Adam Matheson, who, according to LinkedIn, has the job position of “Creating Authentic Travel Content,” recounts his 2020 travels in Sofia, Bulgaria in a self-published article.Footnote 1
In what is considered a “charming and safe” neighborhood, a massive Swastika with the words “NAZI SKINHEAD” was displayed just outsight [sic] the front door of my apartment. Ignoring it and telling myself “That’s Europe,” I continued to walk to the nearest cafe to go get some work done. Two hundred meters later and I could already count 12 of those Swastikas.
Adam was intrigued. He wondered what the many swastikas all over the walls and streets of Sofia were all about. He explains in the article that “‘it’s just an ignorant group of young people who want to feel a part of something.’”
Matheson’s account made me think about what I had witnessed during my own fieldwork in Bulgaria: graffitied swastikas across Sofia, often accompanied by text that was sometimes in Bulgarian and, other times, in English (see Figure 1). My Bulgarian friends and interlocutors typically explained away these inscribed instances of neo-Nazi propaganda with a rationalization similar to Adam’s.
Graffiti outside of Fakulteta, a predominantly Romani neighborhood in Sofia, Bulgaria. In front of the spray-painted green swastika is the Bulgarian word “boklutsi” which translates as “garbage” (plural) and is often used as a racial slur to refer to Roma. Photo by Elana Resnick.
Adam’s was a stranger’s account of Sofia but in reading it I could hear people telling him what they typically told foreigners who might be shocked by the swastikas plastered all over the city: it was just young people trying to be part of a global youth culture (cf. Pasieka Reference Pasieka2021). It was a common refrain that these far-right signs were “just” instances of “hooliganism” or “soccer fan stupidity,” which was, in the 2000s, a common trope espoused both by white Bulgarians and, at times, even some of my Romani interlocutors.Footnote 2
In the summer of 2003, when I began conducting fieldwork in Bulgaria, I noticed the swastikas all over Sofia’s streets. By 2005, when I next returned, the swastikas were still omnipresent; Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union was pending and the far-right, neo-nationalist party called Ataka [Attack] won 8 percent of the popular vote. The party had gained 21 out of 240 parliamentary seats, reflecting the will of some 300,000 Bulgarians. Many of these voters drew swastikas in the box on the ballot instead of the standard “X.” When Ataka voters penciled in the swastika on their paper ballots, they were using a symbol that was already ubiquitous in Bulgarian public space. It had been, along with other white power graffiti in both English and Bulgarian, prevalent since the 1990s—and even more so in the years leading up to and after Bulgaria’s EU accession in 2007.
Commonplace dismissals of the swastika, as just youth culture or only soccer “hooliganism,” seemed to me, at first, to be rooted in a specific token-type distinction ideology. Knowing my Jewish roots, many of my friends were quick to reassure me that the swastikas I witnessed had “nothing” to do with real Nazism or World War II, preempting how I might interpret them. They diligently worked to separate the swastika from its most salient previous historical contexts, including the specific framework (Nazism during World War II) that made it most infamous across the US and Europe.
In this practice of attempting to separate a sign from its most salient usages, many of my friends and long-term research interlocutors, a diverse group of Sofia residents, highlighted a particular token-type distinction ideology.Footnote 3 They explained to me that the swastika might look like a token, or instantiation, of a Nazi type but reassured me that it indeed was not. For them, the token of the swastika did not connect with what they recognized as a predictable type—or at least the Nazi type they anticipated I would connect it to.
Swastikas are generally understood to be indexically over-determined in ways that presume an expected token-type uptake.Footnote 4 Many of my interlocutors in Bulgaria pointed out, through reference to my American upbringing, that my understanding the swastika as an index of Nazism was not something universal but rather my own semiotic ideology at play. In contrast, they explained that many people in Bulgaria had a different semiotic ideology and did not apprehend the swastika as an obvious materialization of Nazism. Rather, they emphasized, in Bulgaria, “it’s just hooliganism.” They insisted that, at least in Bulgaria, the swastika was part of youth culture, something associated as much with Western European influences as it was with local racial hierarchies.
Others in Bulgaria, including right-wing supporters who toted the swastikas on their bodies in public settings and those who knew themselves to be the targets of those swastikas (predominantly Romani communities at the time), did not so adamantly refuse to acknowledge the relationship between the swastika and white supremacy.Footnote 5 My Romani interlocutors knew that the swastikas they saw all around Bulgaria were generally directed at them. By the late 2000s, most people in Bulgaria understood the swastika as shorthand for anti-G*psyism that had become all but normalized as banal.
