The Persecutor Slot: Cross-Ideological Occupant Substitution as the Signature of Installed Psychological Capture

GP-2026-014   |   April 2026

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19161031

Author: Iliyan Kuzmanov

Editor: Iliyan Kuzmanov

ABSTRACT

Adversarial mobilisation exploits psychological substrate, not ideological novelty. Populations carry pre-installed cognitive-affective configurations — architectures of identity, threat, grievance, and sacred necessity — that persist as an enduring substrate beneath continuous surface ideological mutation. Cross-ideological occupant substitution — the documented sequence in which the same structural enemy-position receives successive groups belonging to ideologically incompatible regimes, each producing comparable patterns of persecution — is proposed as the observable signature by which installed psychological capture can be distinguished from surface ideological variation and verified in the documentary record. This note introduces two original analytical concepts: the Persecutor Slot, a structural position within a psychological capture architecture that maintains its enemy-ontological function regardless of which specific group occupies it; and the Proxy-Adjacent Mechanism, through which external actors supply target groups and activation grammar for slots they did not install. The Bulgarian corridor provides the empirical demonstration: seven documented occupants across five centuries, two ideologically incompatible regimes deploying the same persecutory grammar within forty years of each other. Mapping the substrate is not a historical exercise. It is reconnaissance.

Keywords: psychological capture | persecutor slot | cognitive substrate | delegitimisation | ideologisation | identity fusion | proxy-adjacent mechanism | occupant substitution | mnemonic persistence | adversarial mobilisation

ARTICLE

I. The Verification Problem

Yugoslavia's dissolution surprised analysts who had tracked its ideology carefully and missed its substrate entirely. Through four decades of Communist rule, intelligence services, academic observers, and international institutions catalogued party doctrine, ideological fractures, economic grievances, and leadership rivalries — building frameworks calibrated to what the regime produced as official content. When Milošević's nationalist mobilisation began in 1987, it appeared to emerge from a new ideological space, as if collective violence had been conjured from material that had not previously existed. What it had actually done was activate configurations that Communist internationalism had suppressed without dismantling: the identity-fusion logic of ethnic communities under existential threat, the grievance-inversion architecture through which historical victimisation legitimises present aggression, the cosmic-dualist binary in which the neighbouring ethnic group occupies the position of contaminating threat. None of these configurations were new. None of them required the collapse of Communist ideology to become available — they had been present throughout, latent in the symbolic infrastructure that the regime had overlaid with official doctrine but never destroyed. Detection had tracked the ideology. It had missed the substrate.

If psychological capture is real rather than merely metaphorical — if populations genuinely carry pre-installed cognitive-affective configurations that adversarial operations activate rather than construct — then an empirical question follows immediately: what would the signature of that installation look like in the documentary record? Behavioural proxies in contemporary populations, self-report data, and inferred mental states all suffer from the same limitation: they measure what a specific operation produces, not what a population carried before the operation arrived. A more rigorous verification criterion is available. Where the same cognitive position — the structural slot occupied by the threatening other within a community's identity architecture — receives successive, ideologically incompatible occupants across documented historical periods, and produces comparable mobilisation grammar in each case, this constitutes empirical evidence of an architecture that exists independently of any specific ideology. Cross-ideological occupant substitution — the documented sequence in which the same structural enemy-position receives successive groups belonging to ideologically incompatible political systems, each activation producing comparable mobilisation grammar, administrative persecution, and bureaucratic violence regardless of the political identity of the regime operating it — is proposed here as the observable signature of installed psychological capture and its most analytically precise verification criterion: where the same slot holds its function across the radical discontinuity between National Socialism and Communism, what persists is not ideology but cognitive architecture installed in the population long before either regime arrived to exploit it.

II. The Persecutor Slot: Structural Anatomy

Girard's analysis of the scapegoat mechanism identifies something that the sociological literature on prejudice largely misses: the functional position of the victim within a community's crisis-resolution architecture is what the persecutory system requires, not the victim's specific identity. Sacrificial order, he argues, depends on substitution — collective violence is displaced onto a surrogate whose personal characteristics are secondary to the structural role they occupy (Girard, 1977, pp. 39–68; Girard, 1986). The mechanism works because what a community in crisis needs is a position to fill, not a particular candidate. Volkan extends this insight into the psycho-political register: suitable targets of externalisation — the historically sedimented groups into which large communities project their unintegrated, threatening self-images — are not produced by any single episode of prejudice (Volkan, 1988, pp. 13–18, 235). They are prepared over generations, through the slow accumulation of shared enemy-object representations that become available as cognitive resources whenever the group experiences threat, humiliation, or destabilisation. What Girard establishes structurally and Volkan establishes developmentally together constitute the foundation of the Persecutor Slot: a position within a psychological capture architecture that maintains its enemy-ontological function — dehumanisation, contamination metaphorics, defensive violence legitimation, sacred threat framing — regardless of which specific group currently fills it; that is activated by externally supplied designations rather than generating its own targets; and that produces consistent mobilisation grammar regardless of the ideological register of whoever operates it. (The mechanism does not require the community to consciously select; it requires only that crisis and a suitable structural candidate coincide.) Bar-Tal's taxonomy of delegitimisation strategies confirms the persecutory template's formal portability: the five categories through which an outgroup is expelled from the moral community — dehumanisation, trait characterisation, outcasting, political labelling, and group comparison — are transferable operations rather than target-specific attitudes, applicable to successive groups without requiring the population to rebuild its psychology from scratch (Bar-Tal, 2000, ch. 8, p. 121). The slot is a structural feature of the capture architecture. Not an artefact of any particular ideology.

