There are now as many as 12 million Gypsies in the world (their birthrate is far higher than that of other Europeans). A large proportion have until now been bottled up in Eastern Europe. They are in many ways the European Union's worst nightmare, even though the great and the good of the EU lack a socially acceptable vocabulary for even discussing in public their concerns about Gypsies (more fashionably known as Roma or Romani).
But, I expected Gypsy troubles in Western Europe to take a few years after 2004 to build up:
The Communists made this traditionally nomadic people more sedentary, so an immediate deluge of Gypsies moving west may not be likely. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine that all the Gypsies will stay in drab, hostile Eastern Europe when there are so many more cash-heavy and unsuspecting pockets to pick in the fat lands of the West.
From today's NYT:
by Suzanne DaleyRoma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.
“There is not much for us in Romania,” she said recently, watching her husband sleep. “And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there.”
Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have come to a similar conclusion in recent years, heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are.
A summit meeting of European leaders on Thursday degenerated into open discord over how to handle the unwanted immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from European Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation. ...
Expulsions seem unlikely to offer a long-term solution. Many of the deported Roma are already planning their return.
Privately, some Romanian officials snicker over the French action. “They are just giving the Roma a paid vacation,” one official said.
Still, advocates for the Roma hope that the latest conflict will force the European Union to get serious about helping the Roma, who are openly reviled in most Eastern and Central European countries where they have lived in large numbers for centuries, most often under appalling conditions.
“There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way,” said Bernard Rorke, the director of Roma Initiatives for the nonprofit Open Society Foundation.
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80 comments:
Steve is one of the few (only?) Western writers that has a clue about the "Roma".
Steve also notes from his older article on gypsies:
The late classical pianist Balint Vazsonyi told me that in the top Budapest conservatory where he studied, there were numerous Gypsies who never learned to read music, but somehow made their way through this rigorous course of training on sheer musical ability.)
That anecdote matches well with when I took a Belarussian friend to a restaurant in Budapest that has gypsy music -- we asked the gypsy fiddler if hew knew of any Belarussian folk tunes.
He thought for a moment and riffed off a few that according to my friend, were distinctly Belarussian.
We asked the gypsy where he had learnt them - he said he had met some Belarussian gypsies a few years back who had shown him some quick snippets.
-Varangy
Ah, gypsies! I live in a central European city with a fairly large population of them and though god knows they are a pain in the ass, local joke and anecdote-telling culture would be set back 60 years without them. (Not an arbitrary number, either: it was 60 years ago that the communist authorities imported them from the east to fill in the inner-city neighbourhoods emptied out when the German population was ethnically cleansed after the Soviet liberation.)
One local manufacturing company I used to regularly visit was adjacent to a gypsy neighbourhood and they used to tell me a gypsy story just about every time I was there. Hilarious, morbid stuff.
In the city, there is an official Museum of Romani Culture, though I don't know anyone who has ever visited it. Anyway, across the street from this company's reception building is this massive ruined tenement building, looks like a CNN backdrop from Sarajevo or Grozny. Some local wag long ago graffitied "Museum of Romani Culture" across the front of it. It's been that way for years, so I guess the gypsies inside are either proud of it or too lazy to spray over it.
One day I was there in April on one of the first days of nice weather and one project manager excitedly asked me, "Do you know how you can tell it is finally spring here?" I said no, how do you know? She said, "You know it's spring when the gypsies sell their door." Apparently every spring, these museum gypsies take their front door off the hinges and sell it for fast cash and spend the summer without any door. (They are missing many windows as well.) In the fall they somehow buy, make, or steal a new door for the cold months. I thought she was pulling my leg but when I went to take a look, sure enough their front door was missing. Better than a groundhog, I guess.
Not to worry. Spain's got this totally taken care of. Or so says Time magazine...
Pretty hilarious. I hope the whole gypsy kit-kaboodle makes a dash for the western countries of the EU. That'll make those know-it-all, holier than thou European elites swallow hard. Perhaps it'll bring things to a head quicker by sharpening the contradiction between theory and reality. Undermining the EU and it's bureaucrats would be a pleasant byproduct.
I met some Slovakians recently. After hearing some stories, I am inclined to think that the stereotypes about gypsies are, if anything, overly positive. 90%+ of Gypsies exist for one reason only: to extract money from the state (and hapless individual victims). And, as you said, and I heard corroborated, the state is increasingly England, with monies remitted to Central Europe.
Here is a tongue-in-cheek, though fairly accurate, take on gypsies:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Gypsies
From the encyclopediadramatica.com entry:
"Some favorite pastime of gypsies include...Richard Basehart!"
LOL!
Gypsies a big big headache. But TIME OF THE GYPSIES is one of the greatest films ever made.
There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way
Oh, I don't know. Hasn't done much to "focus the minds of policy makers" in the US.