However, many who deployed the swastikas, often in white supremacist rallies, worked hard to link the token of the swastika with something other than Nazism. Their goal was to draw attention to the premise that the swastika could be an instantiation of a non-Nazi type by highlighting the indeterminacy of the sign—whether it be its connection to ancient Bulgarian symbolism or Buddhist iconography—in attempts to make the swastika more publicly acceptable within Bulgaria, a newly accessed EU country tasked with conforming with EU policy and rhetoric. In playing with the token-type distinction for political means, right-wing public figures and their supporters not only assert a particular typeness in relation to the token at stake (the swastika) but also emphasize the existential indeterminacy of this relationship.Footnote 6 Their focus on the inevitable indeterminacy of the sign, as I address later, establishes a form of semiotic gaslighting in which far-right supporters preempt latent critique (cf. Donzelli Reference Donzelli2023).
This article argues that far-right political leaders, supporters, and regular Bulgarian citizens play with the indeterminacy of the token-type relationship in strategic ways. They assert the variable tokenness of the sign, even one as taboo as the swastika, in specific contexts to strategically prevent these signs from being taken up as instantiations of a Nazi type. They draw attention to the unstable nature of the token, even when it is as over-determined as a swastika, but make clear that it is not to be apprehended as linked to Nazi history. They do this in an attempt to perpetuate widespread white supremacist ideologies while also publicly reinforcing what Gloria Wekker (Reference Wekker2016) would term their “white innocence,” which has become particularly useful within a European Union landscape in which explicitly racist signs are subject to severe repercussions as hate crimes.Footnote 7
Right-wing supporters manipulate what Charles Peirce called the token-type relationship to mobilize signs like the swastika in political projects that hinge on making their multivalency explicitly part of the picture. That is, they emphasize the instability of the token-type distinction to destabilize the overdetermination of signs like the swastika. Briefly, within a Peircean framework, the token-type distinction is a way to explain the difference between a “type” as a category and a “token” as an example or manifestation of that type. The token-type distinction could be understood, most simply, as a form of relationality, between particulars and universals. While the token only manifests through types (and vice versa), this relationship is often taken for granted, operating below the threshold of awareness of most people. However, in the case I am addressing, right-wing politicians and supporters play with this relationship explicitly in order to exploit it for political purposes.
First, by highlighting how far-right actors use the swastika in Bulgaria, I analyze how people strategically play with the multivalency of semiosis by deploying signs as tokens of potentially different types—and, when called upon, bring metapragmatic awareness to this potentiality. Such practices include playing with register or the “linguistic repertoire that is associated, culture-internally, with particular social practices and with persons who engage in such practices” (Agha Reference Agha and Duranti2004, 24). This strategic play also includes “grafting” which, according to Susan Gal, is the process of taking something from “registers indexical of one social arena” and adding or “implant[ting]” it in “another area that is conventionally considered widely different, even opposed” (2018, 16).Footnote 8 Moving between registers and shifting actors’ relationships to these registers, including practices of de-enregisterment and re-enregisterment, are other strategies that far-right supporters use for political ends. By addressing these networked strategies, this article evaluates how actors differently deploy semiotic indeterminacy across varying contexts and social arenas. The swastika thus serves, depending on who wields it and in what setting, as an indeterminate sign that can be manipulated for varied goals—a token to be apprehended as the materialization of a seemingly endless range of types. Tracing how actors strategically play with the token-type relationship allows us to better understand how people mobilize signs like the swastika, and to what ends, within the public sphere.
Absurdities of the swastika amid Bulgarian “tolerance”
In the late 2000s, there was an upsurge in far-right supporters claiming that the swastika was not related to Nazism. At the time, I wondered how it was that they drew the limits of semiotic indeterminacy. I asked my interlocutors in Bulgaria what they thought about it. I had been conducting research for years by then in Romani neighborhoods, with Romani activists, waste workers and managers, and (white) non-Romani and Romani Sofia residents. When I asked them what they thought about the fact that the swastika might not be about white supremacy, as its deployers typically claimed (as they insisted it could instead be linked to ancient Bulgarian symbolism or spiritual iconography), they often laughed.
Both my Romani and non-Romani interlocutors deemed the approach of right-wing supporters, in denying the otherwise obvious Nazism of the swastika, an example of typical Bulgarian “absurdity” [absurd]. This widespread diagnosis of absurdity stems from the dissonance between how overdetermined the swastika is as a taboo sign across Europe and Bulgarians’ public denial of its taboo status. My interlocutors’ diagnosis of this absurdity is also particular to Bulgarian politics; absurdity has become a longstanding trope among nearly everyone I met with during fieldwork to describe the state of Bulgarian politics for decades (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2017). And the semiotic gaslighting that I address later, in relation to the swastika, has been wrapped into this long-standing trope.