What the structural and psychological accounts leave unexplained is how the slot survives regime change — how an installed system that took root under one political order remains functional under another that explicitly repudiates the first. Malešević's distinction between ideology and ideologisation supplies the mechanism (Malešević, 2017, ch. 6, pp. 197–198; Malešević, 2019, ch. 1, pp. 30–31, 67, 87–88). Ideology is a fixed doctrinal system — a set of propositions, commitments, and enemy constructions that regimes can inherit, modify, or formally abandon. Ideologisation is something structurally different: the ongoing organisational process through which justifications for collective behaviour, including collective violence, are embedded in everyday micro-solidarity networks, in family and community relationships, in the habits of normal institutional life, in the taken-for-granted common sense of local organisation. Doctrine can be replaced overnight when a regime changes. Ideologisation infrastructure — the network of practices, institutions, and inter-personal norms through which a population has learned what the enemy looks like — cannot be replaced by administrative decree because it does not live in documents or party programmes. It lives in the accumulated common sense of millions of ordinary encounters. No political transition has had the administrative capacity to dismantle what is grounded not in doctrine but in the everyday habits of millions of ordinary relationships — and none has tried. Reisigl and Wodak demonstrate the discursive consequence: the strategies of nomination, predication, and argumentative topos through which threatening others are constructed in political discourse persist structurally across political shifts because their formal operations survive the specific ideological content that originally generated them (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). Doctrine is replaced. Grammar remains.

III. Seven Occupants, One Slot: The Bulgarian Evidence

Bulgaria provides a documentary record unusual in its resolution: five stratigraphic layers spanning the tenth century to the present, each accessible through primary sources, each documenting a distinct phase of the same installation-to-weaponisation sequence, each showing the structural position of the threatening other filled by a different group. Across those five centuries, that position has been occupied by the Ottoman imperial apparatus, heterodox cosmological contaminants, the Jewish racial-economic threat, the Judeo-Bolshevik conspirator, the Turkish demographic infiltrator, the Enlightenment liberal, and the Western globalist — seven documented occupants, each substitution traceable through specific texts, legislative instruments, or state campaigns. None of them ideologically continuous with the next. One slot. Seven labels. The activation language — contamination, purification, defensive necessity, existential threat — did not change as the label changed. What Laclau identifies as the logic of antagonistic equivalence makes this structurally intelligible: the position of the threatening other is defined by the function it performs within the community's identity architecture, not by the properties of whoever currently occupies it. Volkan's account of historically sedimented target availability explains why Muslims and Jews were both structurally primed for that position: centuries of repeated activation had made them available as enemy-objects in ways that required no new psychological installation to exploit (Volkan, 2001, pp. 79–97).

Four decades before the Bulgarian Communist state moved against its Muslim minority, it had watched a National Socialist-aligned government institutionalise the identical architecture against Jews — and then, after 1944, it had inherited that government's administrative infrastructure without dismantling its operative template. The Law for the Protection of the Nation (1940), modelled explicitly on the Nuremberg laws and implemented through a regulatory apparatus of declarations, document classifications, and identity enforcement mechanisms (Chary, 1972), transformed what had circulated as Pan-Slavist antisemitic propaganda and cultural sediment into state governance technology. Two enemy-category tracks operated simultaneously across the interwar and wartime periods: the anti-Turkish-Muslim track rooted in Ottoman-era collective memory and the antisemitic track imported through Pan-Slavist committee networks after 1878, both traceable through specific textual and institutional carriers (Kulenska, 2012; Gülseven, 2017; Avramov, 2012). That both tracks were active simultaneously in the same target environment during the same years confirmed something architecturally significant — the position did not require a single active designated group to remain structurally available; it could hold multiple candidates in readiness simultaneously. When Bulgaria's postwar Communist government constructed its official antifascist identity, it suppressed the antisemitic track's most visible features while preserving the underlying institutional infrastructure, the persecutory template, and the enemy-ontological logic developed in the earlier period. The rescue myth that Ragaru (2023) identifies as mnemonic statecraft served as the instrument through which the Holocaust chapter was narratively closed — national innocence asserted, architectural inheritance concealed from both external observers and subsequent domestic generations. The infrastructure was not dismantled. It was inherited.