And, as you said, and I heard corroborated, the state is increasingly England, with monies remitted to Central Europe.
I wonder what happens when a gypsy and an Irish "traveler" pass each other on the street? Do they each walk away with the contents of the other's pocket?
Things must be bad in France for the über-Humanists to resort to such desperate measures.
Not to worry. Spain's got this totally taken care of. Or so says Time magazine...
Maybe Spaniards and Gypsies are closer genetically. Spain is doing on a national level what gypsies do on a personal level: ripping off the EU.
We should welcome the arrival of gypsies (spare me the fashionable Roma nomenclature) en masse in western Europe, as it will move us closer to (apologies for a Gladwellism) the tipping point.
When locals are forced to live cheek by jowl with the detritus of society living off benefits, theft and prostitution, while all the time being told to welcome them unreservedly, then perhaps they'll start questioning their previously credulous embrace of 'diversity'.
It gets better Steve. The EU Commissioner for Justice, one Viviane Reding, compared Sarkozy's expulsion of Roma (highly popular among the people and abhorred among the elite) to Nazi Concentration Camps. Sarkozy fired back demanding Luxembourg (her nation) take the Roma, and shouted at Manuel Barrosso at the EU Commission (France currently holds the rotating Presidency).
Sarko is dropping in the polls, and this sort of thing is just what he needs to perk up his numbers (he wants to fire his PM, apparently, but his PM is more popular than he is).
In Sweden, the Swedish Democrats might for the first time poll over 4% and gain seats. They've run ads on the internet (Swedish broadcasters refused to run them) showing elderly White Swedish pensioners losing races to burka clad Muslim women for pension benefits and social welfare checks. In Hungary the Jobbik folks want to put Gypsies in various closed communities. This has excited much discussion, but France has done this for years without any real negative comments. Italy famously had beach-goers walk over the bodies of two drowned Roma/Gypsy teenaged girls, so great is Italian disdain for Roma/Gypsies.
Probably unknown to may Isteve readers is that the Nazis did exterminate a whole bunch of Gypsies in the camps, somewhere around 1 million or so. Making the history sensitive. The Gypsies were slaves in much of the Balkans until the 1850's. Making their development far different than that of Jews, or native Eastern Europeans.
All that being said, it seems most European peoples in a deep recession have little sympathy for the Roma. Certainly France is not to blame for either Nazis or Eastern European slavery.
When Sarkozy was first elected, he was spoken of by nationalists all over Europe as someone who would lead the way in tackling the immigration problem, whereas leftists described him as a fascist for this very reason. However, while in office Sarkozy has done little to fulfill these expectations... until now. I'm impressed with the way the French are dealing with the Gypsies, not afraid of whiny "human rights" activists and EU politicos. Gypsies have caused crime waves wherever they've settled in Western Europe, and all of them should be deported.
Take away the dark skin color and what you have is white trash as its own separate race. In no country would any leftist party give a shit about that. No, the Left only cares about trash when it's colored.
"However, while in office Sarkozy has done little to fulfill these expectations... until now.
The Gypsy problem is minor compared to the one they hoped he'd take care of, which was repatriating the residents of the banlieus.
So you're a gypsy thinking where to spend the summer fruit picking or plying the pickpocket trade.
Go to France and you'll end the year with a 300 euro bonus and a free ticket home.
How is this policy supposed to work in the long term?
this is the same thing border jumpers do in the EU. jump the border of one of the outer EU nations, then it's a free ride to the UK. sometimes they get stuck in france on their way to the UK and just stay in france instead. either way, the illegal aliens from africa and the middle east clearly prefer the UK.
i suppose with the coming North American Union, canada may get a taste of what the US is going through today, with an endless stream of mutt, mix raced humans from every nation in latin america, just plain flooding in.
we'll see how serious the quebecois really are about enforcing the french language once 1 million spanish speakers show up for the socialism, healthcare, free ethnic handouts, affirmative action, and hands-off police enforcement.
The European Union is a profoundly undemocratic dictatorship - intended by the elitists who created it - to impose its will on an unsuspecting public, steamrollering all opposition in the way.
The EU is also founded on profound contradictions and inconsistencies.These internal contradictions WILL eventually tear the EU apart and destroy it.
How about this for euphemism from the UK Guardian :
"Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights."
There were two Guardian pieces on French Romani yesterday. Both garnered a robust response in the comments.
Well actually it is not as if the Roma fitted into pre-Capitalist societies either. Is the claim that they are "decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights" a euphemism for "prone to theft"? If so, why not say so? What use is that euphemism? I do not happen to think it is true. I think the Roma have a perfectly good understanding of property rights. It is just some of them, like many criminals, do not think those rights apply to us. Try stealing their property and see.
