Polish Pride

A Facebook friend of mine posted an article by a foreign correspondent of the Flemish national tv station, VRT, about the sentiments in Poland concerning the terrorist attacks in Paris. The article revered the ‘refreshing’ views coming from the Eastern European country about how we should be facing the terrorists, and how welcome a breather this provided the author from all that Western liberal media whitewashing of radical Islamism, by endlessly putting things into perspective. The post was immediately crowned with a couple of standard blurts amounting to ‘at least they know how to deal with these people' from the self-proclaimed no-mercy gang, probably hiding behind closed curtains in some sleepy Flemish village.

Poles, says the author, show little understanding for social disenfranchisement as an excuse for religious extremism. Us Poles make much less money, have less social provisions compared to even the most disadvantaged banlieue inhabitant. It’s an argument I’ve also heard from my Hungarian friends. We also have it harsh, but do you see us blowing up people? No, we work hard and deploy our talents. Obviously, social inequalities within the European Union are real, and Polish living standards are no doubt lower than Wester European ones, but reducing social inequality to purely material standards leaves us with an incomplete perspective on things.

Without wanting to assume too much of the Polish life experience, it is probably safe to say that no Pole has ever experienced open hostility from other Poles due to the colour of their skin, as I often heard my pupils at the Brussels school I used to teach at describe it. I don’t think any Pole has ever indiscriminately been shunned at a bus stop by other Poles because of his or her being Polish. In heavily segregated Brussels, some neighbourhoods are unofficially no-go zones for youths of immigrant descent. Going there means getting in trouble with the police. People with Arabic backgrounds are turned away at clubs, something I don’t think Poles, whatever their material wellbeing, have ever had to experience.

It is probably hard to understand for anyone who hasn’t experienced it (which includes me) what harm such experiences cause to your experience of freedom, and the conception of your own social dignity. In that sense, being impoverished in a large group where social and geographical mobility is not limited by implicit boundaries imposed by a majoritarian group might just possible be a slightly better deal than having a materially higher childcare allowance, although I take care not to judge something I don’t know for sure.

The main problem with these assertions about the problem just lying with ‘those people’ and not with their living circumstances is that by contradicting them, you seem to be justifying the violence. It is a difficult leap to make: calling attention to the radicalizing effects of living in a sealed, socially disadvantaged environment does not mean sanctioning the random killing of people in movie theatres or shopping malls. Rather, it means that we should be looking for different cures for the violence. Not just for the sake of our feeling of safety, but mostly for the sake of the people living in the sealed environments. Enough lives have been damaged by the experience of growing up in a ghetto.

The division runs along many lines. Polish social inequality, just like its Flemish counterpart, has been mediated since ages by an implicit social contract, starting with medieval autocracy and updated through liberalism, communism and post-1989 democratic ideology. Frustrations are communicated, in times of prosperity, through folklore, jokes, and in less prosperous times through sometimes violent revolution, or violence against outsider groups like Jews or Gypsies. Europeans of Arabic or Turkish descent aren't involved in this social contract, and are often actively denied participation. There is some kind of civil rights movement, and some progress is being made, for example in the Netherlands, but it is slow, and often ridiculed as extreme leftist. Rooting for successful national soccer players of Arabic descent is one thing, but when this zeal doesn’t translate into dealing with more systemic forms of social discrimination, the efforts remain moot.

The Flemish nationalist N-VA, while on the one hand, admittedly, proposing an American Dream-style program of social integration in their electoral campaign that brought them such widespread political success, also defended Flemish employers’ ‘right to discriminate’ based on ethnical criteria. Since taking power, little has been done to implement the former, while even less has been done to reverse their tolerance towards the latter. In such a context, disappointed youths from immigrant communities turn towards other sources of authority. While this is no excuse for the violence that stems from these authority figures, blatantly refusing to take this dynamic into account is equally inexcusable, and escalates the risk of socially inspired violence towards innocents members of all involved communities.

If the terrorists come from Molenbeek, the by now infamous Brussels district where some of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks came from, maybe Molenbeek should feel guilty, said the Poles to whom the article’s author spoke. Why should this be so? Why should a baker, shoemaker or lawyer from Molenbeek, who only has the ambition to make enough money to have a comfortable life and ensure a better future for their children, and who treat their religion as a source of comfort and feelings of togetherness, feel guilty about crimes committed by stray members of their community? Once again, the author labels this kind of indiscriminate finger-pointing as ‘refreshing’, a much-needed alternative to the alleged Western European tendency towards nuance and profound social analysis, which in any case doesn’t seem to reflect itself in any political action taken after the Paris attacks.

