PETER AYOLOV

How Totalitarian Systems Simulate Their Own Opposition to Justify Total Control "While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model... monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives." "Within this model, dissent is not a failure of the system but its primary commodity: outrage, scandal, and perpetual disagreement function as renewable resources that can be continuously harvested, circulated, and monetised." "Where anticommunism or the war on terror once provided a stable enemy, the platform environment produces a permanent culture war in which the target is endlessly replaceable... The propaganda system therefore no longer aims to secure belief but to sustain volatility." "The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent" By Peter Ayolov, Routledg...

Ultima Ratio Regum Rursus ### Introduction: The Republic's Eternal Longing for the Crown "No Kings!" has become one of the defining political slogans of the present decade. It appears on banners, social media, protest marches and demonstrations as an apparently self-evident declaration that democracy and monarchy belong to incompatible worlds. The slogan assumes that the greatest political achievement of modern civilisation has been the elimination of hereditary authority and its replacement with elected representatives whose legitimacy derives exclusively from popular consent. It is the language of republicanism distilled into two simple words. Yet the very popularity of the slogan conceals a historical paradox. If societies genuinely no longer need kings, why do modern political systems continuously recreate figures who perform remarkably similar functions? Why do presidents, supreme leaders, constitutional courts, central banks, international financial institutions...

Maria Todorova's concept of **Balkanism** fundamentally transformed the study of the Balkans by demonstrating that the region is not merely a geographical space but a discursive invention of Western Europe. The Balkans became Europe's "internal Other"—a place imagined as perpetually incomplete, semi-European, irrational and historically condemned to instability. Bulgaria occupies a particularly revealing position within this discourse. It is simultaneously inside Europe and outside its imagined civilisation, forever measured against a Western standard that it can never completely attain. Balkanism therefore explains how the West produces an image of the Balkans through a language of deficiency, backwardness and permanent transition. Yet if Todorova explains how Bulgaria is imagined from the outside, Alexander Kyosev explains how Bulgaria gradually begins to imagine itself. His influential concept of **Self-Colonizing Cultures**, formulated in 1995, describes one of...

## *From the Ottoman Empire to the Empire of Debt* ## Introduction: The Nation That Borrowed Its Freedom Every nation possesses two histories. The first is written in monuments, school textbooks, patriotic speeches and national holidays. It celebrates heroes, battles, revolutions and declarations of independence. The second history is written in ledgers, bank contracts, sovereign bonds, debt restructurings and bankruptcy agreements. One tells the story of freedom; the other records the price paid for it. Rarely do these two histories coincide. Even more rarely do historians attempt to read them together. Yet the modern history of Bulgaria cannot be understood without recognising that its political liberation and its financial dependence emerged almost simultaneously. The creation of the Bulgarian state after 1878 did not simply mark the end of Ottoman rule. It marked the beginning of another form of imperial integration—one organised not by armies or governors but by international ...