Homage To The Post-First World: My Wanderings in Europe

Many famous writers chronicle the events that influenced the rest of their life’s thinking for posterity. We read them afterwards to understand the mentality of the author and the people at the time. I have read many books like Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell or Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara to get the general gist of the idea behind the genre. The thought occurred to me that no one has done the same for modern-day First World countries before the breaking of the great storm. It’s not quite a battle-zone yet, and might never really be a roiling civil war, but when the fireworks start, won’t people want to know what it was like before it all suddenly changed? Why not write about all the youth twiddling their thumbs, the locals making escape plans, and the few brave young men who decide to resist? Their stories are worth telling, and capture the zeitgeist of our tired era.

*    *    *

Malmo, Sweden

Malmo greeted us with quite the sight. Neither Greg or I were prepared for it, despite hearing the rumors and already spending a week in Stockholm exploring the center and the surrounding immigrant districts.

As we exited the train station, the typical gypsy/beggar/vagrant crowd was there in full force. At that point, neither Greg nor I batted an eye. But then we saw him.

He was walking at the center of a group of mixed Blacks and Arabs, with a baseball bat in his hands. The end of the bat was adorned with two giant nail spikes on either side. He wore a dress and boots, a pink-colored wig with long hair and a purse on a long belt.

Greg and I made ourselves scarce right away.

We hit the center of town. I’d tell you about all the deformed gypsies crawling around the squares with missing body parts, disfigured faces and new Iphones, but the local women stepped over them, so I will too.

The fashionable Swedish women had the right idea, why dwell on it?

At a local Greek café, the wife of the owner serves us. “There was a shooting with AK’s in the mall yesterday,” she says. “The police even found grenades.”

Naturally, Greg and I decide to finish our meal and check out the mall.

We are walking down to the main street when a bunch of Southeast Asian youths and Blacks surround us on low-rider BMX bikes. I say surrounded because they literally create a circle around us and hem us in.

“You’re taking pictures of us, yeh?” the African on the lead bike demands.

He isn’t wrong. Greg and I had been snapping pics of the “locals” ever since a convoy of Iraqis flying the Palestinian flag had run out of their cars to fist-brawl with the driver of a car that hadn’t cleared the way in time.

Greg yelled out, “Death to Israel!” in Arabic and they blew their horns, cheering and waving to us as they drove by.

Greg reaches for the knife in his pocket now, but I flash a big smile instead. “Just tourists, man, just tourists, yeah?”

I ask directions to the nearest liquor store, “can’t find the booze anywhere!”

He likes that, and tells us to keep going down the road. He even flashes us a big toothy smile as they all bike away.

I breathe a sigh of relief, but remain on edge all day until we make it to a White suburb outside the city, right on the Baltic coast. We take a dip and get robbed anyway when we return for our stuff. Our home and our hosts aren’t far so we’re telling our host, Lars, the story 15 minutes later.

“Probably the Polish,” he tells us.

Neither Greg or I think it was the Polish. But we keep silent and let him make us a tasty dinner. The beer is good too.

“Invest your first million in real estate,” he tells me after crushing down a few bottles. “You can’t go wrong with real estate.”

I laugh long and hard at the thought of my first million, but Lars doesn’t seem to notice.

“So what about all the migrants?” Greg presses. Lars nods his head to acknowledge the problem. “New Zealand is safe,” he says after a pause. “Invest in real estate there.”

Lars and his girlfriend sold their property in Malmo and moved to New Zealand later that year.

*    *    *

Vienna, Austria

I was traveling in pleasant company and was excited to see Christmas in Vienna, the Imperial capital of the former Hapsburg Empire.

But it’s a modern city, filled with short-haired, thick-rimmed glasses-sporting, grim and liberated Austrian women. It took a little away from the atmosphere, I must admit.

She didn’t notice it first. Nor did she notice all the Antifa stickers plastered everywhere, the capital A scrawled out in graffiti on the sides of buildings, the murals of rainbow-colored people hugging one another and overcoming oppression.

