As I told you previously, I am working on a new book. It´s still a manuscript, but I desperately want you to taste it a bit.
Chapter Three: The tribe I'm coming from
To accurately explain what I mean by the word "tribe", I must first explain which tribe I come from. Yes, a tribe, not a nation.
I don't know if you're hip to it, but in this century, the first quarter of which is almost behind us, we ain't got no more powerful national states. Surprise! Instead, we got four big shots ruling the world, and their power goes way beyond any old country or government. They're everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and they done abolished the word "nation" without us even noticing. Asking someone where they come from ain't gonna tell you much anymore. Except for a few countries, these four empires got more power than today's governments, and they operate in every language and culture. They claim they got the right to shape and change our cultural DNA as it suits their business, and they're not shy about it. You know who they are? Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. How many horsemen of the apocalypse were there again?
Their power ain't bound by no laws or constitutions, like the ones our outdated national states used to have. They hide their moves from us, but we gotta give them all the info about our bodies and minds. And what we get in return? Nada. They just give us slick PR stunts, the best money can buy. We gotta be transparent, see-through, but they can keep secrets. We're like open books, and they read us like they got X-ray vision. But what they do like to talk about is how free we are, and how they respect our freedom of speech. Gimme a break.
The Apocalypse of the state and institution is now. All that's left are these little tribes, all mixed up and fragmented, trying to keep their heads above water in the tsunami of irrelevant information these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are throwing at us. Dog lovers, world travelers, online shoppers, grannies going through menopause, bike riders, incels, new-age moms. We ain't nations no more, we're just confused and angry cultural tribes, with our own chiefs and shamans. And we´d better stick together, 'cause these digital overlords are always watching us and put our anger against each other on display. They check out our every move, mine our data, and mess with our emotions. They don't care if they gotta spill blood to get what they want. And boy, we have bled recently, a lot. Genocide in Myanmar, millions of casualties during Covid, gun violence, we are just lambs in their behavioral labs. But we ain't going down without a fight, even if we didn't realize yet how we were drafted into this war.
You wanna know about me? I'm just a girl from a Czech steel town, a small dirty hole in the middle of Europe, that's my tribe. You know the kind of place, where factories and mills set the tone for the culture. At that time, there was ironworks, cement plants, even a factory for making ignition candles. And before the damn commies took over, the nature around was a real nice spot for city folk to come visit. Nestled in the hills not too far from some ancient Celtic site, with villages and streams all around named after those old pagan gods. The hills and valleys give life to the lazy river, and it's still just a beautiful damn place.
But then the reds came and ruined everything. Sixty years of their anti-romantic bullshit and suddenly the whole town's covered in ash, smog and smell. The colorful baroque houses on the square suddenly looked like something out of some post-apocalyptic movie. I grew up in a crappy grey little housing estate, with sandboxes and worn-out lawns. The only thing interesting nearby was the military barracks and apartments, where some of my friends lived. We played war games all the time, even though it was the 70s. Russian warmongering culture marked deep scratches into our little brains. We'd split up into "Russian patriots and Nazis" and cheer on the planes flying overhead, like the damn Germans were still invading.
Our sandboxes had these concrete tunnel structures behind them, left over from when the commies build real bunkers in case of a nuclear war. And let me tell you, we had a blast playing in them. The military kids even had these alarm pistols they stole, and we'd shoot them off and watch as their fat officer dads went nuts trying to find us. "What did I tell you, you little brat, not to crawl into my briefcase!"
But then I learned to read when I was six, and everything changed. Suddenly, the world opened up to me in ways that my peers just couldn't understand. I was transported to far-off lands and exotic cities, and there was no one around who could relate to me.
My obsession with books grew stronger with every page I turned, and soon enough, the other kids didn't want to hang out with me anymore. My parents worried about me too, thinking that I was becoming too much of a bookworm. But I didn't care. The local library became my refuge, my sanctuary, where I could lose myself in new worlds and cultures.
At first, my parents were proud of my reading skills, but then they started to get scared. They thought I was changing too much, becoming too different from the other kids. I read too fast, used big words, and even gained weight from all the candy I ate while hiding under the table with a book. So they took my books away and tried to force me to be more active and socialize with other kids.
