In Prague You Get Beaten for Defending Refugees
October 30, 2015
In Prague You Get Beaten for Defending Refugees
by Andre Vltchek
When respected philosophers get attacked in the middle of the street, you know that something is going terribly wrong with the nation.
The Czech Republic (and before, Czechoslovakia) was always a tough, racist place. It had its shameful share of anti-Semitic pogroms (Franz Kafka wrote, after one of them, that he will never be able to feel that he belongs to Czechoslovakia, anymore). It voluntarily exterminated a great number of its Gypsy (Roma) population during the Second World War. And it kicked out millions of Germans right after the war, following a shameless orgy of rape, murder and looting. “Shameless”, because the Czechs generally collaborated with the Nazi occupation regime, and therefore had no moral mandate to “settle scores” with its German minority.
“Czechs were always outrageously racist, and low”, I was once told by my dear uncle who, during the Communist era was helping to build industry in the Middle East and elsewhere. A true internationalist and Marxist, he fell in love with the Arab culture and the Arab people, and he despised the bigoted attitudes of his colleagues towards them: “You would not believe what Czechs were doing in the Middle East. To make extra money, Czech workers were pimping their own wives, but then they were calling the Arab people names, despised them.”
I experienced Czech racism on my own skin, first hand. During my childhood, I was beaten after each class at my elementary school, simply for having half Asian and half Russian mother. “You have Asian ears”, I was told, after having my shoes pissed into during cold winter days, with urine freezing fast in a bitter cold.
Those Roma (Gypsies) who survived the war, and those who were later “imported” in cattle cars to settle the border regions that were left empty after the deportation of the German minority, had it, of course, much worse.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/in-prague-you-get-beaten-for-defending-refugees/