Ladies and gentlemen, as a Bulgarian married to an American, legal alien now since 1996, husband, father and a US taxpayer, I would like to inform you that no, not all Bulgarians look like that and no, not all Bulgarians are busy with breaking into ATMs.
Unfortunately, Bulgaria has had a very poor track record in the last 100 years, always on the wrong side in both world wars, having been fascist, then communist until 1989. The country has been basically run mostly by former communists thugs since then and even until today. They have no interest or will in reigning in the mafia and crime, since they are all part of it. It’s beyond me how we were admitted into NATO and the EU, I suppose due to the geopolitical interests of the Western world. Which I’d rather be part of, as opposed to Putin’s Russia for example.
I’d say the majority of Bulgarians are hard-working, good natured people whose one major drawback is their lack of ability to think and act as free people and citizens and to demand those in power move beyond democracy on paper only.
www.georgebakalov.net
Sorry, that was kind of thoughtless! I actually have known some Bulgarians here (in SF) and I know they’re not all criminals and furthermore, there are some very good looking Bulgarians!
I think that one of the problems experienced by people from the former Communist countries is that they were very used to surviving by various forms of bureaucratic fraud, etc. and it probably created a culture where this was easy to get into. The Russian mafia is big on things like this, particularly tax scams and ID theft, and I’m sure it came out of the strange environment that Communism always creates.