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International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective
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ibarw is on again, and after the recent kerfuffle (or does anyone remember it in the wake of the Boldthrough?), I've been thinking along the same lines.One issue I often see in racism discussions is the Europe/America divide. Racism in America is something special, yes, but I think it's mostly because of how much it's been fought against and for, there. I wonder if it wasn't for the better: if Americans aren't perfect, at least they have the instinct to respond to an accusation of racism with "No, I'm not." Too often in Poland, the response is "So what?"
And I'm not talking about the usual angle, the black/white divide, though that one makes the news on the football field. Not even about Asians, though there was a recent stellar example of a big bazaar being shut down, then given an extension - "But only for the white merchants, because the Asians are all illegal immigrants". And no, the guy didn't lose his - ministerial - post over it.
The thing is, in Europe it's hard to say "white", and our racism problems aren't the ones that make big fandom debates. When did you last read a post railing against discimination of the Roma? Or Romanians even - in Poland, those two are often lumped together and passed off as thieves and beggars. Or the Ukrainian affair, which goes back centuries before there were either blacks or whites in what is now the US of A. And that's not even touching on the big bogeyman.
To apply standard American measures of political correctness to Poland would be to have a heart attack over every fridge magnet of a Jew counting money. It's a financial good-luck thing, on the lines of the Irish leprechauns with their beer and pots of gold (and somehow, the Irish sell them themselves), but put it next to the tele-evangelist who promises not sulphur, but the Jews coming to take everything away if people don't pray hard and give him money, and it starts being frightening. This is the country where accusations of Jewish blood are thrown in political debate as the highest insult.
This is the country that used to have three million Jewish citizens, once. Once.
So forgive me if I don't overlook these issues, if I don't close off my creativity in a garden where I pretend race doesn't matter at all, just because "it's an American issue". I'm too hot-blooded for that, too prone to overthinking to ignore the fact that if something conforms to the usual tropes because it's easier, it reinforces them in the reader, the watcher.
Mixing Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish blood probably wasn't one of my ancestors' brightest ideas.
(As an aside, I've also been thinking about the issue of writing about race or other discrimination from the point of view of a character with a cultural background and ideas different from my own. Would anybody be interested in reading something like that?)
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I think that the problem on both ends is that people are operating, and passing judgement, based on too little information.
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For example, I'm Austrian. After WW2 were were occupied by the Allied forces for 10 years. A great deal of national pride goes into us having persuaded the Allied forces to end the occupation. When they left we got a document that allowed us to be a state again and it's pretty much the closest to a declaration of independence we have. It's what our state is founded on. Back then we basically promises that we would be good neutral little Austrians, that we had learned from our mistakes, that we were ready to join the international community again. In this document among other things it was decided that we would give the various, usually Slavic communities at our borders various rights (schools, support money for newspapers in their own language AND name signs in their own language if a towns has a certain percentage of these non-native speakers). That was 50 years ago. And people are still arguing about putting up those signs, resisting orders from the supreme court, ripping them down at night when some of them are put up. It's the most moronic and childish argument imaginable.
No, it's not the same as killing people or other forms of discrimination. But it's sort of symptomatic of the idiocy that is going on regarding those kind of things.
I often think that there is relatively little antisemitic action at the moment is only because there are next on Jews and especially few visible ones. I often wonder if Austria and Germany are lucky that they can pass themselves off as civilized is because most of the Jews who were connected to the holocaust (the few that survived) preferred going to Israel or America. Sure, reparations were paid. But I'm convinced if the Jews had actually come back in any major manner and had asked to ask their stuff back (just like insane Germans and Austrians still want their stuff in the Czech Republic that they lost because of WW2) then people wouldn't want wanted to give it up, there would have been festering dislike and, well, there would have been no illusion that people had changed.
The only reasons why Austria and Germany can feel relatively non-antisemitic at the moment is because they were never called on it and never had to act on it. Because Jews are such a relative non-entity that of course nobody bothers to feel threatened by them and so they focus on hating Turkish or North American immigrants instead.
Because it's not an issue of giving up the culture (and more than culture, religion - doesn't America guarantee freedom of it?)
I dunno. Don't you see it brewing in regards to Islamic cultures? Of course you don't HAVE to give up your religion, dear Islamic immigrant, but isn't the underlying message that maybe it would be so much easier for everybody if you did. Not to mention the whole "Must respect the core values of your host country" that always seem to hark into this direction, at least to my ears.
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Well, more and more of the rhetoric here (Netherlands) is starting to be more like "Well,
filthydear Islamic immigrant, while we in this country do have freedom of religion, your religion is so inherently backwards and retarded and violent that we're thinking you should maybe burn your holy books to join our enlightened and discrimination-free society instead of just whining about 'disjkriminasie' and sitting on your ass all day worshipping your pedophile prophet!"And I wish this was just the most extremist nutsoes, but upwards of a million people (on a total of sixteen!) think this way, so….
For illustration, there has been an outcry at the instating of Muslim two state secretaries at the beginning of this year and one of our MP's suggested making a law stating no Muslim could ever hold the office of minister or state secretary; the same one recently suggested we ban the Quran, it being on par with
(It's mostly limited to one party and its supporters, but I think that stops being an issue when there's a million of them.)
