DAY 175 - DISPELLING WITH NATIONAL STEREOTYPES

14 October 2011

1737 miles/ 3,775,601 steps

Over dinner on my final night at Villa Wolkonsky, I was asked about the relative reception  I had received in the different countries I had travelled through – were the Greeks more hospitable than the Albanians, the Kosovans more hospitable than the Croatians, the Milanese more receptive than the Romans and so on. I suppose this is a very obvious question given that we so frequently deal in national stereotypes. I was reminded of this on hearing the history of the splendid residence in which I had the privilege of staying during my time in Rome.

The Villa was built for a Russian princess, Wolkonsky, and upon her death it was passed to the German Embassy and was the Ambassador’s Residence in the 1920s. During the German occupation of Rome, the villa became a headquarters for the Gestapo, who conducted brutal acts against Italian partisans in the basement cells. At the end of WWII the Villa was confiscated from the Germans as part of the War Reparations and offered for use to the Italian Red Cross. On 31 October 1946 the British Embassy at Porto Pia in Rome was blown up by the militant Zionist group, The Irgun, just a few months after the group’s deadly attack against the King David Hotel. Ninety one civilians were killed in this attack, which was part of a sustained campaign to secure the State of Israel. In an act of solidarity by the Italians against the terrorist attack, Britain was offered Villa Wolkonsky, which it later purchased and reverted to an Ambassador’s Residence whilst a new Embassy was constructed at Porta Pia. Following the 2003 al-Qaeda bombings of the British Consulate and other targets in Istabul in which 30 people were killed and 700 injured, a security review was undertaken where the British Embassy to the Holy See (Vatican) in Rome was deemed insecure, and was consequently co-located on the site of the new Embassy at Porta Pia. Less than a year ago, security at Embassies in Rome underwent another major review following the explosion of two parcel bombs, which injured staff at the Swiss and Chilean Embassies. This time responsibility for the attacks was claimed by a group of Italian anarchists.

What has all this got to do with the answer to the simple question about my reception in various countries over dinner, well this: In a media age when time is short, we wish to categorise ethnic, religious, and national or rebel groups as collectively good or collectively evil. We want to believe that global politics is simply a case, as George Orwell puts it so succinctly in Animal Farm, of ‘Four legs goods, two legs bad’. Yet, when a country as peaceful, prosperous, and beautiful as Norway, and is home to the Nobel Peace Prize and a religion as peace-loving as Christianity, can be warped in the mind of Anders Behring Breivik to the extent that he would massacre in cold blood ninety-two young people, we can only conclude with Nobel Prize Winner Aleksandr Solzhenistyn’s assessment of human nature as a prisoner in Stalin’s infamous Gulag:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

The answer then to the original question: That there was no difference at all in the reception I received in the nine countries that I have travelled through so far. There were good and bad individual receptions in all countries, towns, and cities, in all religious communities Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic, in poor areas and wealthy areas. But, they were mostly good. Morality and goodness can never be judged through the distorted lens of mere geography or ethnicity, but rather in the choices we make about how we view the worth of our fellow human beings and by which measure we ourselves will also be judged.