On 24 December 1984, Bulgarian security forces moved into villages across the Kardzhali region — a predominantly Turkish Muslim area in the country's south — placed communities under curfew, and began systematically seizing identity documents. By the end of the following year, 822,588 Bulgarian Muslims had been issued new Slavic names: a census-derived figure from state administrative records, not an estimate, not a retrospective approximation, but a number produced by the apparatus of renaming itself (Dimitrov, 2000; Eminov, 1997). The campaign's official justification — that these individuals were "lost Bulgarians" whose Ottoman-era conversion to Islam had concealed their authentic national identity, and that the state was restoring what history had taken — deployed the complete persecutory template of the earlier anti-Jewish phase without reproducing its ideological content. Contamination framing marked the Muslim minority as an alien element within the national body. Defensive legitimation recast enforced renaming as restoration rather than persecution. Enemy-ontological designation marked the Turkish community as a Fifth Column under foreign influence. Administrative routinisation distributed the process across thousands of ordinary officials — census workers, document processors, local party functionaries. Bauman (1989, pp. 98–104) identifies the mechanism: the act of persecution is divided into components that each appear procedural and legitimate in isolation, achieving both scale and moral opacity through the bureaucratic division of responsibility. Mann (2005) identifies the institutional logic: the state does not need a new apparatus for escalation — it needs only to redirect an existing one. Harris and Fiske's (2011, pp. 175–178) account of dehumanised perception provides the cognitive mechanism that makes this redirection possible at the individual level: officials processing 822,588 renaming files were not engaging with 822,588 people — they were working with administrative categories from which spontaneous mind-perception had been suppressed by the ideologisation infrastructure surrounding them. The operators of the 1984 campaign did not share the ideology of the 1940 operators. They shared the architecture. Same slot. Different ideology. Identical grammar.

IV. The Proxy-Adjacent Mechanism

None of the four external operators who shaped Bulgarian persecution campaigns across four centuries installed the capture infrastructure they exploited. Each found a slot already in place, already populated with historically sedimented target candidates, already equipped with activation language accumulated through prior activations. What each supplied was something structurally different from installation: a named enemy — a contemporary target category, historical frame, or legislative model that could dock into the pre-existing position — and a formulation of the persecutory vocabulary legible to the political generation they were working with. This is the Proxy-Adjacent Mechanism: externally enabled mobilisation that measurably shapes escalation choices without requiring assumptions of full directional control. It is analytically distinct from both fully autonomous radicalisation, in which no external actor shapes the process, and fully directed state terrorism, in which an external actor constructs and operates the violence from the centre. Wigell's (2019) account of hybrid interference as a wedge strategy identifies the closest peer-reviewed parallel: external actors do not manufacture the divisions they exploit. They find them, sharpen them, and supply the specific content that makes latent fracture lines politically operative. Lanoszka (2016) demonstrates the operational dependency from the other direction: hybrid warfare campaigns require pre-existing ethnic and cultural vulnerabilities to leverage; without them, the external intervention achieves no purchase. The proxy-adjacent mechanism explains activation, but it does not determine outcome. Not every external operator who identifies a slot and supplies a candidate group succeeds in activating the capture infrastructure — the depth of installation, the credibility of the supplied target, and the alignment of social conditions all bear on whether activation occurs. The mechanism is structural. It is not automatic.

Pan-Slavist networks after 1878 did not construct the enemy-position against Jews in Bulgaria — they introduced Jews as the designated target for a position already structurally available, importing antisemitic categories through committee infrastructure, consular relationships, and print circulation that carried the Protocols and similar material into Bulgarian nationalist discourse (Kulenska, 2012; Gülseven, 2017). Nazi Germany's alliance framework from 1934 supplied something different: a legislative implementation model — the Law for the Protection of the Nation drafted on the Nuremberg template — and a state-apparatus pattern that showed how the pre-existing capture infrastructure could be operationalised as governance technology rather than merely as cultural sediment (Avramov, 2012). Soviet KGB-DS coordination after 1944 formalised the anti-Turkish-Muslim configuration as intelligence doctrine, embedding the operative framing for the Muslim minority's enemy-ontological position within the institutional practices of the security apparatus that would carry it, four decades later, into the Revival Process (Nehring, 2021). Contemporary Russkiy mir operations supply the Western globalist and NATO-expansion enemy categories that dock into the same slot under current conditions, working — as Gértrudix et al. (2023) demonstrate across 408 documented EUvsDisinfo cases — not by inventing new mnemonic material but by activating historically legible content the target environment already carries (Đorđević and Suslov, 2023). Four operators. Four incompatible ideologies. One operational approach: find the slot, supply the occupant, provide the grammar. What remains is to locate that pattern within the methodological landscape — and to assess what it proves beyond the Bulgarian evidence itself.