When my interlocutors noted this “absurdity,” they often referenced practices in line with what Gal terms “grafting,” or, in this case, the reshaping of common racist and racialization practices in Bulgaria into EU-allowable liberal formats. Often, as Gal notes, these kinds of practices “lack metacommentary for how to interpret them” (Reference Gal2018, 19).Footnote 9 Alternatively, in the cases I address, graftings do sometimes come furnished with metacommentary for how to interpret them. These metapragmatic annotations are strategically designed to be explicit for some groups but covert for others and they change depending on the circumstances in which they are used. Examples of grafting practices in Bulgaria include the demolishing of Romani neighborhoods in the name of EU-sponsored urban cleaning programs or, as it has happened, the targeted and racialized audits of Romani organizations as part of EU-initiated programs to improve “transparency” and reduce “corruption.” Other examples have included the funneling of EU funds intended for minority groups, termed “vulnerable” per international policies, to aid in assisting white Bulgarians categorized as “vulnerable” by the state governmental apparatus.
The landscape in which far-right actors manipulate the semiotic indeterminacy of signs is broad-based and the swastika is just one part of the picture. For example, many of my Romani interlocutors acknowledged how institutionalized European Union funding intended to aid Romani-centered initiatives has been funneled away from actual Romani organizations by those in power strategically using semiotic indeterminacy for their own purposes (as with the language of “vulnerability”). In contrast, policies designed to reduce systemic corruption are implemented in Bulgaria to evade the audits of those in positions of power and render Romani people and organizations functionally illegitimate through intensive audits.
In my experience returning to Sofia, Bulgaria nearly each year since I first visited in 2003, the swastikas seemed to reproduce over time and across urban space. I saw many swastikas graffitied on buildings in the city center. These seemed to be directed at nobody and anyone who would take offense. Other swastikas, during my earlier fieldwork (2003, 2008, 2009, 2010–2014), were positioned specifically near Romani neighborhoods [mahali] in Sofia, including outside of Fakulteta, Sofia’s largest Romani neighborhood where I spent a great deal of time.Footnote 10 Other swastikas, more recently, have been sprayed onto Bulgaria’s most famous Jewish sites, notably on the wall of Sofia’s Central Synagogue, in 2021 and in 2023, with a far different public response.Footnote 11
Since the 1990s, swastikas in Bulgaria have primarily been used to publicly express anti-Roma (but more recently also anti-immigrant and antisemitic) white supremacy and this has been normalized as part of everyday life within the Bulgarian urban landscape. Typically when swastikas or anti-Roma messages are spraypainted around Sofia, nobody writes about it, or even seems to notice, except when those signs materialize into things like anti-Roma violence.Footnote 12 When, however, the swastikas target specifically Jewish sites, these incidents catalyze sustained international media concern.Footnote 13 This is, in part, due to global systems of how antisemitism and anti-G*psyism are hierarchized.Footnote 14 This dynamic has been tragically encapsulated by mainstream comedian Jimmy Carr in 2022 when his Holocaust joke became fodder for debate across Europe. In a stand-up comedy performance that aired as a Netflix special, Carr references the “tragedy and horror” of six million Jewish lives “lost to the Nazi war machine.” But he goes on, in the punchline, to remark that nobody discusses the Roma lives lost to the Nazis because “nobody wants to talk about the positives.” The live studio audience erupts into boisterous laughter.Footnote 15
This joke was widely critiqued after it was aired. In 2024, Simon, one of my closest Romani interlocutors in Bulgaria, made sure I knew about it and how impactful it was for making visible what kinds of anti-Roma racism are so acceptable as to be aired on international television.Footnote 16 The ways in which mainstream Nazi history has functionally erased Romani victims is part and parcel of Carr’s joke.Footnote 17 And, an analysis of swastikas in Bulgaria reveals exactly the historical gaps upon which Carr’s attempt at humor is based.
