Homogeneity as a threat

"In Poland, the streets are white. Everyone looks the same, everyone speaks the same language.
"Poland is currently condemning itself to being a passive witness to the great civilizational processes that are coming.
"By not entering this current, we are even more deaf, even more mute, and we see very little. This is terrifying,"
Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk for Deutsche Welle.


Wikipedia tells us that her father was a member of the Communist Party so she is a child of the nomenklatura, like Angela Merkel, but children of the nomenklatura in Romania do not usually have progressive views. Quite the contrary.


In Romania until three or four years ago the streets were also white but now brown young men on bicycles delivering food whisk past me, sometimes frighteningly close.


In 1945 and 1946 an ethnic war was fought between Ukrainians and Poles which the world ignored. Ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians were expelled from the places across Central and Eastern Europe in which their families had lived for many centuries. The whole story of the displaced persons - the so-called DPs - is calamitous. Coming after the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, by 1950 a terrible simplicity had been imposed on Eastern European countries which had hitherto been Macedonian salads.

(Macedonian salads, which I have eaten in Skopje, do not come from Macedonia but are named after the higgledy-piggledy mixture of many ethnic groups in pre-1912 Macedonia.)
Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered the vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939, stipulating that they should be "humane and orderly". They were, of course, neither.

At almost the same time that Eastern Europe ceased to be an ethnic mosaic, Western Europe began to receive waves of immigrants from outside Europe, unprecedented since the Muslim invasions of the Dark and Middle Ages, and quickly became one.

As always, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, people learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new mistakes in the future.