What Is the Deal About a Not-a-Big-Deal Video

Last week, among the entertainment materials on the Bulgarian website vbox7.com, a two-minute long video appeared. It included exclusive footage of Bulgarian soldiers performing their duties in Iraq. The controversial thing about it was, however, not what the soldiers did, but what they said. The video showed them throwing racist remarks at local Iraqi people- in Bulgarian- while giving away free bottles of water. Their speech included phrases like “ugly gypsy, look at him”, “if you only were two or three years older…” (obviously implying that a girl, who does not look more than 10, could be an object of their sexual desires had she only been a little older), and “here is the other monkey”. Soon after the videos were made public, those became widely discussed in the Internet forums and the blogosphere and provoked a lot of comment, both condemning and neglecting the importance of what happened. Allow me to share with you the first lines I read in the forum of the Bulgarian daily “Dnevnik” (I consciously omit the spelling mistakes in the opinion of the user with the nickname Engineer Phillip)- “He [the soldier] told him [the Iraqi child] he was an ugly gypsy- big deal! Why did the government make so much noise? Nobody killed or raped anyone…”

Dear Phillip,

As I do not communicate through Internet forums, let me comment back to you here:

1. Indeed it is not like the Bulgarian soldiers killed or raped somebody. They certainly did not commit a military crime, and did not desert their duties. You are probably right that the Ministry of Defense did make too much noise about the problem, which is neither something new (the video is three years old, from the time when Bulgaria sent its second military contingent to Iraq), nor the most important one the Bulgarian Army needs to solve. I doubt the Bulgarian soldiers meant bad when they made the obviously inappropriate jokes with the Iraqi children, and it is also true that they made the jokes in Bulgarian, so the children could not possibly get them and get offended.

2. People like to mock other people. Usually when they make jokes, they laugh even harder, when they know that the ones whom they are addressing their humor at cannot understand them. It is an especially easy and quite low-profile job to make jokes at the weaker, the poorer and the suffering, especially when they are children. They cannot or do not know how to throw a joke back. There is no dignity in ridiculing small children- in any way- for it is simply not funny. The image of the Bulgarian soldiers, about whose bravery, high spirit and impeccable moral we have heard enough legends, is also not funny. It seems pathetic. This video threw it deeper the gutter than it used to be. The firing of the two or three soldiers, who participated in the small comedy shooting, will not be enough to make up for what people saw. Of course, the arrogant behavior of the soldiers did not surprise anybody, nor did it make anyone in the country blush- for the simple reason that similar things happen in the Bulgarian army quarters on a daily basis, and this video is just a good visualization of something we are all aware of. In the spirit of this, dear Phillip, will it also not be a “big deal” if somebody called you a dirty gypsy (which I am sure you are not) when your country is devastated by war, you live in the desert and have to pray for a bottle of water? Or, speaking in a general context- is it OK for a civilized man to speak like this to others, even though they have no way to understand? Probably not. I think it is time for all of us to get rid of that improper, uncivilized and humiliating language- it’s degrading not only to the people we use it against, but also to the one who uses it .

p.s. This is a column I wrote for a journalism class last week.