The sign of the swastika brings together—and highlights junctures between—Romani and Jewish history in Bulgaria. Complex global relationships between antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment also have salient local resonances, in large part because of Bulgaria’s World War II history in which Bulgaria has publicly and emphatically claimed to have “saved its Jews” (Ragaru Reference Ragaru2023). While Bulgaria shifted its political allegiances throughout the war, it managed to save a portion of its Jewish population living within the bounds of current-day Bulgaria. At the same time, however, Bulgaria also sent thousands of Bulgarian Jews living in current-day Northern Greece and Republic of North Macedonia to concentration camps in Poland.Footnote 18 Yet the myth that Bulgaria saved its Jews continues to affect contemporary Bulgarian life as Bulgaria “Europeanizes.” This includes local pride in downtown Sofia’s “square of tolerance” where there sits an Orthodox Church, Catholic Church, Jewish Synagogue, and Muslim Mosque on each of its four corners. Pointing to this urban materiality as proof of Bulgaria’s (and Bulgarians’) innate and longstanding tolerance, more than one non-Romani Sofia resident I interviewed just shrugged when I asked what the role of Roma is in this picture.
Of the dozens of people I met who proudly showed me the square of tolerance, none took any pride in the history of—or could even tell me what happened to—Bulgarian Roma during World War II. While scholars of Romani history have noted how at least some Bulgaria Roma were likely saved, by default, alongside Jews living in current-day Bulgaria, they were also subject to a great deal of discrimination and barred from taking up public positions as well as from accessing land and housing (Marushiakova and Popov Reference Marushiakova and Popov1997).
When swastikas are deployed to deface a synagogue, as they were in Sofia at the square of tolerance in 2021 and 2023, they certainly threaten the wellbeing of Sofia’s Jews (of which there are now approximately 2,000 remaining).Footnote 19 However, these hate crimes also threaten the Bulgarian collective understanding of themselves as the perpetual victims of colonially based histories of violence and never the perpetrators (Imre Reference Imre and López2005, Reference Imre2023; Wekker Reference Wekker2016). In contrast, when Bulgarian neo-Nazis draw swastikas outside of a Romani neighborhood, as they did outside Fakulteta, the reaction by the general public and media is virtually nonexistent. Such swastikas are such a commonplace part of the landscape that they never garner much attention at all. I wouldn’t know that these swastikas existed if I didn’t come across them accidently. Because of this widespread media silence, they are also not regularly removed or painted over.
However, it is a different situation when political parties or identifiable party leaders use swastikas in public and televised rallies; they cannot be ignored. In these cases, discounting them is not possible because the media is already covering the event and because within European Union purview, these signs must be addressed. And so, those who wear and wield swastikas have developed new strategies of avoidance. They attempt to disavow the swastika from its racist history in multiple ways.
Like Adam of LinkedIn’s experience, most of my friends in Bulgaria, both Roma and non-Roma, were quick to dismiss the swastikas as “young drunks” or “hooligans” in the early 2000s (Resnick Reference Resnick2024). But Adam had a chance encounter I never did: he met with someone who took credit for doing such graffiti: “one local from Sofia stood out from the others … he said, ‘I spray paint Swastikas around the city. And no, it has nothing to do against Jews. It’s against the establishment. Against our government.’”Footnote 20 The conflation of anti-Roma sentiment and anti-establishmentism is nothing new but it is part of how the swastika is deployed as a token of an indeterminate and always-changing type. This indeterminacy comes into being in a variety of ways, including through “grafting” (Gal Reference Gal2018).
Grafting
Right-wing supporters in Bulgaria deploy the swastika as an explicitly multivalent semiotic token that can be, or at least attempted to be, grafted or cut off and repurposed within specific conditions. Susan Gal uses the metaphor of grafting to describe how the “difference between practices (linguistic and otherwise) is both palpable for many audiences and also solemnly framed as nonexistent, erased or denied by other audiences” (2018, 4). Sometimes grafting appears humorous, a form of parody rooted in unlikely juxtaposition or the movement from one sphere to another social context. This movement, “in contrast to irony or sarcasm … denies that there is a difference between the two terms of the analogy” (16). But, what happens, when instead of observing the end-result of grafting, we focus instead on instances when metapragmatic instructions help constitute the process altogether?
I cite as a brief example the case of “Roma integration” in Bulgaria, which is deeply tied to the current situation of far-right white supremacist power in a landscape of ongoing racism and racial disavowal. When blatant anti-Roma sentiment doesn’t accomplish intended political goals, as was ultimately the case with Ataka (soon after EU accession in 2007 they fell out of power), another strategy proved more useful within a Europeanizing context: practices of simultaneous addition and cutting-off—which (at least after their initial occurrence) come furnished with metapragmatic instructions on how to interpret them based on the receiving audience.
