Gypsy slavery and holocaust

The Pariah Syndrome

The above excerpt is from the book The Pariah Syndrome which covers the mistreatment of the Roma (gypsies) in Europe. I'm very interested in Roma as a nomadic people because of my continuing interest in kinetic architecture and the impermanence of information age culture.

In a recent conversation with my wife and some friends we discussed the age of slavery in the united states and how it differed from previous incarnations of slavery in the world. It is widely accepted that the most striking feature of American slavery was it's racist foundation. The notion that the Africans were somehow sub-human or inferior validated the slave trade. One has to note that there was a slave trade in Africa prior to intervention from Europeans but that it was a political slavery which was not based on racist notions of inferiority. Slaves were prisoners of war or indentured servants paying off a debt of some kind. As such they were not bound to servitude by genetics. Slaves merely served as punishment or payment.

The standard version of American slavery says that only in America was slavery based on race. That this was a new development. Persoanlly, I'm inclined to believe that the onset of industrialization pushed the economic devaluation of human life. The bulk of inhumane abuse towards slaves was carried out on the massive industrial plantations in the south. Farming was an industry and man-power was part of that industry. Slavery became industrialized and as human lives became part of the dehumanizing equations, the slave masters needed moral justification for what they knew was inherently wrong. The Enlightenment made quack science king and countless race theories took center stage purporting to prove racial inferiority. Americans fell for it because they wanted it to be true... for their financial and ethical delemmas.

But lets not pretend that Americans are the only ones guilty of racist marginalization. For centuries before the era of discovery, the Europeans had marginalized jews and gypsies based on race. The ghetto in Venice, Italy illustrates this concept perfectly. However, while European abuse of Jews from the Venetian ghetto of 1400 to Germany's Auschwitz of 1944, is well documented. The enslavement and marginalization of the Roma (gypsies) has gone unnoticed and unchampioned for centuries. Long before Adolf Hitler drafted his antisemetic laws, Germany had existing laws concerning the sub-human nature of gypsies... I feel sure that the lack of attention given to the atrocities of Europeans towards the Roma rests on the fact that the Roma have no written language of thier own like the Jews with which to chronical their suffering. Moreover, the Jews have a semitic, historically-linear mindset which holds onto the past and their historical suffering while the Roma, as nomadic people with a language evolved from sanscrit, look forward instead of back.

The main thing that struck me today in my research was the racist nature of their marginalization and in many cases, slavery. I'm not condoning what has happened. I'm merely reacting to the viewpoint, held by many liberal Europeans during my tenure in Italy, that Americans invented racism and that slavery only happened in America. I doubt that, even today, many europeans would acknowledge the abuses of the Roma... gypsies, tinkers, pikies, etc are still considered sub-human in popular European culture. The biggest slap in the face to the resilient Roma is that even the Jews have largely muscled them out of the Nazi Holocaust, claiming that gypsy abuse was ancillary; at best, secondary... or at worst, simply anecdotal. I find it profoundly hypocritical that America is singled out for their errors while the Europeans get a free-skate on the issue.