"Imagine being unable to accept other people's love"

"The Pickpocket Slaves of Europe"

"The pickpocket slaves of Europe have prompted a major international investigation by the Netherlands regarding the...forced child pickpockets in Europe…

In Eastern Europe, children are living what the Dutch press calls a modern Oliver Twist story.  

Some of the children are being held against their will and forced to beg and steal their way around Western European cities.

According to the findings of an international investigation called Operation 13Oceans, these young thieves, as young as 8 years old, are picking pockets and involved in other petty crimes in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Spain.

Several kids appeared on the radar of the Dutch police when they saw the same faces over and over again, with different names each time. They had picked them up, booked them, and let them out on the streets again, in a never ending cycle. 

Eventually, as the cops ran their faces through the databases of Europol and other international organizations, a list of around 300 kids emerged. 

The children are invisible victims because it is hard for society to see the sinister hand of organized human trafficking that lies behind the petty thievery that afflicts so many European cities, helping to stoke the anger against “migrants,” many of whom are Roma, but many of whom are not.

A Dutch prosecutor said, “What you see is often not what it appears. When you see a mother begging with a child, for instance, you don’t necessarily think about the infant being forced to serve as a prop for a woman who is not its mother at all.”

Another member of 13Oceans added, “As the children get older, they are forced to steal for a criminal organization. We are actively watching four international criminal networks.” More specifics were not given, since the investigation in ongoing.  But the ages of the children range from 8 to 16, he said.

In the past, investigators tended to look at this issue as pickpocketing or so-called mobile banditry offenses…but now in this case the children are considered victims rather than offenders.  Some of the victims are demanded to steal up to [$1,115] a day."

Read more from source here.

VIDEO: "Meet DiEM25"

"Almost two years ago, we got together under DiEM25’s broad umbrella [Democracy in Europe Movement] to challenge old-style politics, to shatter TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) at the pan-European level, to turn Europe’s democratisation into a radical, realistic, uniting project.

2017 was an awful year for European democracy. But it was an amazing year for DiEM25. We:

• Rallied tens of thousands of people in cities including Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, Belfast, Hamburg, and London, and toured the breadth and length of Greece & Italy, demonstrating that There is An Alternative; that Another Europe Is Already Here!
• Nurtured our activists. There are now 70,000 DiEMers in almost every country on the planet!
• Launched and pushed specific campaigns to expose the Establishment’s worst abuses – and we just filed a lawsuit against the European Central Bank to force them to release #TheGreekFiles
• Launched our European New Deal, our concrete social and economic Policy Agenda, crowd-sourced from DiEM25ers and experts across the world

• Influenced elections with our interventions, like in Germany, France and the UK, and supported/partnered with candidates or parties that embraced them, like in Catalonia, Zagreb, Denmark and Poland
• Welcomed progressive leaders to our movement, like Naomi Klein and Richard Sennett

• Kickstarted the process for taking the European New Deal to a polling station near every European – at the Volksbuehne Theatre, in Berlin
• Began electing our Coordinating Collective
• Presented the Real State of the Union in Brussels, at the Bozar Theatre
• Set in motion the ‘Not Just Another Political Party’ endeavour
• Elected our first National Collectives (NCs), taking to new levels our ambitious experiment in grassroots transnational democracy – with all members (despite nationality) voting for different national collectives..."

Read more about DiEM25 here.

"Competing for victimhood: Why eastern Europe says no to refugees"

[Slovenia, 25 October 2015. Photo: Janossy Gergely / Shutterstock.com. Source: Shutterstock]

A thoughtful and balanced piece of writing from Slavenka Drakulic that helps explain bigotry in that part of the world...

"The constant meetings of EU leaders concerning the refugee crisis in Brussels have not so far yielded any solutions. Decisions and documents, yes, but the question remains how many of these are going to be implemented in reality. One of the reasons is that former communist states in eastern Europe are more or less openly defying a common approach, in particular the sharing of the burden of refugees through quotas.

Until recently it seemed that eastern and western Europeans were getting closer, that the new EU member states were slowly adapting to western democratic standards not only in form, but also in practice and mentality. 

But the refugee crisis has demonstrated how deep the division among Europeans still is. Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia reject quotas, Bulgaria was first to build a fence along its border with Turkey, Romania is not offering refugees safe havens either, and Slovenia and Croatia claim lack of capacity, while also lacking the will to keep them. 

It looks as if Poland, with its newly elected government, will reinforce this defiance. Not to mention countries outside the EU: if Serbia and Albania are willing to perhaps show a kinder face to refugees while guiding them towards western borders, it is with an eye on possible membership of the Union. Macedonia is in the worst situation, penniless, overrun and desperate. It is obvious that these states are not very eager to, or capable of, demonstrating solidarity, to say the least." 

Read more from source at Eurozine here.

"East of interest" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[A man passing by the “light border” installation along the remains of the Berlin Wall. Photo: AFP.]

How little we know about the culture of that 'area of darkness:' Eastern Europe. 

Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or music groups from somewhere as close as the Czech Republic or even from the former East Germany. Communism blotted out an entire world of creative expression to those who lived in the so-called free West of Europe and tastes in cultural fashion have hardly reclaimed any of it.

Reading Polish writer Agata Pyzik's recent ironically titled book "Poor But Sexy" helps to uncover some of what she calls the 'culture clashes' between the two sides of the continent. 

She argues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. Only occasionally using too much post-modernist academic jargon, she makes the highly convincing case that the Western 'democratic' world has maintained an arrogant assumption that everybody wants to 'buy into' their capitalist belief systems. As well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures (including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the West.

But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking 'unberaable, ritualised Soviet life' while simultaneously showing how the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins of the old world.

As well as this, writers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism to 'inspire and activate the reader.' In his earlier book "Man Without Qualities" - a superb title - he largely rejects modernity, seeing 'the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet.' Surprisingly, he views this as 'an advance rather than a difficulty.' 

Again and again in Eastern Bloc culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties of Iberian habits of mind.

Another strength of this book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in the East. 

It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately predict how female activism in Poland's Solidarity movement would be wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant. In a patriarchal Catholic Poland 'full of open sexism' precious few women characters of equality got through to be seen.

And in this book there are countless references to the culture from the West so that we are not lost in unfamiliar names. Everyone from David Bowie to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a mention. There are plenty of relevant comparisons with contemporary Eastern culture, Pyzik finds. She ends with the disturbing statement that the populace of Eastern Europe "so strongly believe we don't deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it." Let's not make that same mistake in other parts of the planet.


[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]