The Roma in France are not French. The EU, and Human Rights law, is not a suicide pact. Societies have some basic rights to protect themselves. - 206 recommends
France has done nothing illegal, it is perfectly entitled to remove people from a third EU country, who after many months having migrated to France have no job and have become a burden on that State. If France is guilty of anything then it is in the wrong use of semantics. "Layabouts and welfare scroungers" rather than "Roma". - 504 recommends
Spanish gypsies are called Gitanos and they tend to be different from the other gyspy groups. Historically, the Gitanos were better integrated into Spanish society and tended to be, roughly speaking, lower middle class by the standards of the Spanish society. They didn't have the reputation for criminality or idleness that other gyspy groups carried. So perhaps Spanish gypsies are in some way culturally or genetically different. I don't know for sure, but Spain's gypsies got along pretty well with the rest of the country for quite a while.
The gypsies of southeast Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) are a much more troubled group.
A local entrepreneurial landlord apparently invited a bunch of Slovakian Roma over here with promises of jobs that didn't exist. Since they're now crammed into his crumbling properties he's able to collect on the Housing Benefit due to the unemployed Roma.
In an episode of what is an Oprah style show on greek TV, they had the King of the Greek Gypsies and his daughter as guests. In contrast to most Gypsy girls who never go to school and get illegaly married at 12, she had obtained a bachelor's from a british university. The reason, the father said, that he had sent his daughter to study abroad was so that his tribe would be better able to claim benefits from the EU. What was also unusual was that they were both light skinned.
Your article in VDARE was impressively insightful and as it turned out prophetic. Inspite of the country facing bankruptcy there has been a steady influx of romanian gypsies lately, consisting mostly of prostitutes, beggars and dumpster divers.
A friend of mine lives in a village with what he calls a "gypsy problem". I asked about it. "Well, it didn't start with the murder......."
Once upon a time there was an international conference on social problems.
The British representative put forward a motion to ban sex, on the basis that it was immoral, dirty and too much like hard work.
The Italian representative spoke against the motion, arguing that God said 'go forth and multiply' therefore sex can't be immoral.
The French representative also spoke against the motion. You can always have sex in the shower, he said, therefore it's not dirty.
Finally, the Czech representative got up to speak against the motion. "It's nothing like hard work," he said, "because even gypsies can be bothered to do it."
I say: Send all the "Roma" to the mansions where Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, and other such plutocratic globalist traitors live. See how these bigwigs like a few gazillion bits of pickpocketing, self-pitying trailer-trash installed permanently on their front lawns.
TH wrote:
"When Sarkozy was first elected, he was spoken of by nationalists all over Europe as someone who would lead the way in tackling the immigration problem, whereas leftists described him as a fascist for this very reason. However, while in office Sarkozy has done little to fulfill these expectations... until now."
No, it's all hot air. The Gypsies are EU citizens, they'll come back legally as soon as they've spent their €300. Sarkozy has lost the support of the nationalist voters (the people who used to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National) and he's doing his damnedest to regain it because he knows that without the nationalist, populist vote he's toast in the 2012 presidential elections.
Yet his immigration credentials are bogus: immigration has increased dramatically under his watch, in spite of all the anti-immigrationist baloney. We're having up to 200,000 legal immigrants each year (most of them young African and Arab adults in their prime reproductive age) and God knows how many illegals. White babies are a minority in the Paris region now. Sarko's law-and-order attitude is also just for the show, he has reduced the number of police officers by 10,000 and crime has been rising steadily for years. The elaborate tampering of crime stats cant conceal it anymore.
Immigration and crime were actually lower under socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in 2002, and more and more French people know it. Last but not least, Sarkozy supports affirmative action policies and métissage (miscegeneation) as the future of the French nation. What else could we expect from a guy who said in Greece that his roots are in the Mallah family of Salonica (the Sephardic clan his mother is descended from).
The French now realize that Sarko is working for the rich, and only for the rich, and they resent it. He played us all average French Joes like a violin to get elected in 2007. Fool me once...
"Things must be bad in France for the über-Humanists to resort to such desperate measures."
You must not know the French very well. The humanism of their intellectuals has long been paired with a certain hard-assed pragmatism of their law enforcement apparatus.
I wonder what happens when a gypsy and an Irish "traveler" pass each other on the street?
I assume that they exchange familial greetings. The Irish "travelers" are gypsies.
I once met an old gypsy woman who was sweeping the streets in eastern Europe. She told me of how cruel the state was in that the state made her work cleaning the streets. She asked me if I had some money to give her so that she would be able to feed her family.
Another time I met a gypsy woman stateside. She was drinking coffee from a saucer and then she came up to me and asked me if I liked television. She asked me if I would give her my television as she so liked to watch but did not have one of her own.
