As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe, I follow that part of the world rather attentively. But as someone who has gone native in England, I’m mostly interested in the effect Eastern Europe has on us.
And here one has to observe that the old adage of being careful about what one wishes for applies to that region, though not completely. Sure enough, Westerners wanted communist countries to stop being communist, if only to save millions from arbitrary abuse. The abuse was mostly understood in terms of all those homicidal peccadilloes for which communists are so justly famous.
So the communists have been kicked out (many of them upstairs, to the highest echelons of government, but that’s another story). Now what? Well, now we begin to realise that propensity for mass violence wasn’t the only, or perhaps even the most, endearing – or enduring – feature of communism. Its lasting legacy can be found not only in the millions of nameless graves, but also in the hundreds of millions of ruined souls. For getting rid of communism didn’t get rid of its criminality. It merely privatised it.
Wave upon wave of crime, organised or individual, engulfed the region in the aftermath of communism – and then the EU obligingly opened the floodgates at our own borders. Fetid streams rushed in, and the smell isn’t pleasant.
Almost every day one reads stories about Eastern European gangs cutting a swathe through the West. Seldom do the stories go beyond reportage: they tell readers what happened, where and when – but not why or really how.
For example, we read a few days ago about a gang of Estonian bandits taking budget flights all over Western Europe, holding up jewellery shops at gun point as they went. A good read, that, but one would like to know more about the logistics. For example, where did they get those guns? As even budget airlines frown upon passengers packing firearms, the weapons had to be acquired locally.
Now imagine for the sake of argument that you and your friends decided to complement your income by knocking off the odd commercial establishment. Where would you go for your kit? Let’s say a friendly South London publican could conceivably refer you to an underground gun dealer. But would you know where to go in Paris or Rome? I know those cities well, and I wouldn’t. Yet those semiliterate Estonian bandits did. That means they had access to the spider’s web of criminal infrastructure woven all over Europe – and if you have another explanation, I’d like to hear it.
Then one reads that 92 percent of all cash-point crime in England is monopolised by Rumanians. Such a bias of one ethnic group towards one kind of crime in one country points at the existence of a vast, and technically savvy, organisation – especially since Rumanians in other countries pursue different areas of specialisation, such as pimping, which they, along with Hungarian Gypsies, more or less control in Amsterdam. In other countries pimping, along with drugs, is the chosen pursuit of the Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovars and other fragments of the imploded Yugoslavia. And they all love protection rackets, mostly targeting their straight countrymen.
Before crime was first privatised and then renationalised in Russia, Russian immigrants in the USA had also gone in for such traditional small-time pursuits, and they still do. But now that the Russian state has itself become a giant criminal concern, Russians residing in Western Europe in general, and in London especially, seldom demean themselves by indulging in petty shakedowns. They are into money laundering on a scale never before seen in history, an activity that turns them into instant A-listers in London, provided they have enough cash to launder.
But what about religion, now encouraged in Eastern Europe and indeed hailed as a moral saviour? A few observations are in order, the first dealing with the very term ‘religion’. Well, there’s no such thing, generically. There are only specific confessions, each with its own social and moral ethos in deed, if not in scriptural word. And different confessions in Eastern Europe hold moral sway to different degrees.
For example, in Russia, whose peasants were so praised for their saintly piety by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, it took said peasants roughly minutes in 1917 to begin looting churches and murdering priests in all sorts of imaginative ways. Nothing like that happened in Catholic Poland when her turn came. And if the Orthodox church in Russia has been – and is being – led by career KGB agents, the Polish church never succumbed to satanic politics to the same extent.
I could perhaps venture an explanation, but it would quickly overflow a short article. Empirical observation, however, suggests that the most vigorous criminal activity by Eastern Europeans in the West is associated with countries whose religious background is either Orthodox (Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Serbia), Protestant (Estonia, East Germany) or Muslim (Bosnia, Kosovo). One seldom hears of Croatian gangs, and the Croats, though Catholic, share their language and much of their culture with the Serbs and Bosnians. And the Poles are mostly known in England as plumbers, not money launderers.
It’s too early to tell what kind of social jetsam will be washed ashore in England by the murky wave of criminality rushing in from Eastern Europe. Our home-grown variety of thugs never succeeded in destroying our cultural and social mores – we have our government to thank for that. But the effect of imported crime is already noticeable, and it’s likely to get worse. After all, the EU tells us we can’t discriminate in deciding who can cross our borders.
There’s no question that the demise of communism has improved life in the Eastern half of Europe. What it’s doing to life in the Western half is open to debate.