Flogging a dead horse

Spot the difference

Britain is in crisis mode with shock and disgust being expounded in equal measure, over the fact that a large amount of cheap meat products (burgers, frozen lasagnes, etc) have been found to contain horsemeat. Now the trail of this meat is being followed and it is (as far as I can tell from this weekend's revelations) being laid  at the door of Polish and or Italian organised crime syndicates, or Romanian abattoirs who've been mixing meats together. Either way, it's obviously about foreigners or foreign meat.

Now the two main angles that this story seems to have taken so far are (a) the horsemeat thing; and (b) the foreign meat/crime thing.  I would argue that there is actually an interesting and even shocking story waiting to be told, but it remains to be seen whether we actually get told it.

But first, let's look at the stories that are being told.  The first one, the disgust at eating horsemeat is a bit odd to me.  Now I don't eat meat, so I'm a little biased here, perhaps, but I've never really understood why it is that some animals are food and some animals are not. If you're going to eat mammals, what's the big difference between horse, cow, pig, dog, lamb, cat or aardvark? I don't get it. Obviously a lot of people do eat horse, and I'm sure it tastes fine if you like that sort of thing.  Why it's somehow disgusting and inedible to people who were happy imagining that their burgers were made purely out of cow, is sort of beyond me.

The crime angle is a bit more interesting, I suppose. The idea that the mafia are able to make so much money out of substituting horse carcass for cow at some point along the supply chain is quite intriguing. But you know organised crime gangs are responsible for a lot of stuff, most of which is significantly worse than this (and I imagine significantly more lucrative than this)

But what should be of interest to people (and I'm guessing it won't ever really be the main story, because there are too many vested interests) is the fact that meat has this complex a supply chain in the first place. Broadly speaking if you buy cheap meat, whether it's in burgers, sausages, frozen ready meals, or whatever other form, then you're buying something that comes from an unknown source.  It might be loads of bits of meat from various different places - from a Polish abattoir, mixed with something from Romania, for example and which is mixed up and sold on through various different middlemen before it ends up in Tesco or McDonalds or wherever.  I'm also using the word "meat" loosely here.  It's not the kind of meat you'd be eating if you could see what it was anyway.  Those cuts of meat are sold as they are, because people will buy them.  Your burgers and so on are made from the bits of meat they can't otherwise sell. The bits of carcass and skin and offal and hair and feet and arseholes and everything else that is otherwise unsellable.  All of that ground up (or "mechanically reclaimed") and then formed into your big mac or whatever else it is.  If you're eating that stuff, that is indeed what you are eating.  Complaining that it comes from a horse is missing the real point spectacularly. You should be complaining about which bits of the horse are in it. 

As a vegetarian I tend to be painted as some kind of hair-shirted evangelical nutjob.  I don't think I am one of them at all. I do get that people enjoy eating meat. But if you are going to, really, I think you need to pay a little more attention where it comes from and how it's been processed

(Supply chain udpate: "It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries." That comes from this article which also makes the shocking claim that horse carts have been banned from the roads in Romania. Despite all evidence to the contrary on the actual roads themselves)

Nothing to see

Romania this week has been rocked by scandalous and shocking internet & media based inter-ethnic conflict.  Or so we are told.

Regional flag in Neamt. Somehow not so scandalous

What actually has happened is that because the country is in a total mess, the government have decided that they need a distraction to take people's attention away from the fact that they have no money and no food, and have thus manufactured these scandals to this end. Firstly Antena 3, a TV news channel which is actually a simple mouthpiece of the ruling PSD party, was shocked and traumatised to discover that if they visited the website of the Covasna County Council, and clicked on the button marked "Hu" (and didn't then click back on the one marked "Ro") that they could pretend that the site was only available in Hungarian.  Then later, someone somewhere complained about a regional flag that was being flown over some city hall or other.  No matter that every city hall or public building in the country tends to fly 2 or 3 flags - the Romanian one, occasionally the EU one, and more often than not the one representing the county or city. When this happens in Neamt or Golj or somewhere, nobody obviously cares, but when it's in a predominantly Hungarian area its a clear and terrible indication of irredentism (this is the favoured word of Romanian nationalists who think because they have committed a 5 syllable word to memory they have gained some kind of intellectual gravitas).  Then, apparently the Hungarian ambassador made some private comment regarding autonomy, which he frankly should have kept to himself, but there we go.

Unfortunately the Hungarians tend to respond to all this dog whistling and also are up in arms and happy to keep the story going.  I presume the PSD/USL were banking on this when they started all this shit up.  Anyway, there is genuinely no story and all these angry people on both sides need to just realise why it is that these stories are in the press at all.  That is to (successfully it seems) distract people from actual real important issues.