In 2018, Bulgaria’s Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Krasimir Karakachanov, leader of the nationalist VMRO party (Bulgarian National Movement), made a proposal targeting Romani communities that he claimed should be categorized as an “integration program.”Footnote 21 It was not the first time that anti-Roma sentiment was concealed within the liberal rhetoric of “integration,” but it was one of the first very public instances of such blatant grafting—blatant to those who understood it as parody and still able to appear otherwise to EU authorities. One of Karakachanov’s main proposals was entitled “The Concept for the Integration of the Unsocialised G*psy (Roma) Ethnicity.” It involved stopping the very meager welfare payments to Roma people if they “refuse to work or send their children to school” or if they “demonstrate an expensive lifestyle incongruous with their socially disadvantaged status.” It evoked the time when, in 2012, the website of the President of Bulgaria uploaded an official “Romani Integration” document and saved the PDF as “NationalStrategyIntegrateM*ngali,” supplanting the term “Roma” with the most derogatory slur for Roma in Bulgaria, “m*ngal” (Resnick Reference Resnick2025).Footnote 22
Grafting takes on contours of parody when, for example, Karakachanov proposed compulsory kindergarten classes for every child above the age of four, an aim similar to that of leading Romani education NGOs in Bulgaria that have been working hard with the Ministry of Education for years about this provision. The progressive Roma rights NGOs, ironically, call for the same thing that the far-right anti-Roma party does, and both do so within the acceptable bounds of European “integration” rhetoric.
In this new wave of anti-Roma sentiment that has encompassed most of Europe, parties use what Gal might term a process of grafting that results in an absurd juxtaposition or combination of integration terminologies that reframe far-right politics with acceptable progressive European rhetoric. However, in contrast to Gal’s examples, my approach to this case focuses also on the metacommentary that equips such practices to promote different uptakes simultaneously. Through the lens of a grafting framework, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the sign can be deployed for particular agendas (including in practices of re-enregisterment), something I discuss in the second half of this article.Footnote 23
Indeterminacy and the public rise of the far-right
In 2012, I attended a far-right nationalist rally in downtown Sofia with Simon. Simon had serendipitously seen the rally invitation on a public right-wing Facebook group. He called me on the phone while I was making my morning coffee and asked if I wanted to join him later that day. I, of course, agreed. He revealed to me that the plan was to act like we were tourists who had no idea what the protest was about. We would film it and ask a lot of questions in English, showcasing our foreign naivete.
When I met him in a nearby café so we could walk to the protest together, he was clearly prepared and dressed for the occasion. He wore a bright white cap, with the blue and yellow European Union flag stitched into the front, and quickly took my small digital camcorder in his hand, pretending to be a foreign tourist capturing the day in a home video. Simon was also, somewhat righteously, playing on the fact that with the combination of his dark skin and excellent English, most Bulgarians assumed him to be a foreigner (and I the Bulgarian) whenever we went out together speaking English.
When we arrived at the site of the protest across from the Bulgarian Parliament, protesters brandished signs declaring a stop to “g*psy criminality” [ts*ganska prestapnost]. Simon asked the protesters why they were protesting the “g*psy problem” [ts*ganski problem], the terminology on another sign, which had by then become routine rhetoric in Bulgaria. They quickly shifted between blaming the “G*psies” and the Bulgarian government for all that was wrong in Bulgaria. One protester looked at the Parliament building across the street, nodding to it, as he made it explicit when he explained that their protest was as much against “G*psy criminality” as it was the Bulgarian government officials “that allowed it to happen.” The conflation of anti-Roma racism and anti-government appeals had become commonplace across the region since the 2000s.Footnote 24 As school-aged, mostly teenaged protesters stood, somewhat awkwardly, around the famous Monument to the Tsar Liberator, they complained about the state of Bulgarian politics and Roma, equating the two much in the way LinkedIn Adam’s spray-painting acquaintance did.
Right-wing party leaders, including Ataka’s, have gained legitimate political support through their use of what I have called “determined indeterminacy” or, as I explain here, a strategic playing with the token-type relationship (Resnick Reference Resnick2024).Footnote 25 Some far-right supporters in Bulgaria focus on particular historical nodes in the long lineage of global swastika usage while also disavowing the Nazi-era typification of the swastika-as-racist.Footnote 26
For example, in May 2008, the Deputy Mayor of the Bulgarian city of Stara Zagora, Tihomir Tomov, appeared in a jacket sporting eagle and swastika badges at the city’s celebration of Bulgarian Armed Forces Day. The city’s branches of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the Anti-fascist Union, and the Union of Reservist Officers demanded an apology, but Tomov, an ardent Ataka supporter, responded that this was “not a Nazi sign” but “a sign of the Wehrmacht.” He continued, “In addition, I was there as a citizen … [and] the swastika I wear could be seen among the ancient Bulgarian symbols, and in ancient China. It is also a Buddhist symbol, and ancient Bulgarian sign from the rule of Tsar Kaloyan.”Footnote 27 Several days later, the local Ataka party expelled him, declaring that they did not support neo-Nazism.
