Sweden – The Russian Reader

Thanks to my wonderful British “cousin” AC for bringing my attention to this lovely, sweet, humane and profoundly democratic 2019 BBC TV documentary about a now-defunct photo portrait studio in Bradford and its incredible archive of the city’s changing human face. It’s welcome tonic to my soul as the leading liberal lights in my adopted former “homeland” of Russia indulge in yet another orgy of Islamophobia over horrible crimes committed in completely different countries.

I wish they would watch this documentary and take its message to heart. It might surprise them to learn that not all “westerners” are rabid racists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. People can learn to live together, learn “conviviality” and unlearn “post-imperial melancholia,” as the great Paul Gilroy (a world-famous contemporary scholar whose works are totally absent in Russian translation, unsurprisingly) has called them. |||| TRR

Thirty years ago, thousands of portraits from a small studio in Bradford were saved from a skip. They form a unique collection of photographs that records the changing face of a British industrial city in the middle of the 20th century. Many of the people in the portraits were new arrivals from the Asian subcontinent, eastern Europe and the Caribbean, attracted by the offer of work in wool mills. The names of these people are a mystery – only their faces survive.

A small studio, Belle Vue, in the middle of Bradford, built a business on taking portraits of the newly-arrived migrants. Photographer Tony Walker used a battered Victorian camera to take images of his customers, which were often sent back to relatives in the countries they’d left behind.

Working alongside staff from museums in Bradford, presenter Shanaz Gulzar identifies and tracks down the people in the portraits, and uncovers dramatic social change and the hidden stories behind the portraits.

At times like this, it’s important to recall that the Russian Federation’s unofficial official ideology is Islamophobia.

The young people are complete zombies, and only adults between the ages of 40 and 60 attend protest demonstrations against the Muslim occupation. After one such protest rally in the town of Trelleborg, the sad activists gathered in the home of my friends Hans and Eva.”

Blue-eyed beauty Agnetta moved from the large city of Norrköping, where she lived next to a Muslim ghetto, to tiny Hammenhög for the sake of her fourteen-year-old daughter Nadja. But now Muslims have come to Hammenhög, too.

“Tehran Restaurant in Malmö’s Muslim Ghetto.” Photo courtesy of Darya Aslamova/Komsomolskaya Pravda

“Thank God, Nadia is like an Arab girl, with her black hair and eyes,” says Agnetta, “but I still take her to school every day and meet her afterwards, especially because Afghan men who claim they are sixteen years old are now studying at their school!”

Catholic Oskar Porath fled Helsingborg for the small town of Kivik because of his three daughters. But a huge refugee center is being built five kilometers from his house.

“The girls will grow up, and what should I do?!” Oskar sadly wonders. “When civil war begins, we will move. And it will inevitably begin. First, there will be economic collapse from the exorbitant burden Sweden has taken on itself. And they will stop giving food to the hundreds of thousands of aggressive young men going crazy from idleness in the refugee centers. Riots will start. We have decided to flee to Finland. It’s still safe there.”

—Darya Aslamova, “A Raped Sweden Suffers from Stockholm Syndrome,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1 April 2017

Of course, not all Russians by any measure are adherents of radical Islamophobia, but the passage, above, was a little morsel of the steady diet of hateful nothing that has been served to them in truckloads by national TV channels, large circulation broadsheets like Komsomolskaya Pravda, and internet trolls, working through social media, for the last several years.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade VA for the heads-up