Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik Read Free Book Online

must be left scattered around the cityfor the excitement of the tourists. Tourists also don’t want this myth to die: one of the attractions of the Mini-Europe theme park in Brussels, where each EU country is symbolized by animatronic architectural models, is the mechanized Berlin Wall, which – after being overthrown by bulldozers, is a few seconds of strange mourning later magically resurrected, only to be overthrown again and again, as if we’re stuck in the traumatic repetition of the primal scene, capable only of an endless repetition, but not an understanding.
    In this process, the memory begins to be manipulated. Berlin has become a House of Fear at the fun fair, where we pay to be led through a set of nightmares of history, with the premise that the monsters are our good friends, we know them very well and we know that the nightmare is not actually for real. The reason we must keep the monster alive is crucial for us to not to change anything about the present and to exist in this morbid clutching onto the past. The past is used to scare, so that anything we do now cannot be put into question. And when what we do now visibly fails, we can again and again reach for our little scare bot: See what will happen if we allow this ever again?
    This is not the full picture. The unknown secret of the recent post-communist societies is how often, especially right after the collapse, they voted for communists. Poland twice elected the Democratic Left Alliance, the renamed and ‘reformed’ Communist Party – similar parties were elected in Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria. People not only gave the ex-communists a chance, they did so repeatedly, and did so not only because of the communist nostalgia, but because the ‘good guys’, the former Oppositionists in right wing anti-communist governments had made these weakened economies collapse completely. Because of this the political landscape is that of ritual battles between the ex-communists and the ex-opposition, both basically neoliberal but replacing one another every four years in the government, when a society disgusted by one in the meantimemanages to forget the faults of the other, but both eventually erasing the welfare state and dragging the economy to the drain.
    Of course, the political situation of the respective countries differed greatly. Ex-Yugoslavia drowned in the horrible war, and some of the countries had to live permanently on international help, like Albania, which had practically no industry or jobs at all in the first half of the 90s.
    There’s a lot of post-colonial trauma to post-communism, but the level of barbarism that came after caused people to miss the past. Yet the erecting of a new statue of Stalin in Ukraine (as happened a few years ago in Dniepropetrovsk), and the city of Volgograd’s regular petitions to rename itself Stalingrad have more to do with the memory of the World War Two, in which 25 million Russians died, not necessarily the love for despotism. But what is the value now the Russian Communist Party, by all accounts reactionary, from whom the Russian ‘new left’ want to disassociate? Large, unreformed Communist Parties remain also in the Czech Republic, and Ukraine, where both had big increases in their votes in elections in 2012; the Communists have regularly been elected as the governing party in Moldova. To me, there’s little appeal to these organisations, as they are often socially reactionary. In rich countries, like Germany, Die Linke, formed out of the former Communists and a left-wing split from the Social Democrats, feel more of a modern alternative to the careless neoliberal newspeak of the Social Democrats, who remain so only nominally, while Germany is holding the rest of the continent to ransom during the Eurozone crisis.
    This leads us to the notorious ‘lustration’ cases, where the names of public figures who ever testified or appear in the communist Secret Services files were publicly