Meanwhile, a long article has appeared in the New York Times about Sport Club, the hockey team here, and how it represents some kind of "Mes Que Un Club" FC Barcelona style hold out against Romanian cultural imperialism or some such shit.  Massively overegged, and I assume will serve to offer even more ammunition for Ponta and co in their efforts to take the country's attention away from anything that actually matters.

Hard ideas in simple language

Explaining complex ideas in the thousand most common words in English. It's not easy. But here you can try http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

Here's my effort:

Some people live here. They have been living here for many many years, but they speak a different tongue from the other people who live here. This causes many problems, though it is not really clear what the problem is. Somehow the people from the big group which has the power find it very bad that the other group speak their own way. In the past, the smaller group of today were the bigger group and they had the power and they also got angry with the people who speak the other tongue. Maybe in the days to come people might even be nice to each other. 

But I doubt it.

Emigration - the flip side of the coin

It's been a week of bile and attempted humour about immigration.  Specifically Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain  They are apparently lined up in their hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, suitcases packed, just ready for the moment when Britain is forced to open its borders by the dastardly EU.  On that fateful day (which is still a year off, so I guess the stories are only going to ramp up as the year goes on), they will flood* over the channel, a tsunami* of people, desperate to bask in the eternal sunshine of England.

News was extensive (both in the UK and here) about the government's ideas to try and reverse advertise the country to discourage this tide* of Balkanites.  In retaliation a newssite here, Gandul, slightly missing the point, issued a series of mock ads trying to persuade Brits to come to Romania instead. Most of these were shit, focussing on  how Romanian women were as hot as Kate Middleton (managing to be both sexist and obsessed with royalty at the same time, not exactly my cup of tea) or the fact that the dickheads off of Top Gear liked the Transfagaras highway.  There was one good one, which is repeated here.

(* It's apparently de rigeur to refer to the movement of people with water based metaphors.  So I shall be continuing to do so as often as possible).

Anyway, while the articles in the UK press themselves were bad enough, I was foolish enough to venture "below the line" on occasion and see the real bile and vileness emanating from the keyboards of some of Britain's self-appointed guardians of Englishness and bigotry.  Even in the Guardian the comments were for the most part pretty vile stuff.

But I thought it might be worth putting this in a little bit of context. The media in the UK bangs on and on about immigration (and obviously it is a topic that affects people, so there is a good reason for it being on the agenda. Though, having said that, immigration is something that primarily affects the working class communities in which immigrants invariably end up, and not the lives of people in the media, who instead are content to stand on the sidelines and whip up anger and fury, without presenting the whole story).

But what of the immigrants themselves?  Where's their side of the story?  What of the effects on places like Romania?  This is something we rarely see, because , I presume, those in the media simply don't care to discuss the humanity or choices being made by those emigrating.

Talk to people in this country and ask them if they know anyone who has emigrated, and everybody, without exception, will tell you of close friends or family members living somewhere else.  They will tell you with a kind of pained, sad, wistful expression on their faces. For a country in which relationships - both for family and friends - are so key, the break-up of the individuals, of families, of friendships is a social pain at the deepest level. The vast majority of people do not want to leave, and yet, according to the most recent census, the population of Romania has shrunk by something close to 2.5million in the last ten years, or well over 10%.  There are more than 750,000 Romanians in both Spain and Italy.

So why? Why do people leave?  The UK media presents everybody as some kind of freeloaders desperate to come to Britain and live high on the hog, ignoring the fact that those who do end up coming work in low paid service jobs, and stay in cramped conditions in an attempt to send at least a little money home. The majority of those in Spain or Italy work as agricultural labourers, or in construction , or caring for old people.  They are not exactly living it up.

But here, here there is nothing that even compares to an agricultural labourer's job in many cases.

Two stories

Two anecdotes concerning friends from here who've left, which hopefully will illustrate a little of this desperation.

Sandor had his own business, repairing and offering technical support for computers. He and his partner built it up from nothing and were doing relatively well.  Come the crisis and his clients - companies themselves - started going under, or not paying their bills. They tried and tried to keep the company alive against the odds, but eventually they could do so no longer.  There was no other work.  Nothing could support him and his family of 5 to get by here.  They tried everything they could think of. Eventually, desperate, he decided to emigrate to Holland (where his sister already lived) to try and find work.  When he told people he was leaving he cried.  Every time. Not one member of that family wanted to leave Romania, not one of them wanted to go, but in the end they reached the conclusion that they had no choice. It took him a long time, but eventually he found work, and his family were able to join him. I'm happy for them, but they would rather be here.

