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Zlatko Enev – Writer, Essayist, and Creator of Firecurl
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Noise, apathy, revolt.
Cracks in the social mirror –
and what slips through them.
The civic body,
examined under pressure.

Most

Recent

Essays

Politics and Society

Dec 30, 2025

Pippi, Botev, and Us Today: A Note on Political Correctness

Political correctness is no longer the marginal phenomenon it once was — something that could be dismissed with a casual shrug — nor the dry, slightly ironic phrase that the “New Left” originally used as an internal joke about its own dogmatic impulses. Several decades on, it has passed through so…
Zlatko Enev 433
Dec 12, 2025

The Dangerous Ethics of Victimhood

In recent years I have found myself increasingly confronted with an old yet stubbornly persistent way of thinking: the assumption that the oppressed are, by definition, right, and the powerful, by definition, guilty. One of my more recent exchanges on the Net brought this into sharper focus. What I…
Zlatko Enev 542
Dec 12, 2025

Samuel Huntington versus the Contemporary World: When the…

In the early 1990s, when the West genuinely believed that history had found its direction, Samuel Huntington’s theory of the “waves of democratization” sounded almost like a natural description of the world. It rested on the assumption that democracy advances in tides: it arrives, then recedes, but…
Zlatko Enev 635
Dec 12, 2025

When Collective Pathos Collides with Personal Memory

I want to begin with a story I would rather not recall too often. It was 1984. I was twenty-three, a philosophy student in the capital, travelling back to Preslav for one of the holidays. I was weighed down by a tangle of thoughts that felt literally impossible to share. The so-called “Revival…
Zlatko Enev 503
Jul 01, 2025

The War That Wasn’t: How Israel’s Strike on Iran Became the…

In the early summer of 2025, the world watched with bated breath as Israel launched a sudden, high-tech military campaign against Iran. The strikes were described as “precise,” “calculated,” and “surgical” — a showcase of military might seemingly calibrated to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear…
Zlatko Enev 1120
Jun 29, 2025

Thoughts Born of Powerlessness

Author(s): Kapka Todorova, Zlatko Enev Today I read the following on Facebook — a typical Facebook post, written in typical Bulgarian: Kapka Todorova, Bulgarian journalist based in Berlin: Hundreds arrested and six officially executed — though the number of those killed in Iran since the end of the…
Zlatko Enev 1089
Jun 26, 2025

The Deceptiveness of Experience

Let me begin with a phrase so worn-out it almost dissolves on the tongue: We live in strange times. It’s not its repetition that makes it banal. It’s the fact that it couldn’t be otherwise. Even a line like “we live on planet Earth” at least allows us to imagine that things might have turned out…
Zlatko Enev 885
Jun 19, 2025

About the Sowers of Fear

I do not believe in Bulgarian tolerance. I can’t, no matter how hard I try. I listen to the boasts, where for the thousandth time I’m told the tale of how our recent predecessors saved the Jews, I look around, search for some kind of resemblance, for something to break the evil tooth of my doubt –…
Zlatko Enev 952
Jun 15, 2025

Clash of Civilizations – Reality or Media Myth?

Author’s Note (2025) This essay was written in April 2007, at a time when the discourse around global conflict, terrorism, and identity was shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War. I’m publishing it now not because I still hold every word to be true, but because it reflects a…
Zlatko Enev 845

Comments

Komento Comments

ChatGPT posted a comment in On the Labyrinths of the Soul
What makes this essay striking is not its sub...
ChatGPT posted a comment in On the Dialectics of Dialects
One can’t help but smile at the way this text...
Максин posted a comment in A Brief Attempt at a Theory of Happiness
... „напред“ е по същество единствената посок...
A Note Before the EndYes, I know this piece i...
Zlatko posted a comment in On the Unbearable Lightness of Hatred
A short exchange between me and ChattyMe:too ...
Zlatko posted a comment in The Silence of the Dolls
This is one of those texts I didn’t plan, but...
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