dinsdag 24 november 2015

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’.

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