Krasimir Ivandjiiski at 70. It is not a period, but just a comma

Krassimir Ivandjiiski /Красимир Иванджийски/

First Published in 06.2017

Celebration of one’s own anniversary is always burdensome but also quite sympathetic.

My 70s, however, are not a self-adoration, but quite opposite - an attempt to show today's tough times in an adult version.

My life, like all Bulgarians and Eastern Europeans of this age, had two milestones: from 1944 to 1990, and after 1990 until today.

The first, today’s modern prostituting propaganda interprets in compliance with its miserable level. This is a deep insult to our memory on behalf of a handful ignorant criminals and primitives.

As I witnessed and took quite active part in these times, I would remind that our memory has not yet died and that we had been both actors in the greatest historical success in 1944-1990 when we formed as a nation, national interest, geopolitics, geo-economics, ideology, and alliance. Falling and getting up we had been looking for our ways through life and no one has the right to review our autobiography.

With my 70s, I was a small part of the processes I have described previously. I will try to refresh again the reader’s memory.

I was born in 1947. My family tree on both lines was studied 7-8 generations back, longer than the British Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps that was why Vanga used to send me various messages.

My great-grandfather on my father's side took part in the rebellion against the Turks in 1876. My grandfather was an immigrant in the United States until 1922- a miner, a soldier, an entrepreneur. He made a mistake and returned to Bulgaria. The Americans paid him a pension until 1946. Then they embezzled it - so typically American.

My maternal grandfather rose in arms in the uprising of 1923. When we were children with my brother found the rifles in the attic and nearly shot each other.

Before September 9, 1944, my father was a political antifascist prisoner serving lifetime, sentenced by the Koburg tsar.

Behind bars, they were aware of whom was who "outside". In fact, the fascist regime threw the real anti-fascist resistance in jail, while those outside, as it turned out later, had been very often manipulated.

Perhaps that was the reason for the quite complicated relationship between my father and Todor Zhivkov and his group of advisors. However, this did not prevent Zhivkov, being under house arrest after 1990, to call me often for a chat, including the interview where on behalf of him I named Gorbachev "a great traitor and political shake-of-the-bag".

My mother was a journalist and a staff manager at the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency since the days when the "Agency" in the 50s was in three small rooms in down town against the National Assembly and I, as a little child carried around the rolls to the aunties that worked on the two teletypes. Since then, I could call myself a "journalist."

Nevertheless, our childhood in post-war and demolished Sofia was unbelievable - "poor but cheerful." We practically grew on the street.

I graduated from English College. In these days there were no drugs, so we went in hard for sports - football, volleyball, tennis, everything. We had not heard about transsexuality and "gender" and had been chasing around girls. They were not running fast.

But above all we were open to learning and science.

I received my university degree in Warsaw /Poland/ at a truly elite University of Economics - international diplomatic, trade ,economic and all kind of relationships. Since then, I have diplomas that are recognized all over the world.

My dissertation was "Bulgaria and the EU Market". Pay attention - it was 1971 when on 30 pages I wrote that our possible join EU would be a total disaster. The same were my predictions about NATO.

I mention Poland because, during these days, besides all ideological sciences , the above-mentioned university laid the foundations of geopolitics and geo-economics of Eastern Europe.

These were the 60s of Europe. Incredible times.

In the East, we were looking for socialism with a human face. In the West, they were looking for capitalism with a human face.

On both sides, we were certainly the strongest generations in Europe's modern history. That usually happens after great wars.

It happened that even then, I had the opportunity to travel all around Europe - both in the East and in the West, and I knew Europe like my pocket.

As a student, I had to work on a Volvo conveyor in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I realized that capitalism, even the Social Democratic one, was not quite humane.

At that period, our family lived also from time to time in Moscow. My father was one of the first to study cinema dramaturgy in Moscow so I knew the USSR, and after that as a journalist, like the other pocket.

Later I gained a good knowledge of Africa, Central America, the Middle East, Asia, and so on.

Quantity at a certain point transforms in quality i.e.my development in geopolitics and geo-economics after 1990.

Surely, I was not the first. However, I was certainly the first to know almost the whole world "on the field" before engaging in geopolitics. And “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

As a young man, I worked at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) department. The department had a secret statute so the West could not know the prices we bought crude from the USSR. The prices were of the tomatoes and peppers we were exporting to the USSR.

I finished my military service as a military journalist in the Army newspaper. The whole army envied me. In those days the Bulgarian army had no match on the Balkans.

At that time the old man Petko Petkov, a former Inter Brigadier in Spain during the Civil war, /by the way working with Hemingway/ taught me some basic skills. "Boy, if you are careful enough, within the years, you will at one glance figure out who works for which intelligence." I went farther, I need a half glance to recognize the idiot, everywhere.

In 1974 I started my career in the official newspaper. I pursued a different career- a diplomat and a foreign trader. But the then editor in chief pulled me aside and said, "Come to me and you would become a serious journalist."

Later, as a correspondent of the largest Bulgarian newspaper with over 14 years abroad, first in Central Europe - Prague, Warsaw, and Vienna, and then in Africa - Harare and Addis Ababa, I had the opportunity to meet or witness some of the greatest world politicians of that time.