V. Discussion: What Occupant Substitution Proves

Radicalisation research has produced increasingly sophisticated instruments for the analysis of adversarial mobilisation — significance quest theory mapping the psychological conditions under which individuals become receptive to extremist overtures (Kruglanski et al., 2014), lone-actor behavioural analysis establishing the observable precursors to violence (Gill, 2015), moral ecology frameworks identifying the systemic conditions under which violent ideation becomes action (Bouhana, 2019). What this body of work has not been able to address is the differential question that sits behind all of it: why identical adversarial operations, deploying identical content through identical channels, produce radically different rates of uptake in different target populations. The substrate answer the Bulgarian evidence supplies is this — populations do not arrive at any specific adversarial operation as blank receptors; they arrive carrying a pre-installed capture architecture whose depth and target-readiness determines, before any specific message is transmitted, how effectively that message can dock. Zilinsky et al. (2024) provide quantitative confirmation from the most directly relevant contemporary context: pre-existing conspiracy outlook predicts acceptance of Russian justifications for the invasion of Ukraine more strongly than media exposure alone — meaning the architectural precondition matters more than the specific operation's volume or channel. Gértrudix et al. (2023), analysing 408 EUvsDisinfo-documented disinformation cases, demonstrate the operational pattern: Russian influence operations work systematically through historically legible mnemonic material rather than constructing new ideological content, activating what target environments already carry rather than installing what they do not. The substrate is not theoretical. It predates the operation.

Bulgaria's documentary density makes it an unusually legible case — and that density itself invites a legitimate counter-reading: that the corridor's specific historical position, its accumulation of Ottoman aftermath, Pan-Slavist import, Nazi alliance, and Soviet bloc membership, makes it a unique convergence rather than a paradigmatic instance, its substitution sequence visible at a resolution that simply does not exist in other target environments. This counter-interpretation deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissal. The verification criterion the paper advances is not generalisability but structural proof: a single case demonstrating the same slot operating under two ideologically incompatible regimes within forty years of each other establishes that a pre-installed capture architecture can exist independently of any specific doctrine — its existence is proven by the cross-ideological proof regardless of how many other corridors share the same structure. Whether they do requires separate investigation. Girard's structural logic explains why the Bulgarian case is more likely paradigmatic than anomalous: any society that has undergone repeated sacrifice-mechanism activation will have sedimented the slot structure, the only variable being whether the documentary record makes successive substitutions visible at the same resolution (Girard, 1977; Girard, 1986). Volkan's account of chosen trauma transmission explains why the sediment endures (Volkan, 2001). Nedelcheva and Levy (2022) demonstrate that Bulgaria's civilizational mnemonics remain politically instrumentalised in the present. The empirical proof is complete. The threat it describes is not historical. The current occupant changes. The slot does not.

VI. Implications: Detection and the Architecture's Indifference

Detection frameworks calibrated to ideological actors will always be one substitution behind. When the operator is defeated, discredited, or absorbed — when a specific nationalist movement is dismantled, a propaganda network exposed, an extremist organisation banned — the capture infrastructure that operator was running does not disappear with it. It reverts to availability. It waits for the next actor who can identify the slot, supply a credible contemporary target, and provide the activation vocabulary that makes the position legible to a new generation. What the Bulgarian evidence demonstrates across five centuries is not a sequence of ideological continuities but a structural continuity beneath ideological discontinuity. The slot outlasted Bogomil cosmological institutionalisation, Pan-Slavist nationalist mobilisation, National Socialist alliance governance, Communist forced identity transformation, and post-Communist transitional fragility — not because any of these formations preserved it intentionally, but because ideologisation infrastructure, as Malešević (2019) establishes, is grounded in the everyday networks of micro-solidarity and institutional habit that no political transition has the capacity to dismantle overnight or by decree. What the Persecutor Slot framework contributes to existing analytical approaches is therefore not a new detection category to add to existing inventories but a new detection level entirely. Below the surface of contemporary ideological mobilisation, the substrate can be mapped through historical documentary analysis, its depth estimated through convergent evidence across marker types, its current target identified, and the discursive pattern connecting successive occupants traced — before any specific adversarial operation begins, before any surface signature appears, before the activation that existing frameworks are designed to detect has already occurred. Wigell's (2019) wedge strategy analysis establishes that external actors work through pre-existing divisions rather than constructing new ones. The pre-existing division, in this framework, is the slot itself — structurally available, grammatically primed, and indifferent to the identity of whoever arrives next to operate it. Mapping the substrate is not a historical exercise. It is reconnaissance.

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