If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: Official Foreigner Juke Box Hero 2025 Shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long sleeve tee
In most former Communist countries the public mood is certainly not benign to immigrants, especially from Africa and Asia. Politicians, irrespective of their leanings, have to take this into consideration. Communism that Stalin brought to East-European societies kind of "froze" them as they were in the mid-20 century. Back then, this was the era of virulent nationalism that led the continent into WW2. Communists annihilated the torch-bearers of this nationalism, the bourgeois middle class. Once the Communists were gone in the 1990s, a new middle class started to emerge. Some groups in the new elites in their struggle for power have deployed the old, tested-and-tried slogans: "Aliens and foreign enemies are the source of our troubles". Darkskinned, Allah-praying strangers became a convenient enemy, easy to recognize, safe to attack.
I said that these directions or lacations are used purposefully, but they are l´also used conc´ventionally, Central Europe should be around LIthuania, but it is typically defined to be West and South of Lithuania. It describes a conventional way of thinking and the awareness of people: Russia is so big and "shapeless" that it is somehow just dropped out or dealt as "just one country". Update: I get comments that my map is erroneous: Crimea has been removed from
Ukraine. Yep, I didn't notice that in the beginning. I'm working on it. I'll find a better map or then I'll remove the whole map, because Crimea wasn't my point… I'm not saying that these maps try to lie about Europe, but I think that they are examples of conventional thinking and form or describe the awareness and common thinking of what Europe is. On the other hand, I think that conventional thinking locates Finland in Northern Europe and so do I. These definitions are largely in people's heads though. Maybe these pages can tell about the difficulties to decide exact definitions of the geographic Europe:
Putinist Russia has been an outlier in this for soon two decades. We had a massive Muslim immigration, primarily from the Central Asia. Turks and Azerbaidjanis, according to some stats, are the largest minority in Moscow and St Petersburg. They have been a source of our growth in a relative safety of our police state. Nativist, Islamohobic and anti-Semitic forces have been held in check. They are a threat to Putin and the stability of our state-oligarchical rule. The official line is that Russia shows the way to harmonious relations between Russians and the immigrant communities. Behind the scenes, a massive secret police force has been busy at work keeping both radical nationalists and religious fundamentalists down in the hole.
Vist our store at: Teeextra