Or, so say many of the readers, who react vehemently - not to say minaciously - to my articles. They insist that I demonise, chastise, disparage, deride and hold in contempt groups of people simply and solely because they are born in a given geographical area or are of a given genetic stock. Few stop sufficiently long to notice that the above two accusations contravene each other. A territory as vast as CEE cannot and is not inhabited by one "race". It is an historical cocktail of colours and origins and languages and bloodlines. Disregarding the pan-Slavic myth for a minute, a racist would find the CEE a very discouraging neighbourhood. Am I a racist? If this is taken to mean "do I believe in the inherent inferiority or malevolence or impurity of any group of people (however arbitrarily defined or capriciously delimited) just because of their common origin or habitation" - then of course I am not. I am not an adherent of genetic predetermination and I think that there is very little point in discussing fictitious entities such as "pure races". That people are what they are made out to be by their up-bringing, society, and history and by the reactions of other humans to them - is what I subscribe to. Yet I do believe in the temporary inferiority, malevolence and impurity of groups of people who experienced and were subjected to prolonged corrupting and pathologising influences. Historical processes exact an exorbitant toll. Ideologies, indoctrination, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, command economies, statism, militarism, malignant nationalism, occupation - all carry a hefty price tag. And the currency is the mind of the people: their mental health, their socialization processes and, ultimately, the social fabric. Beneath a thin veneer of kultur - the masses were savaged, the individual was crushed into a moral pulp. I do believe in mass pathology: mass hysteria, mass personality disorders, mass psychoses. I do believe in common depravity, all-pervasive venality and inescapable subornation of whole societies and of each of the individuals who comprise them. I do believe in the osmosis of evil, in the diffusion of villainy, in the corruption of the soul. In short: I do believe in terminally sick societies, whose prospects of recovery are nil. The only hope lies in their demise. Not in the abstract sense of the word - but in the actual death and decomposition of each and every individual until the whole "generation of the desert" is done with and a new, less contaminated one, emerges to take its place.