In her latest Eurozine article Competing for victimhood, Slavenka Drakulic poses an interesting and important question – why Eastern Europe says no to refugees. Her conclusion is that the Eastern Europeans themselves feel like the biggest victims, and would not want to be pushed aside by those who are maybe much more needy.
The truth is, writes Slavenka Drakulic, that the victims of Communism now have serious competitors: war refugees arriving from the Middle East and Africa. These new victims, mostly Muslims arriving in frighteningly high numbers, make solidarity even more difficult. But the most important explanation lies in eastern Europeans’ suffering under totalitarianism.
The article on the same subject has been translated to German and published in Die Zeit.
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