Are Foreigners Human?
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Are Foreigners Human? Every Sick Society needs scapegoats; and many people low down the socio-cultural scale like to think others are still lower. In Bristol as in Beirut,...
...How, asked the spokesman, would they have reached the hotel without a road...
...Paradoxically, major tragedies tend to be diminished by the tabloids' callousness...
...For the record, there is less crime, including terrorism, in Spain than in the UK...
...hesaid, flushed and ashamed...
...It will applaud politicians and buy newspapers that give it this kind of reassurance...
...And during and after World War II, for many bright servicemen, "Abroad" again offered liberation from the blighted society of Blighty (the Army's name for Britain) as well as an opportunity for cultural exploration and growth: The experience enriched the minds of countless teachers, writers and other creative workers...
...An Englishwoman who rented a rural house in France complained that cows sometimes passed by and (gasp) looked at her...
...and the town's cultural amenities were admirable...
...Russia was 16th...
...Their campaign has recently centered on mishaps that befall tourists visiting the unnerving jungle called "Abroad," with Spain their main target...
...An enthusiastic member of the UK team showed me a diary he was keeping...
...The anonymous countries were then listed according to their total scores...
...A high proportion of the UK's favorite consumer goods and entertainment, from corn flakes and cars to Spielberg and Mars, is American...
...Ofcoursenot...
...These cultivated middle-class journalists were asked to weigh the facts and award points in the many categories and subcategories...
...There has never, to my knowledge, been a wave of xenophobia in the UK similar to that in Central Europe 50 years ago or in the USSR and some Arab states today...
...The English (but not the Scottish) aristocracy is of French origin, and loosened its French ties only when the British monarchy went German, under the dismal Georges...
...The food and wine were, as one would expect, good...
...France was still suffering from the human and economic losses of two world wars, and Parliament was deadlocked...
...A Kent schoolboy tells me that, according to his mentors, "the Star Wars films were an English idea the Americans stole...
...cost Bill?50...
...British advocates of a closer-knit Western Europe are disturbed by the tabloid-touted xenophobia at the bottom of the heap, but heartened by the growing realization in the educated middle classes that European Community membership has improved the quality of life in the UK...
...Her scout pack are collecting money for her defense...
...In the UK the poison has certainly spread—from gutter tabloids into homes and pubs, helped by economic discontent and educational cutbacks...
...Shocked, I asked sharply: "Why write nonsense like that when there's so much of real interest here...
...For 150 years, British workers and entrepreneurs emigrated en masse, mainly to North America, to escape poverty and social sclerosis...
...The worst offenders—Rupert Murdoch's Sun and three other mass-circulation papers—are read by two thirds of the British public...
...Where'd you get it...
...Pupils of lower-caste schools cannot usually study French until they are 11-12, which is too late except for bright sparks...
...I must add that I sympathize with Bill...
...Despite the tabloids, even packaged tourists enjoy their continental vacations...
...When horror stories are lacking, abuse may take over...
...Debrett's says 90 per cent of the English who ask it for family trees hope to discover French ancestors, Norman or Huguenot...
...He might also improve his image and business prospects in theUnited States, where there is understandable concern about a bid to take over television stations by this man whose journalistic flagship propagates xenophobia...
...British attitudes toward "foreigners'' and "Abroad" vary—like British attitudes toward food, football and fiscal policy—according to class criteria and social conditions...
...Did your home in France have smelly drains...
...Noway," hevowed, "will we ever go abroad again.' A mass-circulation London daily splashed this story over six columns...
...Robert Graves overheard this exchange between two girls in London: "What a smashing tan...
...it doesn't waste space on foreigners...
...In the 1950s, a plan to generalize the teaching of French inUK schools, and English in France, was opposed by Labor politicians who associated French with upper-class elitism...
...Many of the incidents reported are minor tragedies brought about by ignorance, drunkenness or delinquency, British and/or Spanish, though Spaniards are usually blamed...
...She and her boyfriend were smuggling drugs worth approximately $200,000...
...The weather was too hot,' he said, 'and we don't like Spanish food...
...Abroad" is also, however, the lair of all those Yanks, Japs, French, and Germans who are churning out more cars, aircraft and hi-tech gadgetry than the UK, and enjoying higher living standards...
...San Antonio...
...Every depression favors hatemongering, but some observers think the bottom half of British society is now more insular and worse-informed than in the mid-1930s, when the mass media dev oted a greater amount of space to overseas affairs and the Labor movement was internationalist in spirit...
...Last year the London Economist provided its staff with facts and statistics on cultural, economic, medical, political, social, and other conditions in 23 unidentified countries...