Robert works in construction.  He too had his own business, doing projects for people.  He in fact was the person who rebuilt our house.  After a year with almost no work, desperately trying to keep his family of 4 afloat he was offered some construction work in Iraqi Kurdistan.  A number of people from the area were recruited by a local businessman, and they travelled together by bus all the way across Turkey and into Iraq. They were there to build a hotel, but it quickly became apparent that they were being screwed over - after 3 months with no pay and working long hours, he finally accepted that there was no money ever going to come and so he quit and came home.  He still has little to no work.

These are just two stories, of individuals and families and dislocation. But there are also bigger stories, of communities and the fabric of society.

The Romania that is left behind

There have been documentaries on Romanian TV about villages in which there is no-one between the ages of 16 and 40.  All the young adult population is living overseas. The kids who have not gone with their parents, live with their grandparents.  The parents, to make up for their absence, give their kids presents of computers and games and so on.  You have whole villages where there is a visible actual generation gap (as a whole generation has gone), while the kids surf the net and their grandparents have no idea what is going on.  As yet we have no idea what the social effect of this will be. But it doesn't seem like it will be good.

Go to any hospital here, and you will see posters all over the place targeting the nurses, inviting them to come and work in Spain or Italy or Canada or wherever.  They work incredibly hard and in some cases probably make something like 300 Euros a month.  The attraction of going to work somewhere you might make 5 times that to start out with is undeniable. The fact that the majority stay here tells you a lot about the pull of home and the family.

Last year the Romanian president made a speech in which he thanked the emigrants for their contribution to the economy of the country.  They are away, not being a burden on the state, and sending home what little money they make.  In short-termist micro economic terms he's right. They are helping the country.  (This speech did not go down to well with the governments of Spain and Italy as you might imagine).  But what is the ultimate cost?  What happens in the future when Romania's best and brightest have left, when whole villages become uninhabited?

If Western Europe does not want the free movement of labour enshrined in the EU to mean immigration it needs to stop emigration.  And it can do that by being a genuine community, a  genuine union, in which the strong support the weak, the rich help the poor.  Their governments (and media) need to stop bitching about paying for things and supporting the poorer nations.  But of course that might mean that fewer people come, fewer people prepared to work as agricultural labourers or toilet cleaners or home help or low paid construction workers.

Sigh of relief

It seems like the bulk of the attention has blown over and I can now go back to the normal barren desert of this blog, occasionally frequented by tumbleweed.

Some interesting things came out of my brief flirtation with national fame (or whatever it was)

• The sheer niceness of most people who wrote to me
• The sheer absolute craziness of a very few people who wrote to me, who varied between people furious that Hungarians should ever be allowed to speak Hungarian at all, even in their own homes (quite possibly in their own dreams too) , to people at the other end of the scale (but actually at the same end, just upside down) who think that it should be Romanians who are learning Hungarian and that should be the only language of Transylvania.  Could I disrespectfully ask all such bigots from both sides to just piss off and go and wank over a picture of Gigi Becali or Gabor Vona.
• The sheer persistence of the fear engendered in this country by so many years of vicious authoritarian rule.  A lot of people were very worried for me, and my family and so on, because - essentially - putting ones head above the parapet can only end badly. In the eyes of many there is now a bulging file on me kept by the securitate somewhere, ready to be used when I next dare to say anything that might not tally with the orthodoxy
• How fascinating it is to be the one listened to, when for years and years people - real experts, not just language teachers like me - have been saying just the things I said, and being ignored. Because I'm neither Hungarian or Romanian, I guess it seems I don't have an axe to grind, and am not carrying a backful of historical baggage.
• I suspect the brief rush of excitement (and, yes, panic) has died out and with it the subject.  That's the only regret I have, now.

So, for any readers of this blog who want to review some of the things that were published, here they are

• The original article I wrote on the blog, translated into Romanian
• An interview with me and follow up also in Adevarul (Romanian)
• An article by a Romanian teacher backing me up (this is my favourite)
• An interview with me in Hungarian (including asking whether I wanted to be a political figure here like Raed Arafat. For those who don't read Hungarian, the answer is an absolute emphatic no)
• An interview with Todor Erika from here who is much more of an expert than me (also in Hungarian)

There are a few other articles in the local Hungarian press which I either can't find online or can't be bothered to now.

Anyway, I have more to say, but it'll have to wait.  I'm going off to do stuff in the snow for the weekend 

Stepping back

OK.  This has got a bit out of control. I have now made Adevarul's front page and I am getting contacted by journalists, people thanking me or otherwise being very nice, and others who are sending what can only be described as hate mail.