But I hated sports. I would rather be lost in a good book than playing outside any day. The only time I ever got involved in anything resembling physical activity was when the neighborhood kids played "trench warfare" in the dug-up street. I had to join the team of military daughters, because the civilian boys didn't want me around. We were the "enemy." The oldest of them, seven-year-old Klara, constantly watched the enemy's position through a telescope and commented on the amateurish behavior of the opponent's leader, who stupidly stuck his head out of the trench and looked around ignorantly: "That asshole there!"
Oh, yes, profanity. It was everywhere. Even from a young age, it was part of our chants, school conversations, and inscriptions in the restrooms.
Swearing was just a part of life for us, even at a very young age. We used all the dirty words you could imagine, and they were scrawled all over the school bathrooms too: “Tick toe tack, everyone loves to f*ck.” But that was just how things were. And even though my parents tried to keep me away from books and swearing, I did both. They were my escape, my way of exploring a world that nobody else could understand.
You wanna know about my upbringing? Well, my parents, they were raised in a real strict environment, no cussing allowed. See, my grandparents were some fancy-pants opera singers, painters, teachers, and even a math whiz. Of course, before the commies. But me? I grew up with the kids of soldiers and workers, and let me tell you, their way of talking was a whole lot livelier.
Now, I knew better than to go repeating what I heard on the playground, even if it was just a whisper. I didn't want to get slapped or anything, and my folks would've banned me from ice cream for a month. But the commies, they taught us to talk different at home than we did out in the world. And let me tell you, when I'm feeling down or emotional, I swear like a sailor. Those cuss words, man, they stick in your head like a damn virus.
But I learned to read the room, you know? To switch up my language and behavior depending on where I was. Still, deep down, I'm just a Eliza Doolittle from a steel mills town.
***
My tribe, they didn't really believe in women's equality, even though the regime made a big show of promoting it. You couldn't turn a corner without seeing pictures of women workers in overalls, plastered all over the schools and textbooks. But nobody talked about the hard work and pain that those women went through. They were just expected to work, cook, clean, and keep quiet from a young age. They were our mothers, our heroines of socialist labor, pulling double shifts at the factory and at home, caring for everyone around them. And they did it all with swollen legs and ugly sneakers, wearing shapeless skirts and drab coats. They loved their fatty cakes from the shabby patisseries, a little private escape from the sleepless nights spent ironing and washing.
They didn't have any fancy machines, no sir. Just a tiny apartment with a gas stove and a boiler for hot water, sadly twisted plantations of weak indoor plants, which they also had to like.
It was no glamorous life, but it was ours.
Women communicated to each other in ritual ceremonies, which consisted of malicious but silent gossip about men (all of them without exception) and women who "didn't fit in," as well as exchanging information about who had what. "WHAT DO THEY HAVE?" was one of the first sentences I learned. I heard it all the time because my mother was eager and social, so she used it almost every day to figure out what type of food you can get today in the shop. The regime was economically collapsing, and information about what was and was not available in stores (usually not) had great exchange value.
The women in this tribe, they rewarded each other for their loyalty with shouts of excitement when someone has found something good. Like "They brought bananas!" And then they all run to the store together, even though they know there's going to be a super long line. It's like they were all trying to prove who's the most heroic, who can bring home the biggest "booty." Not like treasure or anything, but just whatever they could get that the socialist distribution couldn't provide. It wasn't the father who brought home the mammoth, but the heroic mother with swollen legs who had plundered a bag of bananas and demanded admiration.
The tribe of mothers (single women were denied access to the network) developed a detailed social-information system in which there was a hierarchy, sports performances, social capital (knowing the butcher!), and trickstery (no, they had nothing, said mother, hiding the bag of plundered fruit so that the nasty neighbor woman wouldn't see it and envy it).
Envy was a big part of this whole thing. If you weren't envious, you weren't in the tribe. And everything was up for grabs when it came to envy. There was almost nothing available, so anything that anyone had was a reason to envy.
Only stuff that was brought home counted. It wasn't important how it got there. Morality didn't really come into it. That was something for the intellectuals in Prague, not for the socialist women.
In the tribe of steel city women, everything had its set predictable rules Once you got married, that was it, you were stuck in this superstructure for sixty long years. All there was to do was go to the shops and scrounge for food, drink yourself silly on the cheap booze at work, and watch that damn communist propaganda on TV.
They started indoctrinating us with that stuff in kindergarten. Everywhere you looked, there were pictures of Lenin and Stalin staring back at you, and they made us sing those communist songs. Even our teachers talked in this weird newspeak that we had to learn, like some kind of second language. We didn't even think it was strange to call each other "comrade" or talk about the "proletariat" and the "peace movement."