When actors note the possibility of the swastika to be a variety of things—an ancient symbol, a design, a peaceful iconography—they position it as a token of a potentially fluid, explicitly non-Nazi type despite its otherwise over-determined taboo status (cf. Fleming and Lempert Reference Fleming and Lempert2011). Their semiotic play, reinforcing the rigidity of the token-type distinction at some moments while centering on its indeterminacy at others, reveals how semiotic fungibility becomes politically salient for mobilizing particular agendas within a liberal public sphere.
Purification and ambiguities of register
Far-right supporters in Bulgaria hone semiotic malleability for political ends, even when the sign at stake is an overdetermined swastika. They engage varied strategies to reinforce the swastika’s “token-ability” in terms of its possibility to be detached from a seemingly determinate historical type in order to be used as a token of something, anything, else.Footnote 28 That is, when far-right parties and regular, everyday citizens use the swastika in Bulgaria, they do so in ways that acknowledge it as a semiotic token while also allowing for considerable ambiguity about what type it is a token for.Footnote 29 They claim openly that the token of the swastika could be tied to a range of different types and therefore does not have an intractable correlation to Nazi iconography. Their ability to play with the token-type relationship, which includes drawing metapragmatic awareness to its semiotic status, is part of “determined indeterminacy” (Resnick Reference Resnick2024). Determined indeterminacy here depends upon, if not fully re-enregistering the swastika, at least making its possibility of re-enregisterment explicit. In other words, what is more important than declaring the swastika as a token of one type or another is right-wing supporters’ practices of deploying its inevitable semiotic indeterminacy to recalibrate it as tied to something other than Nazism.
Months after Tihomir Tomov’s wielding of the swastika in public, Ataka leader Volen Siderov implicitly expressed support for claims like Tomov’s. In the city of Plovdiv on September 6, 2008, Bulgaria’s National Unification Day, four Ataka activists were detained for “hooliganism” and “improper behavior” that they committed while carrying banners with swastikas. One of the detainees told the press that the hooliganism charges could not be sustained in the courtroom “because the swastikas on the banners were accompanied by text explaining their meaning just like in any regular textbook sold in every bookstore.”Footnote 30 Siderov did not comment but, in response, led a public demonstration of 100 people against their detention in which they carried similar banners.
In this demonstration, the detainee rejects the swastika’s ties to Nazism by asserting it as, potentially, a token of another type: an educational one, legitimated by the explanatory text around it. By thinking about the swastika in an imagined circulation, in which it is “just” an image accompanied by text, the detainee attempts to draw awareness to its potential to be taken up within a particular “pedagogical” register (cf. Agha Reference Agha2005a, Reference Agha2005b). In this way, the process of separating the token of the swastika from the Nazi type, is a process of de-enregisterment that entails highlighting that the swastika could be re-enregistered as educational with explanatory text around it, to be allowably and publicly deployed.
Far-right supporters attempt processes of de-enregisterment and re-enregisterment strategically, in contexts where semiotic ambiguity becomes a resource. We must first consider how the swastika is expected to take part in a token-type relation that “arises from a perceived repetition and hence a seeming linkage (across encounters) of forms that are framed, reflexively, as being the ‘same thing, again,’ or as yet another instantiation of a recognized type in some cultural framework” (Gal Reference Gal2018, 2). However, its far-right deployers work to denaturalize those linkages to use—and move—the swastika over and over again in public domains within EU public purview.
If we consider how “registers exist for populations of speakers who can recognize such coherence,” the power of the swastika in Bulgaria is based in noncoherence (Gal Reference Gal2018, 3). That is, far-right supporters in Bulgaria work to create an ambiguity of register, playing with the token-type relationship to strategically cultivate discrepancies of recognition. They claim that the swastika is one thing, even if European audiences know it is another. The recognition that Gal points to, for those who can recognize a sign as “of them,” stands in contrast to the kinds of ambiguities strategically encapsulated in swastika usage in Bulgaria. It is a process in which the swastika’s deployers purposefully render those same potentially interdiscursive speech/sign events as something else (another register) to outside groups.