I'm going to turn on comment moderation on this blog and I'm going to step back a bit - if I have sparked this story and begun a debate on something I believe to be very important, then great.  I'm glad to have started that debate up.  But I am not the story here.  And I don't want to be the story. Thanks.

What appearing on Adevarul can do for an otherwise moribund blog...

(Yesterday, for those who are not aware, a post I wrote last year about how the Romanian education system fails to really help kids who do not speak Romanian as a first language to speak Romanian well, was translated into Romanian and featured on the website of Adevarul newspaper here).  Made quite a difference to the number of visitors to this otherwise quiet little corner of the internet :-))

More elections

There's a parliamentary election this weekend in Romania.  It'll be rubbish.  There is nobody I would trust in Romanian politics, and all of the parties are basically a bunch of corrupt self-obsessed wankers who will happily carry on screwing the people of this country in the pursuit of their own egos and their own little pieces of power.

There's a summary which tells you more or less all you need to know on Craig Turp's Bucharest Life

Just a couple of additions though: Anyone from outside Romania who reads reports of the elections this coming weekend (either before or after) and reads the description of the likely-to-win USL coalition as "centre left" should take this designation with a massive pinch of salt. they've always been a bunch of corrupt socially illiberal populists at the best of times, but now they even include the loathesome racist homophobic bigot Gigi Becali under their banner. This is a man who would make Jean Marie le Pen look centrist. Any coalition with him in is NOT in any way left, centre left, or even centre anything.

Here in Hungaro-world, there is a second Hungarian party standing (for the first time as I understand it in a national election), the Erdelyi Magyar Neppart, which is, as far as I can work out, an electoral vehicle for Laszlo Tokes who never seems to get on with anyone and flits from party to party trying to find one which can accommodate his ego.

What this means electorally, of course is that if they take something like 1.5% of the national vote – or more accurately approximately 25% of the Hungarian vote – they will push the UDMR below the 5% threshhold, which will make a huge difference to the makeup of the parliament.

Racism and the Occupation

Something I wrote yesterday in another place. This has nothing to do with Romania or Transylvania or anything else.  It's just at the top of my mind. 
I do not use the word racist lightly. I have thought long and hard about the situation in Israel and Palestine, I have invested an awful amount of time reading about it, studying it, discussing it with pe

ople who agree with me and who disagree with me. I've spent time in the West Bank. I've had blazing rows about it, and I've had revelations about it. I've listened to people and I've modified my position on a great many occasions

I say this, because having done all that, I feel there is no other way to describe the continued occupation of Palestine (as defined by the UN) as racist. It is vicious. It is brutal. And it is about the oppression and subjugation of an entire people based on their race. There is no other word that fits but this one. And support for racist oppression is - I think you'll agree - racist.

I support Israel's right to exist (there are loads of things that happened in 1948 that shouldn't have happened, but they can't be unhappened, and Israel is where it is and it will stay there and its people need to be and feel safe). In fact, I believe my position to be pro-Israel. It's just that I think a pro-Israeli position is to end the occupation, and this happens to be a pro-Palestinian position too.

In fact the best thing Israel could do in the defence of itself is to end the occupation. there is no other way of genuinely making peace. And make no mistake, Israel is the aggressor here. And the occupation is brutal and evil and vicious and disgusting. It involves torture, killing, maiming, the making of un-people, outright discrimination, the theft of land, and of livelihood, humiliation and oppression. And all on the basis of race. The surprising thing about this "conflict" (a term I hesitate to use as it implies there are two sides) is that there is not much more violent Palestinian resistance. If I lived there full time, with no possibility of an end, with no light at the end of the tunnel, I would certainly have pondered and considered violence. I would hope that I would have chosen the path of non-violence, but I couldn't say that for certain. The vast majority of the Palestinian people are, in my opinion, practically deserving of sainthood.

So, if people tell me they support the occupation, or that they unquestioningly support all Israel's actions, I will tell them all of this and tell them that as far as I am concerned they are - objectively, by definition - racist. I have no idea if that will make them think about their position, but it is the position I have reached, after a lot of thought and experience and study.

The media in the west give the impression that the ongoing - and current - fighting in Israel and Palestine is at best an equal one, or - in some cases - one in which Israel is the victim. Israel is not the victim, Israel is a racist aggressor. Support their war on Gaza and their ongoing oppression and theft of Palestinian land, and you are supporting racist aggression.

Dark secrets of Romania's 20th century

Today seems to be "serious international media cover some of the hidden shit in 20th century Romania" day.

Here's Al Jazeerah on the Securitate and its cover up in the wake of the fall of the Ceausescu regime



And here's Der Speigel covering "Romania's forgotten holocaust" in Odessa and Transnistria, under the Antonescu regime.