And how does the ‘we Polish don’t blow away innocent people, we deploy our talents’ ring with the countless Brussels people of Arabic or Turkish descent who did manage to get a job? Enthusiasm for employment in Brussels is far greater than outsiders, who gorge themselves on stories of benefit-happy immigrants (a prejudice Poles can’t be completely unfamiliar with), like to believe. Where they can, Brussels people with a migrant background work, albeit in sandwich bars, as airport luggage handlers, as office clerks, but they work. And slowly, they break the barriers of prejudice against them being capable of higher education, and move into university careers. The progress is slow, but it is there. Perhaps the unmitigated Polish disdain for the social attitudes of people of immigrant descent in Western Europe more reflects the intensity of the competition between two groups who face certain prejudices from a Western European elite. Their eagerness to use the Paris attacks as a justification to blot ‘Molenbeek’ from the map entirely, certainly points in that direction. A good journalist would have figured that out by himself. This particular VRT correspondent chose to warm his heart to ‘Polish straightforwardness.’

We live in dangerous times, and when we feel attacked, we often become functionally blind to our own actions that feed the violence. The Syrian conflict has been entrenched for such a long time not only because of Putin’s obstinate support for Bashar Al Assad, but also, among others, because of Saudi Arabian ideological support for religious extremist anti-Assad groups, to which the United States has allied its interests. And European governments meekly tag along in this crazy parade. It is in this hellhole of conflicting geopolitical interests that certain desperate youths have taken in the images of horrific violence that they have now exported to Europe. Apart from causing us to buck on our moral responsibility towards the Syrian population, failing to come face to face with these dynamics will lead to more violence, not less.

It is hard for us to unclench our fist. The greatest danger is that Europeans direct their thirst for revenge at the most vulnerable and easy target, the many innocent refugees stranded on the continent, fleeing exactly the kind of horrors perpetrated on a minor scale in Paris. Already the Daily Mail ran a cartoon showing refugees as threatening shadows, setting foot in Europe with rats in their midst. Flemish newspapers run jubilant articles about Kurdish brigades happily killing away against IS militia.

However much justified our fears about IS, what does it say about us when we start celebrating violence ourselves? Which crimes will it lead us to commit? Is it not possible to stop terrorism without inflaming these age-old homicidal instincts? With, for example, refined intelligence-gathering, pinpoint actions and most of all, a renewed effort at creating an inclusive society for all inhabitants of Europe? Not just because it would help eradicating the roots of radicalism, but because it is one of the moral imperatives of that enlightened Western society we claim to be so valiantly defending against the forces of darkness. In these most desperate times, it is only a renewed belief in our humanity, a belief that must not be limited to words, that will save us. It is a pity that journalists, in their desperation to make points and say something new, eschew this view as unworldly and rather label primitive warmongering as ‘refreshing’.

Bomb Fears

Fears are hard to admit in part because there will always be a little voice in the back of your mind telling you that expressing your fears in words, communicating them to other people, will make them come true. So it’s with a certain amount of nervousness that I admit that ever since the sluggish, stubborn juggernauts America and Russia locked heads over the Ukraine, I have been scared out of my wits about nuclear war suddenly breaking out.

During the first few weeks, I found a tool on the internet which allowed me to calculate the impact of an atom bomb on my surroundings, Brussels, hometown of NATO headquarters. The results were projected on a map. I'd always carry this map in my head, always keeping in mind how far I’d have to paddle with my race bike to get out of the first two circles on the map, which demarcate the most lethal blast radiuses. I'd think of the Brussels landscape, try to picture the slopes, thinking of how I may position a natural barrier between me and the supposed impact point, cynically drawing practical lessons from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (less people died in the latter city because of its hills deflecting the blast).

Sometimes I would cycle back from the countryside to Brussels. At a certain point during the trip, I’d see the city exposed to me from an elevated point, and I would apprehensively eye the sky for that blinding flash of white light that would wipe out buildings, friends, memories in the basin lying before me. One time, while walking through a supermarket with Sweet Little Sixteen playing on my mp3-player, tears burst from my eyes as I realized that not existing would mean not being able to listen to Chuck Berry.

I pieced my argument for the inevitability of the catastrophe together from remnants of the history courses I followed at university, from Hollywood scenarios, from a simple sense of doom which has pursued me since childhood and moved me back then to look open-mouthed at passing Cessna private planes, waiting for that dark shadow that would detach itself from the plane, hurtle earthward and evaporate me and my prudent hopes of becoming an astronaut or a farmer.

I thought of the run-up to the First World War, of a greedy German Empire land-locked by a greedy British Empire unwilling to share imperial privileges. I thought of military men, who, simply because of the fact that they were sitting on top of huge armies, saw every solution to a problem in the barking of cannons. I saw politicians on both sides of the divide with teeth gritted, unwilling to give up the slightest morsel of the ground they had, in their minds, planted their flag on. It could only lead to war, I was convinced.

The actual act would come out of a fundamental sense of distrust. Confronted with a diplomatic buildup from the other side, with hostile military activity circling around its borders, one of the parties involved would get so convinced that the other side was planning a strike that they would consider a pre-emptive strike the only solution to save them from destruction. Governments, wanting to avoid panic, wouldn’t warn the public of the upcoming cataclysm. The bombs would start falling, spreading fiery death among unsuspecting civilians. Somewhere deep down in some bunker, some grizzled general would mutter ‘God, it’s gonna be hell up there’. Well, yeah, buttmunch, it’s gonna be.