My spirits soured, but again, she didn’t want to notice that either.

We went to the metro station. It was old and beautiful, along an aboveground track that looped around the skyline of the city, with many of the best sights looking back at us right through the glass.

I notice them before we even step onto the platform. They followed us from the bottom of the stairs, along the platform, with me feeling them on the back of my neck the whole time. We step inside the metrocar and they follow

It’s two Turkish girls. They don’t wear hijabs, and their black hair is dyed with blonde highlights. They don’t like the tourist with the long blond natural hair travelling with me. They push her and grab her hair.

Shocked, I push one of them off and into the door on the other side of the metrocar. I round on the second one, and notice that the metrocar is full of brown men and swarthy mothers in hijabs, pushing baby-strollers.

She backs down, which is just as well. No Austrian would come to our aid, that much I could already tell.

We sit down at the opposite end of the metrocar and they scamper off at the next stop. The girl I am with is stunned, but still hasn’t quite realized what happened to her. We get off quickly too and start walking.

We don’t get far before it sinks in.

She leans against the granite wall of an old Austrian building and cries.

I feel bad, but say nothing at first. We have three more days in the city planned. I have to keep our spirits up. I have to say something encouraging, I know.

“It’s ok,” doesn’t cut it.

We leave for Salzburg the next day.

It’s just as well. Even the local Viennese women were giving us dirty looks the whole time. I think it was because of the fur on our coats and because of her long blond hair. The Viennese locals learned a long time ago to cut theirs short.

*   *    *

Helsinki, Finland

I was excited to meet the local patriot. Sven from Sweden had already joined me and we were at a bar of course, waiting to meet up the third of our company.

We were worried, truth be told, even though we had done this before. When Sven and I had met up in Stockholm, both thought the other was a possible Antifa set-up. We tried not to show it, but we were tense as we downed our drinks and lounged in our divans.

Meanwhile, the local girls were rapidly losing interest in us as they began to divine that we weren’t planning on buying them drinks. We didn’t fight it, and let it die out naturally. This after all the effort in trying to start a conversation in the first place.

The Finnish patriot, Suomi, showed up late, but we received him warmly.

We begin to wander around Kallio, the Hipster district. There is diversity there, but it isn’t so bad. I ask a local girl for directions and advice as Suomi doesn’t really know the scene very well. She is nice enough and tells us where to go, but warns us that we will probably be let down.

“How come?” I ask her.

She shrugs and says she’s sick of the city. She tells me she’s planning on moving to Australia in a month.

“For good?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah.” She replies. She seems to be under the impression that it’s safe, full of economic opportunity and that the people there aren’t stuck up snobs. Strangely enough, her friends don’t feel like inviting us along to their party though, and she doesn’t feel like sharing her cigarettes so we part ways.

“They never talk about moving to Mexico, do they?” I tell Suomi and Sven and we all have a chuckle at the girl’s plans and fashionable facial piercings.

We end up talking at some bar, just the three of us. The Finns leave us well-enough alone, which is fine, and a national tradition as I would learn.

Naturally, we converge on the topic of Europe’s vibrant future and our place in it.

“Helsinki is not that bad,” Sven says. “Not nearly as bad as Stockholm.”

We all nod our heads and agree. Sven’s country is clearly in the worst shape out of them all and we all know it.

What to do though? That’s the question that we all have. We have some ideas, sure, but which is the right one?

We have some more drinks and some more laughs. It’s refreshing to be in the company of people from whom you don’t have to hide your views. Repression is serious in Sweden, less so in Finland and even less so in Russia. Still, we all feel it, that restless eye roving around, looking to find us out. But not tonight, and not now.

“Cheers to finally meeting up with fellow patriots!”

We clink mugs and chug. I sigh with satisfaction.

And then Sven looks up from his beer and finally says it.

“I think I’ll join something, Nordic Resistance maybe.”

Suomi and I nod and agree that it’s a good idea. We both know that we’ll probably have to join something too very soon.