At home, things were normal and safe. We played games like normal kids, but outside, everything was different. There were these propaganda games we had to play, and war was always on everyone's minds. They made movies about war, sang songs about resistance, and even our competitions had trophies symbolically linked to war. It was like they were raising us to be soldiers or something, which is probably the most Russian thing about the whole deal. The WW2 was our primordial soup we grew up in.
I remember running a certain competition called "The Resistance Machine Gun", which involved a team running quickly to the finish line and occasionally solving a mixture of tasks related to communist propaganda and scout skills. My classmates convinced me to join the competition, even though I warned them that my running resembled more of a fast walk interrupted by attempts to faint. However, they insisted, and we deservedly lost.
The communists set us on a path like a flea circus, where we all received the same propaganda tasks (memorize a poem, sing a song, draw a Soviet hero, tell the story of the Soviet Union, survival tasks and short-term memory tests called "education" (in which I excelled). Deviating from the obstacle course always had fatal consequences.
In those days, it was crucial for us kids to blend in, to be just like everyone else. It was drilled into our heads from the get-go, that standing out was a bad move. But I was never much good at playing that game. So instead, I tried my best to come off as some kind of spaced-out alien, a little bit off-kilter and not quite with it. I figured that would be the best way to avoid drawing attention to myself and getting on the wrong side of our communist teachers.
In school and at work, they'd say stuff like "for the comrades," but at home we'd just talk like normal people. You know, "I'm hungry," or "I got a C on my spelling test," or "I want another book for my birthday." But outside, it was a different story. The world was all murky and dangerous, like there was some kind of shadow hanging over everything, and our folks kept us in the dark about it all. I was ten when I saw this guy stumbling down the street in a dirty coat and hat, yelling and crying and cursing up a storm. I thought it was hilarious and ran to get my dad. "Check it out, Dad, some drunk dude!" But he didn't laugh. He just listened to what the guy was saying for a second and then said something that didn't make sense to me at first. "Or maybe he's on his way to get interrogated."
That's when I found out that anyone around us could be working for the secret police, and that my parents could get in real trouble if I said the wrong thing. All those rules they taught us about what to say and what not to say suddenly made a whole lot more sense.
From the time we were little kids, they were always trying to get us to believe in their way of thinking. They'd use games and songs and parades to make us love all this shitty hateful stuff that, let's be honest, was pretty weird.
In our reading books, we had kitschy pictures and a mixture of children songs along with impossible communist slop, for which some deserving comrade received an honorarium as a consolation prize so as not to bother serious poetry publishers for adults. Meanwhile, the real editors were off somewhere reading actual good poetry.
I don't know if you've ever met a bunch of communists, but most of them were just plain stupid. Their censors only went after obvious subversion from normal democratic cultures in spoken and written language because they didn't have the education or the taste to sort everything out. They couldn't stop quality poetry from being published, or keep quality art from being reprinted, or even keep American country, rock, swing, and jazz from being translated into Czech. The censorship office only cared about persecuting dissenting economic and political views and banning any praise for the West or criticism of our great Brother from the East. If you dared to show any sign of disagreement, they punished you or at least noted it down. But anything they didn't understand or any texts that were translated into Czech in a very harmless way, they didn't care about. It's interesting that the Czech camping subculture, which they didn't mind in the 1980s, was actually closely linked to American country music.
Czechs would go camping in large groups, light fires in nature, and play songs on the guitar about John Brown, General Caster, and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The regime didn't care because it was about weird American people who had long since died and none of them were capitalists. I don't know why the Czech camp culture annoyed me so much. Maybe it was because it was everywhere and so kitschy and US-sentimental, while in my group, we were all about cynicism, dark nihilism, and black humor.
