Observations and Generalizations

In what seems to be a rare departure from my usual complaits and reports from a bourbon cloud, I thought I'd take a moment to make unfounded, sweeping generalizations about entire European populations and about Sweden in general. I base these thoughts on my encounters with the representatives of each culture I have met personally--rather in the same way that I have only seen a half dozen Thai movies, but they were all excellent, so I assume all Thai movies are excellent.

I have always been somewhat put off by the recent American anti-French angst. I never entirely understood it (after all, the worst charge I can level at the French is that without them, there would be no America) and as a student of history, I have had the vague impression that it's largely unfounded. But I've met people from all over Europe here, and I've discovered something interesting: none of them like the French.
This bewildered me for a while until now, a scarred veteran of group work with French exchange students, and having spent most of the day watching French students attempt to give presentations, I have had an epiphany. I know where the universal distaste for the French comes from.
The French are the Americans of Europe. Think about it! They refuse to learn other languages, they seem to think their culture should dominate the world (and are prickly that it failed to do so), they don't work or play well with others, and they're belligerant about their surly exceptionalism.
Yet women seem to find them attractive, despite the fact that the seven French guys I know are all hairy, smelly, bad-tempered, humorless, and insular. I only know two French women, but they are both gorgeous, and when I ask very nicely, they are willing to swear at me in French, which sounds like sweet, sweaty sex on silk sheets. I love it.

I still find Germans alarming. Two members of my group for my current class are Germans. Our Australian member Joel and I usually walk home together and the topic of conversation tends to drift around to them. He finds them oddly attractive--these massive Prussian women who could probably bend you in half like a pretzel. I disagree: I'd be vaguely worried that they were plotting tank maneuvers or thinking up really long words to capitalize for no apparent reason. I have determined that they do not like to be wrong: they like to be in charge, and they do not trust anyone else to do anything properly. Hence Fascism, I suppose.
It is only when talking to Germans that I realize how much of my humor and references have to do with the Second World War. The issue is a massive conversational pink elephant in every discussion, and we spend a lot of time studiously not mentioning it. The Germans seem to have a bit of a chip on their collective shoulders about it, like they want to say, "It's because of you people getting all irrationally upset that I had to spend years in school learning about the Holocaust."
I was also quite surprised to hear both German girls in my group immediately reject the suggesiton that we devote a section of our paper to gender issues. They said quite adamantly that they were tired of feminism and that it was quite silly and unnecessary--something I have never encountered in the United States, where I was once taken to task for spelling "woman" properly, instead of with a "y".

I am willing to dub the Australians honorary Europeans, since any hostel you go into anywhere in Europe will be full of Aussies who have been travelling for a year or more. They're everwhere, downing twenty beers each and closing out bars every night. I quite like the Aussies in small doses, since they are universally friendly and willing to talk to anyone about anything with equal degrees of inebriated interest. They all seem to hate Australia, though, and will tell hours of horror stories about the heat, the bugs, the institutionalized racism, and (worst of all) how it's full of other Australians.

The Czechs might be my favorite people on Earth. Their women are gorgeous and friendly, their beer is the best you'll ever find, their men seem to be good natured and vaguely simple, and their government is practically nonexistent. Everyone I've met from every part of the world tells me unanimously that I must go to Prague, and I look forward to visiting it in a month. I expect the streets to be paved in Krušovice, and for their women to come standard-issue to every visitor as a gesture of welcome.

Europeans in general seem to be universally well-educated and well-travelled, as well as at least bilingual and usually secular. Most of them have been all around Europe and are used to the presence of foreigners, but there does seem to be a deep-seated ethnocentrism: that they are very comfortable with any group of people (which is great) as long as those people are white (which isn't). I'm not sure if this is just a case of low-grade culture shock and the Europeans are in fact post-racism, but that isn't the sense I get, I've gotten a real impression of genuine hostility towards anybody vaguely brown.

The topic of most of our class presentations this week has revolved around the darker side of the Nordic welfare states. Everyone from continental Europe seems to take a morbid glee in uncovering these sorts of things, perhaps due to a sense of jealousy at the egalitarian systems the Scandinavians have made practical.
For instance, it seems there were widespread eugenics policies in all of the Nordic states well into the 1970's, based mainly on sterilizing people who had mental illnesses, genetic diseases, physical deformities, or criminal records. There doesn't seem to have been much of a racial element to it, rather an attempt to weed out the genetically unfit and to make the population universally productive, but eugenics is eugenics, and I was surprised to learn that it was so recent and widespread.
There is also a history of persecution of indigenous northern people (the Lapps and the Samis) who really just seem to want to herd reindeer all the time. There was a mass re-education and re-culturalization program against them in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark well into the 1960's which centered mostly on taking children from their parents and putting them in white homes to be "civilized."
Much also is made of the famed coldness of the Swedes, and it is theorized that this is due to the pervasive role of the state in every day life. The idea is that people get used to interacting with impersonal representatives of a governmental machine, and this has a gradual dehumanizing effect on the culture to the current point where you can spend an evening drinking in a pub and no one will ever talk to you. For my part, I have found the Swedish aloofness to be fairly exaggerated, since my corridormates are much more friendly than I am, but I know far fewer Swedes than I do Germans, Brits, Americans, Canadians, Czechs, or Irish. Which is peculiar.
Anyway. The Swedes seem to be the opposite of nationalist--displays of the Swedish flag are frowned upon, and most people don't even know the national anthem. There isn't any pressure to be "proud to be Swedish," and I find that interesting. Maybe that's part of the reason why very few people in the world consider Sweden to be "the Great Satan" and spend time hating the Swedish freedom and declaring jihads against Social Democrats.