Taking My Country Off to Reveal My Deeper Self
An incident at the Bulgarian Pride parade got me thinking about patriotism and nationalism
A week ago, during the Pride parade in my country’s capital, singer Mila Robert took her dress off on stage to reveal another dress. The first dress, colored in white, green and red like our national flag, was dropped and left on the stage in the process. The dress that was revealed was basically the Progressive Pride flag. Nationalist feathers got so ruffled that one political party filed a lawsuit the next day against the singer — for offending a national symbol.
These events got me thinking about two main points: 1) How can this lawsuit come from the party that wipes its derriere with our national symbols every day? 2) Is it true that we are Bulgarians before we’re anything else?
No longer white, green and red. Only brown.
Like the Nazis did in Germany, our nationalists appropriate historic and religious symbols and taint them for future generations. Here is an advertisement for a nationalist torch march. On the green strip of our national flag, the line ‘Bulgaria above all’.