We didn't mean to, but in high school we started diggin' all this absurd poetry and theater, absurd and black humor, and stuff that the commies just couldn't get their heads around. And it wasn't long before my whole universe was flooded with all kinds of poetry. Our teacher figured out that I had a real talent for spittin' verses, so she started sending me to every damn competition there was. Every win was another feather in the cap for the principal, showin' him that even the daughter of a so-called "enemy" could study and contribute to socialist education. Poetry opened my eyes to the difference between garbage and art, between propaganda and real passion, even though sometimes the lines between the two were blurry as hell. And my knowledge of Russian and world poetry didn't just make me more creative and help me use both sides of my brain, it also taught me how to read between the lines, how to find the real meaning in words and speech. Thanks to spoken word techniques, I learned to hear things in other people's voices that others just didn't pick up on - the tremors, the sways, the suppressed emotions like joy or fear. And believe me, those skills came in mighty handy when I was trying survive in a communist regime. They probably also laid the groundwork for my lifelong obsession with human communication and how to use it to get the effect you want. My people used to be the Czechoslovak nation, but I don't even know if that still exists nowadays. Maybe it's just us seventies babies who still remember it. But that Czechoslovak identity, with our knowledge of both languages and both countries' geography, that ain't so easy to shake off. Although it does kind of shame me a bit when I see how much the Slovaks know about us Czechs compared to how much we've forgotten about them.
***
When I was one year old, the Russians came to Prague and shot dozens of people, mostly innocent bystanders, including mothers with baby carriages. It was the first attempt in twenty years of living in captivity, when my "tribe", the Czechoslovaks, tried to escape from Soviet domination through economic and rhetorical tricks. It was of course incredibly naive, because the Soviets had always only recognized physical, brutalizing power, and they never cared about any economy or ideology. They are quite simple - what they occupy, they hold, regardless of what they say or how they behave.
You know, those damn Soviets didn't waste any time bringing us down from our naive little world where we thought their game of communism and prosperity was important. The minute they took over my country in 1948, they went straight to torturing the elites and executing political opponents to make it clear what culture they were gonna spread and demand we imitate. And then, in 1968, those communist fools thought the Russians actually cared about spreading communism and socialist economics. Hell no. If it were something like a belief in the domination of hallucinogenic mushrooms and the descent of the Fly Agaric as some sort of messiah that would secure them world domination, then half the planet would probably already be on a this bad trip today.
The second lesson on the impossibility of escaping Mordor threw the remaining shreds of what could be called human, decent, creative, and productive in my tribe into utter nihilism. It sucked the life out of what was left of our tribe. All the decent, human, creative, and productive parts of us were gone, replaced by pure nihilism.
My old man, like a lot of folks, thought maybe 1968 would bring some change, make things a little easier. But nope. They fired him from his job and everywhere he went, his "personnel" file beat him there. The whole family was in it, marked as unreliable troublemakers. Nowadays, you could probably buy that file on Facebook and it'd do the same job as them commie "street committees" and party cells that pried into our loyalty to the regime.
Even my mom couldn't get a decent gig at first, and that regime had a real weapon, one that could break even the strongest. They punished the kids, denied 'em education and opportunities. I almost didn't make it to high school, man. I remember climbing stairs to the gym director's office, clutching all my report cards and diplomas. I was only fourteen, for Christsake. I waited in that damn anteroom for two hours while the comrades talked it out. Eventually, they let me attend high school, but it was touch and go. And thank God for that, 'cause my hands ain't so skilled, and a lotta folks got spared from my crappy jackets and half-baked cakes.
Neighboring and distant tribes
I've been around in different countries throughout my life, first in Central Europe, Germany, and Austria. Some fancy schmancy sociologist calls it the European tribe of apple strudel, you know, where every household swears by apple strudel as the foundation of all baked goods.
My pops' ma was German, and his dad hailed from a family of Prague Germans. And my other granddad was a Jewish math professor who kept his roots under wraps and married a beautiful South Bohemian girl who was pure blood and milk.
I was a journalist and political communication specialist all my life. But some pretty weird stuff started happening in my country back in 2013. The air was so thick with hate and bigotry, it was like trying to breathe underwater. So in 2016, just before Brexit, my family and I made our way to Canada, because besides the whole mystery surrounding my heritage, my Jewish granddad left me with these horrific nightmares about violent mobs, and I just wanted to get the hell outta there, no matter what. So when the Russian shadows began to lengthen in Europe, I forced my family to move to Canada.
Canada was a total mind-blower for me. We settled in British Columbia, in Vancouver, which is even known to Canadians as a state within a state, a super-duper liberal left-wing bubble, where everything modern Canadian is even more Canadian. But in the first month, I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out that not only do people not get my jokes about Russian aggression, but a lot of folks here don't even know where Russia is exactly and why my last name ends in -OVA even though I'm not Russian.