Semiotic gaslighting and cultivating doubt
The Ataka detainee’s statement (above), about how the hooliganism charges could not be sustained in the courtroom, focuses on the possibilities of using semiotic indeterminacy for political purposes. This indeterminacy is rooted in having multiple audiences for the swastika who would recognize it in potentially different ways. Tomov claims that text can be recontextualized to separate it from its historical meaning and usage, in ways that fashion it as potentially linked to multiple available types. Within this framing, it can be cut off from expectations of one type, and linked, at least potentially, to another. It is an absurdist politics of potential indeterminacy that results in semiotic gaslighting.
Gaslighting, although “theorized primarily within interpersonal relationships,” has also become “a popular term to describe experiences of doubt and manipulation that make individuals or groups feel like their lived realities are not valid” (Carter Reference Carter2022, 236).Footnote 31 The strategic ambiguity of far-right de-enregisterment/re-enregisterment functions in a similar manner. Far-right representatives and followers engage in gaslighting that entails playing with the indeterminacy of the token-type distinction. For instance, when swastika deployers claim that a sign like the swastika might not be linked to white supremacy they are using a “manipulation tactic” (Donzelli Reference Donzelli2023, 173). This tactic however is rooted in possibility—of what the sign might be if it weren’t taken as the most obvious (Nazi) type.
In Bulgaria, when the swastika’s deployers simultaneously brandish it in white supremacist rallies and then deny it as such, they are playing with the inherent indeterminacy of semiosis for the goal of gaslighting (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Auer and Di Luzio1992). This play works to distort the uptake of the swastika as racist, which is how it is commonly apprehended. The semiotic gaslighting that I saw with the swastika can also be witnessed quite clearly in soccer matches across Europe—including in Bulgaria and Italy.
In the late 2010s, there was a string of racist attacks on Black players in Europe. For example, during a European Football Championship qualifying game in Sofia in 2019, Bulgarian fans made Nazi salutes and monkey noises directed at England’s Black players. The referee, following UEFA discrimination guidelines, stopped the game twice. Bulgaria was forced to play its next game to an empty stadium, the Bulgarian team was put on probation until 2022, and the Bulgarian Football Union was fined 85,000 Euro (Associated Press 2019).Footnote 32
At a subsequent press conference, the Bulgarian coach, Krasimir Balakov, said that he was concentrating so intently on the game at the time that he did not hear the misconduct and could not comment. “I have always had my firm stands against racism,” he said.
If something is proven to be true and if there was this actual abuse then once again, we have to say that this is a big shame … if something happened then I am sure it was a small group of people who really were out of their minds because this is … unacceptable … if it happened, of course.Footnote 33
In a follow-up interview, Balakov claimed that he did not even know what monkey noises were, because he “had [never] been to the jungle” (Law 2019). He reiterated for the international press that he could not comment on the incident because the Bulgarian fans’ racist attacks had not yet been proven.
Balakov uses strategies of indeterminacy, such as invoking evidentiary regimes—legalistic framings of “proof”—to cultivate doubt. Like far-right party members of the 2000s, he also suggests a form of disavowal: just as they suggested a swastika “could be” an ancient design, he suggested that without having traveled to a jungle he could not recognize how monkeys sounded, or indeed, if the fans were imitating them. In this semiotic gaslighting attempt, Balakov pronounces that he cannot determine if the sounds were a token of a type since he fundamentally doesn’t recognize the occurrence of stereotypical monkey sounds as a race-based type in the first place.
Soon after this case in 2019, something similar happened in Italy when the Inter Milan striker Romelu Lukaku faced monkey chants during a match and afterward even his own fans dismissed it.Footnote 34 According to the New York Times fans actually denied the racism of the event altogether:
‘We understand that it could have seemed racist to you, but it is not like that,’ the fan group, L’Urlo della Nord—Scream of the North—emphasized. The group explained that the use of racist comments did not mean fans were racist, just that they were trying to ‘help’ their team.Footnote 35
The statement explained that it wasn’t racist because it was just a well-worn strategy to throw the opponent off in order to win. It was another way of saying what so many Bulgarian friends told me as they dismissed right-wing, swastika-brandishing supporters in Sofia as just “kids” trying to “fit in” with global youth culture. Like the defending of young far-right Bulgarians, L’Urlo della Nord also exonerates its fan base as just “trying to help.”
As right-wing party leaders in Bulgaria imply that the swastika could be removed from its previous, overdetermined forms of circulation and then be apprehended as it would in a textbook, regardless of how people use it in the context of a neo-Nazi rally, they strategically try to absolve the sign of its previous events of circulation. In doing so, they also invoke a form of gaslighting rooted in playing with the indeterminacy inherent to the token-type relationship. On one hand, this could be seen as a forced attempt to open the range of possible types for which the token of the swastika is an instantiation. However, it is also a reconstitution of the typification that its enregisterment entails altogether.Footnote 36 It is not just about detaching the swastika from its histories or other instances of usage but about projecting, as absurd a project as it seems, a different lineage and potential trajectory.