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So the Austria as well? The Swiss can get unhealthily obssessed with this "integration" of immigrants. To an unfortunate degree. It is almost as if becoming Swiss is like adopting a religion. There are special governamental institutions to help the different people integrate in the local culture, to become truly Swiss whatever that means. In the canton of Vaud (Waadt) they ask the local dishes recipes like fondue in the nationality exam etc. In Geneva they come to your place to see if you are "not living in a yourt". This is a direct quote from a real "Swiss maker" I met *insert an eyeroll*
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It does seem that the immigration laws are getting more and more restrictive in all countries. I have a female friend who is trying to immigrate from Austria to Australia (so one first world country to another), speaks excellent English, has a finished degree, has an Australian boyfriend who works at the embassy and plans to marry her and she still can't get a Green Card/apply for citizenship.
Not to mention the occasional "We tried to extradite an African immigrant to Hungary and accidentally choked him to death with his gag".
Though I'm convinced that you can find dark cases like that in every country if you are just committed to looking hard enough. Nobody is clean.
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It was pretty easy for the Government to put this in, Australians have always been wary, bordering and going into xenophobic of our northern Neighbours (Malaysia and Indonesia), and you'll find a lot of Australians convinced that both countries would invade us in a second if they had the chance (and yeah, there are military and political types in both those countries who would if they could). And we're absolutely terrified of being invaded by Asia, the war against the Japanese is still in living memory. We're such a small population, and we have such a resource rich country, I know this will be a matter of contention in the future, so it bleeds in over into our xenophobia.
I can't imagine it ever going away as long as our northern neighbours continue to be hostile and a potential threat.
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What weirds me out is that occasionally you still find Austrians who feel that way about some out neightbours. That Yuguslavia would try to march up and take our companies.
Which is just nuts to me. For once, unlike Austrialia, Austria is surrounded by other Western countries. Not to mention that our country extremely heavily tourism based. So it's not like that is something you could just *take* in an invasion. Not to mention I look at the Austrians and I figure they would be such a bitch to govern (because if we know anything then it's how to bitch and be morose) for a true invading force I just can't picture anybody actually trying that. Especially since we have so few resources and so little industry. Aside from the fact that most of these countries are EU by now or working on becoming EU and therefore have easier ways to invade ;p
But historically it's just so locked in people's mind, it's just a fixed idea.
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I also agree no one should throw stones at the Americans. They just have different issues which we do not always get. I've just moved to US from Switzerland, I'm trying to navigate the local waters, and they are murky sometimes, without a flashlight.
I know Switzerland has relaxed our immigration laws but only for the EU citizens, not even for the Americans or the Aussies. Those arrangements are usually mutual, maybe Austria has a similar thing in place and the Australians just respond in kind. I got my US green card easily enough only because my husband is American. I know it sounds pragmatical and not romantic, but if your friend and her bf are serious about each other, they might as well get married to help things along. Really, fingers crossed for her :)!
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Really? I'm from Germany myself, and I think anti-semitism, at least in the social groups I frequent, is more or less gone. Especially in the younger generations (mine and that of my parent), even though we very seldomly get confronted with Jewish people, it just isn't an issue any longer; the kind of racism that gets inbred (and let's be honest, all of our families are racist to some degree, including us) is usually against immigrants or east european countries. Especially the German-Polish relations, as someone already mentioned, are still a problem for many of the people living in former East Germany.
But even the NPD and other right-wing nationalists and neo-nazis, are focusing on immigrant and not Jews.
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It's just something that comes up when people are discussing black/white racism in the US. Where people are still talking whether black people or the descendants from slave are owed by the establishment. If there is a duty to be particularly sensitive.
We are taught that we have to be particularly sensitive to Jews and we are for the most part okay with it. But really being nice to Jews really is an abstract concept to us because there are barely any Jews around. We don't dislike jews because we don't know any.
And when people do get called on it, like some additional reparations that have been paid or because they have to give back some piece of art that was appropriated during WW2 there is bitching and there is grumbling and there is "Well, how much longer do we have to do this/how much longer do we have to pay/isn't it enough"?
After WW2 the Jews that survived had a place to go to, America and Israel to build a new identity. After slavery was abolished the slaves still had fewer rights for a long time and they stayed less educated and less rich than the average. And so issues of identity are still discussed and are still an issue.
That is not to say that the Jews were somewhat better off than the slaves. It means that we were better off because the people we treated badly mostly disappeared from our direct line of sight, found their own identity without our help and their new enemies are now other people so we don't have to feel guilty anymore. We had the liberty of recovering without having our mistakes stare in our faces in the shape of real living people, we recovered quietly and when we were ready we had our nice sanitized far removed Aufarbeitung that was more about us perpetrators wanking each other than about direct confrontation with real life jews. To me that seems much different than dealing with a minority right in out midst.
Just like it is easy not to hate Roma if there are so few of them that barely ever has met one or your country is so rich that they can ensure that even Roma live relatively well. (ever tried to say Roma in the presence of somebody from Eastern Europe? Usually instant guarantee for a long and detailed tirade about what low lives they are)
I'd like to think that we are different because of OUR unique history (scared straight so to speak) but honestly? I'm not convinced. It's easy for us because we could live in denial over the mess we made (because the world was busy with the Cold War) till we were ready for it. And if we ever do get into really dire immigration problems again, I'm not convinced that we wouldn't be at least as assholish as everybody around us. And if the immigration or culture inside culture was with Jews, I'm not convinced that we would be more sensitive (probably actually less) than we are with others. The reasons we can be easy going about it is because there just aren't enough Jews for us to really feel like there could even be a problem.
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Most of them migrated to the Maghreb and the diverse territories of the Ottoman Empire, with a substantial minority heading for the Netherlands, the philosopher Spinoza being one of the most famous examples of the era. But, yeah...
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