Free Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik Page B

the politician answered with the accusation of racism. “Yes, what do we know? We’re just wogs”, tweeted the Estonian president - “We’re just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa. Let’s sh*t on East Europeans: their English is bad, won’t respond & actually do what they’ve agreed to & re-elect govts that are responsible.” He didn’t offer statistics in his defence, but asserted that Krugman’s critique bore traces of even if not directly racism, then of dismissal based on his Western privilege, moreover, about a country he apparently knew nothing about. But in fact, despite that, Estonia, just like any other Eastern European country newly in the EU, simply obeys the austerity decreed by Brussels. So in his rant the Estonian president not only played the ‘underdog’ card, but did it to avoid a real discussion on economics. Because perhaps we do feel that we gave away too much and are overly subdued to what the West wants, yet admitting it would be too much for us.
    In
The Possibility of an Island
by Michel Houellebecq, the main character, Daniel, observes the merciless conditions in which thepost ’89 world has found itself, especially for the citizens of the previous so called ‘demo-peoples’. Nowhere else are people so merciless when fighting for their own interests than Eastern Europe, he claims. Even the villains of the Balzacian world were nicer than those thugs. ‘Let’s beware brotherhood’, the French writer concludes. Together with the end of the Curtain, new attitudes started emerging in those post-Soviet countries, that were relatively better off as a result of the capitalist transition, or indeed, got slightly less fucked up despite all the attempts to the contrary. Poland, due to its accession to the EU and the accompanying subsidies is, as we’ve seen, definitely perceived as one of the ‘leaders’ in the former East.
    But what kind of attitudes did Poles gain as a result of the restoration of property, together with the liquidation of communal flats and free healthcare for everyone? The best way to measure it is to examine the relations Poles have to those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. As the leader of the East, Poland started to be an obvious destination for migrants or refugees of the many post-Soviet countries that were less successful in the post-89 restoration. Here, an eternal rule of capitalism seems to be at work: exploiting anyone you can, who is more vulnerable than us at this precise moment. For now, Chechens, Ukrainians, Vietnamese, are those exploited and discriminated against in Poland. A recent rental survey has shown how Poles are hostile to rent a flat or give a job to any of the nationalities above, or to someone of color.
    As every neoliberal country, where ownership is the only model of living, we now have a dramatic problem with flats. Yet what happens is the city selling the debts of tenants to businessmen who then carry out brutal evictions. In Warsaw another problem is the sudden claims from all those who had or inherited properties which were there before the war and before PRL’s First Secretary Bolesław Bierut issued a decree in 1948 abolishing private ownership. It was perhaps the only way the destroyed Warsaw could’ve been rebuilt, but now, together with the Stalinist or simplysocialist modernist architecture, it stands for the straw-men of all kinds that stop Warsaw from becoming a tacky ‘Eastern tiger’, like some Eastern European Shenzen, even if hopes for that are nonsense. The inheritors are blocking construction sites or evicting people, even institutions, like schools who were in the city center for decades. And when they strike back, organized crime is ready, as with the killing of one of the leaders of the Tenants Movement, Joanna Brzeska, whose body was found burnt in the forest near Warsaw and was only two years later recognized as murdered by the court. Everyone attached