...We'd only been there two days when the wife got a tummy-bug and was taken to hospital.' " Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, their dog ran into a car and "the damage" (to the dog or the car...
...Israel came in 12th, Spain 11th, Britain ninth and the United States eighth...
...Columns of ink are wept over the "ordeals" of characters like Mary A. an English youth leader w ho was arrested in Spain: "Mary has complained she is being held in a filthy prison cell with three prostitutes...
...Bellyaches (of both kinds) are popular, too: "Bill B's first trip abroad has left him with nothing but painful memories...
...British attitudes toward France, in particular, are entangled in class conventions...
...We went by air...
...Here envy reinforces xenophobia, producing a mental hash like the ragout of frustration, anti-Americanism and chauvinism the Gaullists whipped up in France in the late 1950s...
...Ah," you may say, "one of those slimy limeys who eat your food and then sneer at your silverware.' But he isn't that type...
...When their names were revealed, the lowest scorer was seen to be Saudi Arabia...
...In Western Europe hatemongers can no longer vilify Blacks and Jews without risking prosecution, but a few sleazy British papers make up for that disability by fomenting ill-feeling against continental Europeans...
...English women are brought up to be tough...
...Rupert Murdoch's Sun is hostile to France as well as anti-Hispanic, and publishes moronic anti-French "jokes"—to the despair of the Foreign Office, which is anxious to strengthen relations with France...
...and in recent years many of the drug-smugglers of theCos-tadel Sol, and most of the bottle-throwing vandals in three other Spanish resort areas, have been British...
...In Bristol as in Beirut, the feckless X family will seek comfort in the fancy that it is somehow superior to the intelligent, industrious Ys because they, after all, are only bloody foreigners or heretics...
...Now, too, "Abroad" has its merits...
...Nowadays antiforeign stories are part of the bait London tabloids use to compete for bottom-of-the-barrel readers...
...Where's that ?" " Abroad...
...More British graduates than ever are working on the Continent ; thousands of British families have bought houses and apartments there...
...My son nearly died of gastroenteritis after eating contaminated food, and a few years later he acquired a dangerous bug from an ice cream—both times in England...
...In Spain in 1984 only 3 per cent of British tourists complained about anything—and, according to a spokesman for the big Thomson travel agency, their complaints mentioned obnoxious compatriots more often than Spaniards, and "petty silly things'' such as the fact that their hotel was "next to a road...
...Fortunately, Jean Monnet and his team were able to push through their economic and social plans...
...The hookers, more charitable than Mary, did not object to sharing their cell with a dope smuggler...
...Top-drawer children in England start learning French in "prep" school at the age of 8; and school places at the French lycee in London are eagerly sought by the English upper-middle class...
...He is, in fact, of southern European origin...
...I know his mother, a brilliant woman...
...It was intended for his in-laws and colleagues in England, and interspersed in his notes were a few puerile remarks about "smelly" French drains and "hysterical" women...
...It's an ungrateful world, though...
...Not a few people in crime-infested, drug-soaked Spain hanker for the discipline of Franco's day," says an editorial in the Daily Mail, which supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War...
...Is your mother hysterical...
...One report, for example, was headlined: Britons Die as Jet Hits Peak...
...At present, Britain could deploy greater financial resources than France had in 1959...
...Last vear, I spent a weekend with a group of officials from fiveEECnations who were holding a series of meetings in a French industrial town...
...As Peregrine Worsthorne, of the London Sunday Telegraph, has written, "it is difficult for many Britons to admit that 'foreigners' are human beings...
...Abroad' Many, but by no means all...
...Headlines like Costa del Crime, Holiday Horror and Nightmare in Spain have become routine...
...In all, 148 people died in the crash: two British subjects and 146 others, presumably Spaniards— the paper didn't say...
...The new economic machine took off, and prosperity assuaged French pain and pique...
...but neither Conservatives nor Labor seem able to inspire the kind of educated consensus that underlay France's revival...
...Since the Sun is a pace-setter on the Gadarene slope, Murdoch could cool things and score a point for decency with one phone call to its editor...
...Brits wanting a vacation centered on cheap booze, and a tan to dazzle the neighbors, take a "package tour...
...While she lay suffering, her nurse said: "You foreigners are too soft...
...But these are the stupid cliches the people who read this, in England, will expect...
...The highest scorer was France...
...In a further, purely subjective, quiz which ignored statistics, France emerged as "everybody's second home...
...This mudslide was started about two decades ago by the London Express newspapers, whose owner was a Canadian magnate hostile to the European Economic Community (EEC...
...She had a painful operation in a British hospital...
Vol. 68 • September 1985 • No. 11
