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#1 | |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: The Wild West
Posts: 12,518
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Beware The Gypsy Menace
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#2 |
Forum Moderator
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 7,471
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I was going to start a thread on this topic awhile back and never got around to it. While this was an appalling judgment, I doubt that anyone who's been following the situation of Roma in Italy lately would be surprised by it--the "Security Pacts" issued in Rome and Milan, effectively giving police carte blanche in Roma camps; the uptick in violent racist attacks, most recently in May in Naples where a mob of about 60 Italians burnt local Roma camps to the ground with Molotov cocktails; the vigilante 'neighborhood patrols' that have sprung up in numerous Italian cities; and the rhetoric of fear and foreignness coming from right-wing politicans, most notably Northern League officials ("All Gypsies must go"--Davide Boni; "People do what the state can't manage", with reference to the Naples attack, and "We have 300,000 martyrs ready to come down from the mountains; our rifles are always smoking" should Rome's new mayor fail to 'get tough' on Roma--Umberto Bossi; and then there's the aforementioned Flavio Tosi of Verona). And regardless of one's opinion on hate speech laws in general, 'He said Gypsies must be driven out because they're all thieves, not because they're Gypsies, so it's OK' is a hell of a scary rationale for not applying them if you're going to have them.
__________________In the mid-'90s a friend of mine taught English at a high school in a small Czech town which, according to a New York Times article I sent him, had the dubious distinction at that time of having the country's (and one of Europe's) highest rates of violent attacks on Roma, most of which the local police shrugged off. When he cautiously raised the topic with a group of his Czech colleagues at the school, all seemingly progressive types, they all had the same response: 'Yes, it was terrible when that mob burnt that boy to death/threw that woman through a window/beat that man to a pulp...but, you have to understand, these people are dirty and they smell bad and they're liars and thieves.' No mention of due process, the rule of law, the dangers of paranoid stereotyping or anything like that. Some of the comments I've read coming from Italy over the past several months have reminded me unnervingly of his experience. |
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#3 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Ireland
Posts: 10,122
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There are quite a lot of these Roma immigrants in Dublin now and frankly they are not popular at all.
Fortunately we haven't quite descended to the level of burning them alive. |
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#4 |
Blue Crack Addict
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: NY
Posts: 18,918
Local Time: 09:56 PM
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The problem in Italy is also exacerbated somewhat by the mass exodus of Roma from the Balkans in the early-mid 1990s. When the civil war broke out in the former YU, they basically all picked up and fled, and they existed in the Balkans in relatively significant numbers. This flooded nearby countries like Hungary and Italy, which were already hostile to the population as it is.
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#5 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: canada
Posts: 13,462
Local Time: 08:56 PM
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i think it's fair to say the vast majority of slovaks feel a great deal of hatrid toward gypsies.
i've seen why they feel that way for myself. sure it's the easy way out to lump them all as being the same, and indeed, it's not fair. but for fuck sakes... what a travesty that was. |
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#6 |
Rock n' Roll Doggie
ALL ACCESS Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: manchester
Posts: 7,447
Local Time: 01:56 AM
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Without sounding racist. A sizeable proportion of these gypsies dont live within the laws of their adopted countries. I might even go as far as saying they are lawless.
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