Thread by @APHClarkson

As a kid in German schools I experienced incidents where teachers would scoff at my future prospects because of my Anglo-Ukrainian background and struggle to adjust to German grammar (I moved at 11). But I instinctively felt it would be off for me to use the #MeTwo hashtag

Partly I think this is about surname and class. Despite a lot of crap from teachers who told me I would never make it because I "did not understand Germany", my middle class parents had time, capital and combination of British arrogance and Ukrainian ferocity to bully them back

But reading through the #MeTwo hashtags I noticed that people of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian or Romanian backgrounds were far less involved than people from various other diaspora milieus. Even though in the 1990s East Europeans were heavily targeted in an anti-migrant backlash

I was left wondering about how experiences of Right wing xenophobia might have differed between East European communities and other diaspora groups.

Thinking to how we responded to neo-Nazi bullshit when I was a kid, maybe our advantage was that we could bang on about the war

Whenever I had to deal with a teenage German neo-Nazi skinhead or Scheitelnazi waffling on about Aryan superiority my stock response was "f*** you, if you're so superior why did you lose to us".

Worked equally well in a Ukrainian or a British context.

And this wasn't an unusual tactic. Russian or Ukrainian diaspora friends would regularly politely or not so politely mention Stalingrad or Kursk when faced with prejudice from Germans. Polish diaspora friends would point out to how Poland had survived despite every German effort

For many of East European backgrounds, it was the Germans who were the pack of losers. Prejudice could be countered and indignities softened by a reminder that they had lost and "we" had won.

A tactic that people from many other diaspora communities simply didn't have available.