Then, other images from the media would stick to my mind. Inhabitants of the Donbass region complaining of how ‘there’s just nothing to do here’, made me wonder, why they didn’t have jobs, why they were being left feeling disenfranchised and revolutionary, while their own oligarchs toy around with helicopters, yachts and soccer teams? I started connecting the whole summer of unrest to climate change, to a universal sense of bad times ahead and everyone trying to vouchsafe the piece of the cake that would remain after environmental disaster had struck. Why do people stubbornly insist on driving cars, why does the oil industry keep on trampling pristine natural treasures in a never-ending search for new black gold, I thought? Don’t they know they’ll also be wiped out when environmental decline finally sets people all over the world up against each other in grim battles to the death?

After a while, my panic attacks would often be followed up by spells of persistent rancorous feelings, raining through my head. It’s not fair, I’d think. Here I am, working at a Brussels inner-city school, trying to do my bit to bridge the gaps between cultures, using my bicycle for almost all my daily migrations (conveniently forgetting that I’d rent a car, through a citywide car rental system, as often as I could, just because I love to take a set of wheels for a nice spin), doing almost all my travels by train (conveniently forgetting that no longer than two years ago, I set myself a target of taking at least three plane trips a year, once taking a kerosene-guzzling flight for a mere two weeks’ Easter holiday in Australia), buying food with some sustainable label as often as I can afford (conveniently forgetting my frequent splurges on kebab meat and cheap hamburgers). Why, why are those other people, those immoral people, screwing up the world for me, I wailed in my head.

Cycling around town, I would suddenly be gripped by a powerful rage and fantasize about dragging motorists out of their cars, without really knowing very well where to take it from there. I felt like they were sucking the air from my living-space. That must be the way a pro-Russian rebel in the Donbass feels towards those satanical Nazi-lovers in Kiev. What environmental rights are for me, cultural rights are for him. However I twist and turn things in my mind, I find no way to blame him for the way he feels.

The cowardice and egoism of my thoughts of running and hiding from the apocalypse never really bothered me. I was too scared to actually notice I was only preoccupied with my own well-being. Ironically, the behavior that ensued from my fear of war was one that would, when shared by a great many in the world, actually further the risks of war. I was isolating myself, and my behaviour, especially towards politics, was becoming antagonistic. My anger was never going to convince anyone to stop driving a car, and my rage at the warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic was impotent if anything.

After the 2007 financial crisis, it puzzled a great many people that so little was done to curtail the powers of big banks, and the fatalism that ensued the failure of the Occupy movement and other expressions of social activism fuelled the rise of this new tide of nationalism. However, the reason of their failure may have also been the anger and indignation in their message. If you’re a rich person, and a couple of thousands of people are shouting abuse at you from across your garden wall, and demanding you hand over your cash, you won’t toss them your money. You’ll simply raise the wall. After all, how are you to discern whether the protesters’ anger is directed at you, or at your money-loving ways? Mental pictures of French Revolution guillotines or Communist firing squads must be an everyday thing for the wealthy. The merest indication of likewise public outrage only makes them tighten their grip on privilege, the only thing they’ve got to ensure their survival.

In a way, we are reaping what we’ve sown. Not that we’ve ever been particularly self-critical creatures, but popular culture during the last decade or so has abandoned all incentive for self-examination and soul-searching. Self-righteousness, fake subversiveness and paranoid self-pity, validated by the general public, set the tone. Yes, I’m talking about you, Miley Cyrus. And you, 50 Cent. Perhaps I’m becoming old-fashioned. Perhaps popular culture was always like that. After all, Elvis was a bird-brained luxury addict, however much I like Heartbreak Hotel. But the point remains that most of today’s popular culture and its icons set an example of validating one’s first impulses, however bellicose or paranoid they may be. A quest for self-knowledge and an understanding of the paranoia and aggression in our human nature is much harder to find in it. We would do well to reverse the trend.

The beginning of a new year is a time for resolutions. Mine, for this year, is to fight my anger. It doesn’t do me any good, it doesn’t do my surroundings any good. I will try to be more careful in the way I express myself, careful yet determined. I will discern between people and their worldviews, I will formulate my world-view in a positive way. I will try to be critical about the information I encounter, evaluating it instead of usurping it as a source of anxiety and anger. I will discuss good-naturedly, always recognizing my opponent in discussions as a fellow human being. I will see the solution of a problem not in the eradication of a class of people, but in the elimination of the problem.

And so I wish a merry 2015 to you, Dick Cheney, whatever shadow you’re lurking from now, hatching yet another plot grossly disregarding the well-being of the planet in favor of an arms-producer’s stock value. And I wish a merry 2015 to you, Vladimir Putin, whatever nuclear-armed submarine you’re christening right now, whatever upheaval you’re trying to stir up, grossly disregarding the well-being of the planet to safeguard the interests of the corrupt military-industrial complex you’ve set up that so well resembles the one of the country you see as Russia’s arch-enemy. I love you both just the way you are. And I will spend all of 2015 trying to practice and spread all those wussy values you both loathe and despise as impractical, and do my bit to try to turn the world into your worst solar-powered, mutual trust-based, pacifist nightmare. I hope you’ll like it.