This absurdity is clear to most everyone, including the police, who knew that protesters were using swastikas to incite racist violence. Protesters suggested that they could disavow such usage by claiming that their swastikas had the necessary language around them to prevent them from being taken as racist. Similarly, by claiming that the swastika could be understood as a Chinese or Buddhist or even an ancient Bulgarian symbol, Tomov asserted that the sign might not be a Nazi one. Instead, by focusing on the range of latent possibilities that the swastika might have, he strategically deployed it as indeterminate, a sign that can be used and reused to refer to a seemingly unlimited range of things.
Conclusions
Party leaders focus on the possible indexical relationships in which the swastika can take part, disavowing its most publicly accessible historical contingencies by emphasizing it is not of the “Nazi type.” Rather, they claim, it is a different product—a token—in a new context with an alternative history of use that can be de-enregistered from previous usages. However, the reason Ataka members employ this sign in the first place is precisely because of what its Nazi usage and typification has made possible.
Public perception of swastikas in urban space has changed over time in Bulgaria. In the early aughts, many of my interlocutors dismissed the swastikas that covered Sofia streets as merely childish “hooliganism.” But, in recent years, those same people have begun to take these signs quite seriously, especially as they understand these swastikas as in dynamic dialogue with other material manifestations of white supremacy, like the razing of entire Romani neighborhoods and physical violence against Romani Bulgarians.
Right-wing party leaders and supporters readily dismiss claims that swastikas are racist by naturalizing the swastika’s presence in public space while simultaneously rejecting the history of Nazism associated with it. Even white Bulgarians who describe themselves as “liberals” told me that the swastikas visible on the street were “just kids” who “don’t know what it means” and that the graffiti is “soccer,” “not politics.”
Despite the commonplace rejection of the local salience of WWII Nazism, right-wing parties, including Ataka, have readily invoked Nazi rhetoric, such as demanding “labor camps” for Roma during election campaigns (Resnick Reference Resnick2024). Right-wing leaders have gained support through the use and simultaneous disavowal of racist tactics by playing with token-type distinctions. They strategically manipulate the indeterminacy of the sign—in this case the swastika—to legitimate the project of white supremacy as they deny the existence of race and racism in Bulgaria. It is semiotic gaslighting, we might say, on a national or even international scale.
While Ataka became synonymous with right-wing extremism in the 2000s, it is now considered to be the precursor to other, even more potentially vicious far-right parties that have become mainstream. Some of my interlocutors and friends argue that the new right-wing parties in Bulgaria, of which there are many, are far more dangerous than Ataka had been. And some of my interlocutors in Bulgaria who had not seemed too alarmed by swastika graffiti in the early 2000s are now on high alert, especially as they have seen many cases in which far-right signs have manifested in anti-Roma violence. As the far-right starts to appear centrist, “new populism” has become a term to encompass “where anti-establishment, nationalist, and populist values combine in a reaction against economic recession, the migration crisis, and the cultural shifts brought by globalism.”Footnote 37
Far-right actors deploy the swastika as a strategically indeterminate sign, a token with a wide range of possible types. They use it to propose the possibility of unsettling the token-type relationship even with a sign as overdetermined and taboo as the swastika. Tracing different token-type configurations allows us to better understand how people mobilize the swastika—and to what ends. By attending to how far-right leaders and supporters use the swastika in Bulgaria, we can better understand how even overdetermined signs are deployed as tokens of potentially different types through a focus on how people harness the political possibilities of semiotic indeterminacy.
Acknowledgements
I thank the Signs and Society reviewers, including Asif Agha and an anonymous reviewer, for their incredibly constructive suggestions. I first started thinking about this article over a decade ago, in a final paper for Webb Keane’s graduate seminar on semiotic anthropology, at the University of Michigan. That paper was given new life when I shared a version of it as part of an ELAN (EASA Linguistic Anthropology Network) workshop in 2023 in which Ilana Gershon participated and began to think through this piece with me. I am indebted to Ilana for her ongoing, brilliant feedback and hard work in organizing a 2023 AAA American Ethnological Society (AES) conference panel on ‘The Political Uses of Semiotic Indeterminacy’ and turning that collaboration into this special issue. Fellow panelists (Josh Babcock, Ilana Gershon, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Anna Weichselbraun) sparked many ideas that run through this paper. I am also grateful for Susan Gal’s generous feedback to the questions I emailed her while revising this article. All errors are my own.
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