Italy is a country that has lost its memory
Posted on July 8, 2008
If you have lived in a country for 40 or more years, are you still a foreigner (insofar as that concept has any value of course, apart from providing convenient scapegoats)? According to ‘post-fascist’ Silvio Berlusconi and his allies in the far right xenophobic Lega Nord (Northern League) the answer is ‘yes’, because they have announced plans to fingerprint all Roma in Italy (half of whom are not ‘foreigners’ at all but Italian citizens) — in order to ’safeguard their rights’ — which invites obvious comparison with the Porajmos of the 1930s and 1940s, the stigmatisation, detention, deportation and industrialised murder of Roma at the hands of the Nazis and allied fascist states, including Italy.
This so-called ‘census’ is supposedly to fight ‘crime’, although it is Roma settlements which have been attacked and fire-bombed by gangs of thugs, while the Corte di Cassazione has assented to anti-Roma racism on the basis that it is justified because — it says — Roma are ‘all thieves’. In other words, a quarter of one percent of the population, designated as belonging to a pseudo-scientific category and labelled by the state for reasons of convenience ‘immigranti’, Italian citizenship notwithstanding, are responsible for the majority of crime in Italy. Or so we are supposed to believe, with lurid latter day antizigan blood libels circulating about ‘Italian’ babies being stolen for the purpose of harvesting their internal organs, when in reality it is state authorities which take Romani children from their parents and put them into care on the flimsiest pretexts. No-one is proposing a national fingerprint register of ‘Italians’ in order to ’safeguard their rights’, or the rights of Romani people. It is Roma who are still marginalised, victimised and preyed upon 70 years after Mussolini’s ‘Manifesto of Race’, and they are understandably anxious.
[T]he police arrived at dawn, woke everybody up, surrounded the camp and flooded it with lights and then went from home to home, demanding identity documents and photographing them. All the residents were Italian citizens. It made no difference. ‘This wasn’t a census,’ protested a Roma called Giorgio. ‘This was an ethnic register.’¹
The Romanian socialist MEP Adrian Severin has said:
[The] call for the immediate dismantlement of Roma camps, and the arrest of their inhabitants, are to my mind clearly fascist. Roma are citizens of the EU, you cannot dismantle a camp because its inhabitants are Roma or expel or imprison someone without having legal grounds … A government has a collective responsibility, it works on the basis of collegiality. When a member of a government makes a fascist remark, either the government adopts it — and it becomes fascist as a whole — or the government dismisses the minister. For the time being, we are in the preliminary phase for such statements, but we should not compromise on our values.²
The Council of Europe has issued, within the constraints of ‘diplomatic’ language, a strong statement:
‘This proposal invites historical analogies which are so obvious that they do not even have to be spelled out,’ Council of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis said in a written statement.³
Others think the Berlusconi gang is laying the ground work for ‘ethnic cleansing’:
Amnesty International and the Anti-Defamation League believe that the idea behind fingerprinting Roma is to scare them into leaving major cities and prepare the ground for mass deportations.³
For all of the attention this has received in the bourgeois press — a few column inches here and there — and broadcast media … ? … it appears that the selection of Roma for ’special measures’ is nothing out of the ordinary and of little import. Imagine if Berlusconi and the racist scum of Lega Nord, with their hillbilly rhetoric and threats of ’smoking rifles’, were firebombing Mosques and proposing the same ’special measures’ against Italy’s Muslim minority. There would be 24 hour rolling news coverage, while the organs of the ‘revolutionary’ ‘left’ would be printing special editions just to accommodate the anti-Berlusconi jeremiads. In the modern hierarchy of oppression and current obsessive third worldism, the suffering of Europe’s most despised and marginalised minority slides neatly under the carpet. Defence of Romani people is an imperative, a benchmark of our humanity, which must proceed urgently and robustly without any of the usual limp corollary and excuses about ‘building the party’.
¹ Plight of the Roma: echoes of Mussolini — Independent, 27 June 2008.
² Euro MP: Italy’s handling of Roma ‘clearly fascist’ — EurActiv.com, 2 June 2008.
³ Council of Europe blasts Italy over Roma fingerprinting — EurActiv.com, 30 June 2008.
