So Much for Bikinism

Good Communists have long frowned on the capitalistic, zoot-suited squares who resist the muscular dedication of their People's Republics. They call them variously hooligans, Bikinists (after the big bomb and the little bathing suits) or just plain Schlurfs. Last week a 25-year-old, gun-toting Schlurf named Jan Brzoza was up before a Polish court, charged, along with three accomplices, with robbery. The court decided to make an example of Brzoza and sentenced him to death on the simple grounds that if a Bikinist is not already a traitor he will probably be one before long.

Next day Poland's official press cheered the death verdict and pointed the moral with a Rake's Progress report of what happens to those who follow Western ways: "The twin phenomena that we know as Bikinism and hooliganism in recent weeks have reached the proportions of a plague. The trial showed what happens when encroachment of Bikinism upon a section of the youth is tolerated and not stamped out as an enemy ideology smuggled into Poland by imperialist agents.

"From monkey-style haircuts and tight pants to knives and revolvers, from the daily bottle of brandy to riots and adventures in the streets, from annoying pedestrians to armed assault on people, and eventually from the 'samba' and 'boogie-woogie' to jail and the gallows -that is the way Brzoza wanted to develop as a bandit, and then travel to West Germany. Who knows if he wouldn't have returned to Poland as a murderer and an agent of an enemy-espionage gang?"

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