Long forgotten habits and propensities can be found during the pan-European quarantine. Entire groups of people have decided to take advantage of the situation to settle accounts with their neighbors, and it is quite legal to record a violation of the regime of self-isolation and bring the unwanted one under penalty. In which European countries is this most pronounced and with what examples?
Spain
Spain’s been quarantined for a month. The “four-wall sitters” are not only getting their minds boiling, resentful of the government’s actions, but are also getting more and more nervous. And this spills out into neighborhood confrontations.
Children from three to 12 years of age in particular suffer from isolation – they have nowhere to put their energy: they don’t care about the endless cartoons on TV anymore, let’s move. But movement is noise, and noise is the dissatisfaction of people living behind the wall, as well as the floor below and sometimes even higher.
The Internet community Malasmadres highlighted a note received by one of its 440 thousand subscribers. On an A5-sized sheet of paper, a red marker with an unsteady hand shows: “Neighbours from the third apartment on the fourth floor! That’s enough already! Your children are sick of it. Stop running, stop jumping, stop moving furniture! Otherwise we’ll complain to the administration.”
In many cities, the authors of such warnings have long since moved from exhortations to actions, a line of “carts” to the police, administration and even the courts. Laura Baena, the founder of the Malasmadres club, summarizes: “These notes, and the nervous reaction of neighbors to the behavior of exhausted children imprisoned without movement, once again confirm how unwise the government, which does not care about children, it makes decisions, focusing only on adults.
It is possible that Baena in the palace of Moncloa (residence of the Spanish Prime Minister) heard: from Monday, 27 April, the government order will allow children to “go for a walk”. Taken in quotes, as it is not about the possibility of running, jumping, playing. The text of the order is black and white: “children under the age of 14 may accompany adults when they go to a bank, pharmacy or store. Instead of playing outdoors at a distance, they can walk to an enclosed room with a bunch of people and limit themselves again in movement.
The national flash mob “Let’s applaud the medics at eight o’clock in the evening every day” is gradually turning into a fiesta in different regions of the country: the applause is accompanied by loud music and all this is smoothly transformed into dancing on balconies and inside apartments. Those who do not participate in the fiesta write denunciations on the participants. In Cantabria, last weekend the number of complaints about neighbors’ “music and dance orgies” that “violate the quarantine law” doubled compared to the usual.
The authorities are already tired of the abundance of complaints and are gradually moving to the side of violators: in the same Santander, the Mayor’s Office announced that at 20.00 will include at full volume the song “Resistiré” by the band Duo Dinamico to support morally the population.
France
It’s a similar picture in France. Authorities of various cities of the country, swamped with denunciations of quarantine troublemakers, already direct text offers snitches to moderate their fervor. According to the police trade union Alternative Police, up to 70% of citizens’ calls to law enforcement agencies are related to complaints about neighbors doing something wrong. Frédéric Calandre, head of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, called on residents to “stop occupying line 17” allocated for reporting citizens, “because the constant employment of its insignificant calls does not allow anyone to report the real crime he witnessed”.
In New Aquitaine, denunciations account for 50% of daytime calls, and after 4 p.m. the percentage rises to 90. In Strasbourg, 500 daily calls to the police are denunciations of self-isolation offenders, while in Nancy the police receive 27 calls per hour, 22 of them: “I want to report my quarantine neighbors.”
Alternative Police spokesman Sylvain André believes that in most cases “denunciations are a form of envy from one person to another”. As a rule, people with less money try to annoy those who have managed to provide for themselves more. “We get a call to say that someone walked the dog four or five times today, someone went to the store a few times, someone’s children do physical exercise. That’s a clear over-vigilance. There’s no benefit to such messages, just a distraction from real things.
Great Britain
The British population was divided into two camps. Representatives of one camp are eager to take advantage of the holidays that suddenly fell on their heads – they go out to sunbathe on the lawn of parks, visit the beaches, ride on planks on the sea, etc. Others enthusiastically shoot violators on video, which is then posted on the network with the denunciating posts or call the police.
“People call with outright calls to punish their neighbors for going out twice, when only once is allowed to do so. One man suggested coming and influencing his wife, who does not want to go to the office but prefers to work remotely. Someone reports that his neighbour just drove out of the garage and is demanding to arrest him for that,” complains to the Daily Mail correspondent, North Hampdonshire police officer Nick Edderley.
Add “covidiotes” cutting off police phones with questions such as “isn’t it allowed to sneeze in a handkerchief”, “isn’t it allowed to wash a horse”, “will it be considered a violation to go to the store for cartridges” – and the picture of British quarantine will be complete.
Germany
In Germany and in the prequarantine era, it was almost an obligation of every responsible citizen to report to a neighbor, and now it is a sacred thing. We are talking about the safety of all people. On Easter Sunday, according to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, the police visited St. Afra church in Berlin’s Gesundbrunnen district twice. Well-wishers who called reported that a crowded mass was being held behind closed doors. The abbot of the church, Gerald Gosch, is the only clergyman in the German capital who opposed the ban on divine services involving the congregation. He was even tried to be prosecuted for this in court, but it did not work.
The country’s human rights activists have already expressed their concern about an avalanche-like increase in the number of denunciations, which are far from being always true. For example, on Sunday, 12 April, someone called a police helicopter to one of Berlin’s parks, reporting a massive crowd of people. The law enforcement officers who arrived at the scene recorded that there were indeed people, but they walked within a one-and-a-half-meter social security distance.
Germans do not applaud doctors, as in Spain, and they do not sing songs from balconies, as in Italy. On the other hand, according to some Ukrainian migrants, they can bypass bans and invite a specialist to their home to take care of their nails, for example, and then lay him on the police as a regime breaker.
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In order to sum up all of the above, excerpts from the publication of the official EU publication Politico.eu, published under the title “Crown Snitches Thrive in Closed Europe” would be best.
“Some countries were interested in taking advantage of the most ratty instincts of their citizens,” writes correspondent Aitor Hernandez. – The French call them mushards. In Spain, they are known as Civatos. The Germans call them spires. Every country has a special word for those annoying people who report others to the police”.
According to the author, in European countries under quarantine, “many ambitious guards seem to feel that their time has finally arrived. And countless of these individuals are shaking their clocks in self-isolation, watching every step of their neighbors and reporting them to the authorities, and not even letting themselves think that they might be wrong”.
Vladimir Dobrynin, VZGLYAD