What Is the Most Racist Country in Europe?
The BBC’s Panorama programbroke the news that Poles are all massively racist. What were we even thinking of letting those bigots host the Euro 2012 soccer tournament? In response, the British press has been rumbling and wrangling away at people about it in that way the press does when it has nothing else to talk about. What the BBC have willfully ignored, however, is whether any other country in Europe is actually any better.
We at VICE are more scientific than that, so we cast a quick glance around the continent for racists.
SWEDEN
If you’d like to see a bunch of Swedish fascists in action you should watch our film Teenage Riot: May Day in Eskilstuna.
The Tag
The home of enlightened progressive thought and bending-over-backwards cultural deference.
The Evidence
FACT
Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce a research center for racial biology—in the town of Upsalla. It was there that the idea of forced sterilization of the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the gay, or people suffering from ethnic minority-ness first found scientific credibility. Incredibly, this tactic was approved by the government and was still technically legal under Swedish law until fairly recently. Before 1975, if you were caught with a red hot pair of scissors in the vicinity of a gay Somali’s testes, legally-speaking, there was nothing the police could do.
FACT
A recent survey showed that job-seekers in Sweden have a 50 percent higher chance of being called up for an interview if they have a Swedish-sounding name rather than an Arab-sounding one.
FACT
Earlier this year, Swedish Minister for Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth decided that she should do more to promote cultural harmony for World Art Day. So she ceremonially cut open a cake. This was the cake:
That’s her with the plate, by the way. Not the one lying down. Note all the people in the background going, “Go on, Lena, keep grinning, that’s it, yeah, God, this pic is gonna look great on Facebook when I do a witty caption about the end of your career.”
Verdict
Swedes are a nasty bunch of CV-binning cake-baking race haters, for whom tying the tubes of anyone who doesn’t fulfill their eugenicized national ideal is as natural as tying their shoelaces (though we have to admit that all that eugenics has left them extremely good looking).
Travel Advice
Avoid if you are anything up to and including a Norweigan, have one tooth a little bit twisted or suffer from occasional eczema: you will be taking a Zyklon B power-shower within minutes of landing.
Racism Rating
5/5POLAND
The Tag
“Stay at home, watch it on TV. Don’t even risk it… because you could end up coming back in a coffin.” - Sol “Factually Accurate” Campbell
The Evidence
FACT
In mid-2011, a large group of Polish football supporters unfurled a banner proclaiming: “Death to the Hooked-Nosed Ones,” illustrated with a picture of a Jew with a large crooked nose, at a stadium in Rzesow. The game was not televised. There were no players of Jewish origin on the pitch at the time. And, given that Poland’s Jewish population is vanishingly small, it is not particularly likely there were even any Jews in the stadium at all.Which doesn’t make it any better, obviously, but it does, in fact, make the Poles in question seem even more unnecessarily pathetic.
Verdict
In a country which is 98 percent ethnically Polish, Poles have had to resort to being racist against people who don’t exist. They probably maintain a sort of internal fantasy football league of race-hate, acting out this pitiful shadow-boxing in the absence of genuine targets. It is likely that, when no one else is around, Polish neo-Nazis force each other to dress up as Arabs in crude tea-towel and bath-sheet costumes, then beat each other with sticks just for the release.
Travel Advice
In terms of race-hate, wet-behind-the-ears Poles have never even taken off the training-wheels. Safe for travel, so long as you are not an Invisible Imaginary Jew.
Racism Rating
2/5imma just stay away from all of em. the us is bad enough
this is a joke right? the vice is doing this for giggles? cuz um…this is incredibly chock full of bullshit. like onion-style bullshit.
(via carrionofcats)