You know what's really lousy? When you come to a new place, all hopeful and excited for new beginnings, and then you find out that everything you thought was cool is actually uncool. That's what happened to me when I came to Canada. I thought I was the bee's knees, representing my country with our inventions of contact lenses and sports victories. But it turns out that our sense of humor is considered perverse here. They don't like our Czech jokes that are a often racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, rude or even our black humor.
And don't even get me started on the nice and polite people here. Most of them are proud Asians, from the biggest countries in the world. They don't believe me when I tell them that you can drive across my whole country in five hours and that we have an even smaller neighbor named Slovakia, with whom we voluntarily split into two independent states. I wish you could see the bewildered faces, wondering why two such tiny nations are getting divorced instead of uniting.
After the first month, I just gave up trying to make jokes altogether. The silence was so awkward, it was like one joke to ten silences. I couldn't take it. And not being able to make people laugh with what we find funny back home made me feel like a cultural failure. Oh boy, I was a total cultural flop. My old gig in the European Parliament? Might as well have been on another planet. Over here in Canada, they wanna call up your last employer and hear all about ya. But they don't call up Europe, no sir. And out here on the West Coast, most folks don't have a clue what the European Parliament even is. All that time I spent workin' for a bigshot legislation committee head? Zilch. Nada. I ran from some kinda Russian mind game attack in Europe and wound up feelin' like a washed-up, nobody mama in the middle of a full-blown midlife crisis in a strangely polite country.
My national pride crumbled like a house of cards in just three months. Except for my story about contact lenses and the touristy spots in Prague, I had nothing to impress anyone with, nothing to earn respect, and nothing to make anyone laugh. I was invisible.
***
There's a billion Indians and a billion Chinese. My nation has ten million people. People on the West Coast, they don't give a damn about Europe. And you know what? I can't even blame 'em. Who the hell cares about our little, slightly racist Hobbit land, right? I'm just a white lady from some far-off, backward corner of Europe where the customs are just incomprehensible. And let me tell you, being an Eastern European in Vancouver is like being a savage to Hernán Cortés' soldiers. I had to swallow my pride and prejudice and just get used to it.
I moved across the ocean for the first time in my life, and something strange happened. See, even though I didn't have the same language or memories as the Canadians my age, I knew every single note to every famous song from the '60s, 70´s and 80ś. The only difference was, I had Czech words stuck in my head. The music of Czech country, campfire songs, jazz singers, and rock ballads connected me with the youth of the American continent, with whom I had nothing else in common. My daughter shocked her third-grade teacher when she told her that we sang Red River Valley as a lullaby at home. And I'll never forget the day my colleague at work finally noticed me. She heard me humming Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and a dozen others. Suddenly, this woman from the wild east, where the people are just plain strange, seemed like someone from her own tribe. Tribal culture is pure magic.
Time flew by like a flock of birds in Canada. And I gotta say, my cultural identity, it didn't seem to matter to nobody. But on the flip side, nobody insulted me either. Sometimes, folks even showed an interest. I was no second-class citizen, not some lowly person with fewer rights or less respect. No, I was just from a country that nobody knew squat about, and it was so small that it'd probably stay that way for the rest of time. Ain't nobody had the nerve to make fun of my accent, my name, or question my talk about the information warfare, which sounded even more ridiculous here than in my homeland.
See, in my time, the Russian information warfare had been waging for three long years, and the Czechs were creating just as angry digital tribes as in the attacked America. But in Canada, it was all peaceful-like, and the locals didn't even know the term "information warfare" existed. Heck, even most of the eggheads at the University of Toronto didn't have a clue that something like this was happening.
So, when I'd introduce myself to someone in Vancouver, it'd go something like this:
"And what do you do for a living?"
Me: "I'm a specialist in political communication and propaganda."
A moment of stunned silence.
Me: "I don't do propaganda, I just explain how it works."
Other person (with relief): "Oh, like when the government tells us we're eating high-quality food, and there is just a recall."
Me (desperately): "Y...yeah, something like that."
"And somebody pays you for that?"
"Well, not here in Canada. I reckon I'll go sling some coffee at Starbucks. I hear they hire women in my age.”
Other person: " We like you. You're nice."
Canada, it was a second home to me, even though that feeling of loneliness, of not being able to translate my tribe's culture or the danger of Russian information warfare, to the world, it still lingered. But come 2022, we up and moved to Boston, in the United States. And I started to write my third book.
about
Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author, who lives in Boston, MA. A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on bannonist behavioural BigTech propaganda. The story features the events of the American election 2016 and how the propaganda machine was established to destroy America. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda. Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.