In 1985 as a first Eastern European journalist I entered apartheid South Africa several times. At this moment, there was a real chance to prevent Gorbachev's perestroika, not only in the USSR. It is not known that the USSR collapsed not because of the low oil and gas prices or the betrayal of Gorbachev and the Zionist wings in the KGB and GRU, but because the USSR and South Africa could not coordinate the prices of gold and diamonds. At that time the USSR had more than 30 000 tons of gold and South Africa about 10 000.

The orders for my "marginalization" in that process came personally from Gorbachev and Kryuchkov. The CIA was helping them. Yes, there is no mistake.

As far as I knew, the military counterintelligence of apartheid South Africa tried at least twice not just to marginalize me but physically eliminate me during my travels in the country. They did not know that „every circus has its rules”.

As a journalist, I have covered so many wars that I no longer remember all of them. Actually, at war, journalists are least of all in jeopardy, but still one tries to survive.

I flew and landed twice on a burning plane. Once it was in 1975, above Eritrea when the rebels on the ground were training firing at passenger jets flying over their heads, the second time, probably for similar reasons, over Uganda. Several times during my professional trips , I got tropical diseases.

We worked around the world with all kind of colleagues - Russians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Romanians, Germans, English, Americans. I have to especially mention the Cubans in Africa. These guys have done the most important job there. I even bought my car in Africa from Fidel Castro's security when Fidel attended Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Harare. It costed me cheaper.

I have several awards- both Bulgarian and foreign. Those from abroad are more interesting - Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Poland, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique… I may have some more, but I guess.

I am not talking these nonsense spy stories, they are for the Hollywood movies. Real things did not and do not happen like that.

Here I get to the second milestone, i.e. after 1990.

It was exactly us, probably the greatest generation of Bulgaria over the past 100 years, that should have done the transition to the next stage, as Chinese did it. But we did not.

We had been eliminated. I will come to that sometime later. We managed to raise up Bulgaria amongst the top ten of the world, while the "new ones" pushed it down to 180th place. I cannot imagine where this incubator for idiots was.

After 1990, the whole world entered more complex and critical times of transition from one era to another.

The world has come to a dead end, and the Western project culminated into financial neo-fascism. This is a planetary crisis. And such is the resistance against it. The battle is colossal, historical and cosmic. This is a crisis of the old world order accompanied by complete failure of the system.

That is why, 25 years ago, I chose to start a new project instead of developing old stuff. I have realized that the world was entering upon a new stage of development, in which parties and ideologies are less important than much lasting things like geopolitics, geo-economics, real production, and decent information.

It was about time for the so-called today alternative media to become an antithesis and counterpoint to all false ideologies and paid media.

This was a new and brutal truth about media-consuming communities.

At first, we were quite a few in the world, less than a dozen, who reached to the conclusion through "peripheral media outlets" to deprive the "mainstream media" of their information monopoly.

Step by step, new people joined us to shape the wave of the so-called alt-media that already dominate.

The most retrograde forces joint efforts against us but it was too late.

The world has irreversibly moved to the era of "alternative media" and today I can write that my humble work for the past three decades was part of the new informational and analytical aggregates. This is a process where evolution and revolution interweave, primarily in the information, military, financial, geopolitical and geo-economic spheres.

What will come next?

Earlier the world used wars and revolutions to solve problems. The bigger the issues, the bloodiest the wars, and more cruel the revolutions. People, however, always find the strength to clear the ruins. But today, instead of creation, everything is being destroyed.

The question "what comes next" should be formed in some product. People need a new beginning and a new freedom.

The world is approaching the so-called End Game similar to the situation prior the First and Second World Wars. The imbalances gave birth to a crisis that leads to tectonic changes.

Since I have been dealing with information for 50 years, I can say that information is becoming a new era of humanity. So far, the true story has been hidden, whitewashed, and deceived. But suddenly the dam gave away and the information rained down with roar.

For me these days, time flies with the speed of light. Therefore, time is really a relative value and I must hurry because the end is getting closer and since I have many missions, as a responsible person I am trying to get them finished.

The mission is obvious - to explain the cause-and-effect link of what happened and what waits for us.

This is a challenging task. Once Vanga gave me 77 years. But I hope she was wrong.

Even so, we must realize that life after 70 years, as it is written in the Bible, is against essence of nature. Longevity is neither promised nor predestined. Human beings are programmed to gradually degrade. Nature loses interest in us from the moment we give birth to a child.

But here I am offering you the big surprise. According to the latest demographic trends, children born in 2012 have every chance to live up to 100 years, while 50 percent of those aged 65 today could also reach this limit.

In other words, there is always a chance.

That is why I gradually gave up some funny ambitions, such as to receive some Nobel Prize for something- economics, literature, journalism. Whatever.

The belief that public life can be commanded on long-term basis is stupid. 25 years ago, no one could foresee the nightmare that is around today.

In the same time, this is encouraging because once again proves that history is impossible to program and that life is everything that one cannot predict.

In that case, we can be optimistic.

From this point of view, my 70s, look like a comma, not a period.

In short, we keep writing the story and I am deeply grateful to my mother and father who have long passed to the Infinity for having given me their spirit.

And always when I spot a tin oil-lamp somewhere in the distant bossom of the mountain, although I know the whole world as the palm of my hand, somehow warmth embraces my heart.

Even at the beginning of the 21st century

Ivandjiiski, 1978, 1986, 1990