There was this other time I met a young gypsy woman late at nite at a Mickey D's. She had her two upper front teeth missing,,.
Still, advocates for the Roma...
AKA people who personally have absolutely no day-to-day contact with them.
When I took a coach tour of Bulgaria 2 or 3 years ago, our guide was an ex-professor and a compassionate man -- probably a Liberal -- but even he was frustrated with gypsies. Under the communists, people endured years-long waits to get assigned an apartment in a new building. The gypsies, however, were moved to the top of the lists, as part of Bulgaria's affirmative-action plans. When the gypsies moved into the nice new buildings, they'd piss in the hallways, build open fires on the floors, and bring livestock into their rooms!
"... also known as Gypsies..."
Really? I've never heard that expression. Huh.
I love this thread and keep returning to read the latest comments. Like most Americans, my knowledge of them comes mostly from relatives who visited the tourist sites in Paris and other European cities.
I would like to know how they compare to other groups to get a better idea and feel for these people. What makes them different, better, worse, etc. than groups we're more familiar with in America? About 10 years ago, I saw a program on the Irish Travelers, which was done to enlighten people against scams which were seen as a growing problem. They did things like dress up and drive pick-up trucks looking like work men, knock on a door offering to paint, etc., take the money, then run.
Anonymous said...
Historically, the Gitanos were better integrated into Spanish society and tended to be, roughly speaking, lower middle class by the standards of the Spanish society. They didn't have the reputation for criminality or idleness that other gyspy groups carried.
Having lived in Andalusia for more than six years a while back, I can tell you that Spanish Gypsies most definitely do have a reputation for sloth and thievery. But they also have a reputation for bullfighting and flamenco, which makes them the object of some affection among other Spaniards.
And it's certainly true that most of them are much more integrated into Spanish society than are most Gypsies elsewhere. One meets a *lot* of part-Gypsy people in Spain, which should tell us something.
"“They are just giving the Roma a paid vacation,”
My dad used to joke about the times that the INS would round up all of the illegals at the steel mill where he worked by saying that they are just "getting a free vacation to Mexico." Most of his deported coworkers would return to work in a few days.
Within about 5 minutes of arriving in Rome, I awas approached by Gy....(oops) Roma(ni) children who made strange noises, put a piece of cardbard up to my waist, and started searching my pockets.
My then-fiance actually physically pulled me away, as I was in a bit of a confused stupor. (children? Europe? crime? An unflattering stereotype being confirmed, rather than proven false? .... so disorienting...)
Later, from a bus, several of us saw a group of pickpo....(sorry!) Persons of Roma-ness openly handing out cash from some inattentive tourist's wallet.
That inattentive tourist (and MANY others) would have benefited from respecting, rather than dismissing one particular stereotype.
I found a photo of the Museum of Romani Culture; the Internet never fails: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dezidor/3250643062/
Probably unknown to may Isteve readers is that the Nazis did exterminate a whole bunch of Gypsies in the camps, somewhere around 1 million or so.
Oh Whiskey, everybody knows that. A few gypsy kids from my city were apparently the first Nazi test subjects for Zyklon B. After the war, their Nazi victimhood and pitiful material conditions led to a big push in most of the eastern bloc states to socially engineer them into new communist men. Vast effort was brought to bear on the question and, as I mentioned in my last comment, large sections of inner city real estate were even given over to them by the Czechoslovak government, even in the midst of a major housing shortage.
Well, Marxist social engineering proved even less effective on the gypsy people than on Slavs, needless to say, and by separating them from their traditional folkways may even have made them worse. The comment about them being white trash as a separate race is pretty correct. Most Czech gypsies can't even speak Romani and even the statistics show a lot higher figure than I'd guess from hearing them around town, though the gypsies may get some satisfaction from braying their loud, course, ignorant Czech within earshot of normal people, whose fetishism of their language approaches the French's. In fact, there are quite a few non-gypsies whose complexion suggests a gypsy or two in the woodpile, so it's highly likely that the non-trash elements of the population have and continue to assimilate out.
It's impossible, at least for me, to read about the revolting Nazis using these little kids from town as guinea pigs for their poison and not feel ashamed to dislike gypsies but their behaviour is carefully kept only just on this side of tolerable and it's not clear there is anything to do about it. Hence, gypsy humour. And hoping they all leave for the West.
I have to agree with some of the other commenters that Sarkozy is being disingenuous by going after the Gypsies while seemingly ignoring the real immigration problem in France. Gypsies have been in Europe for centuries, and though not always welcomed, have not threatened to take over the continent.
This reminds me of how our DHS officials like Janet Napolitano drag their feet on securing the Mexican border, and instead direct their attention to sealing the Canadian border as if the two were equivalent in the amount of unauthorized traffic.
Securing the Canadian border while the Mexican one is wide open is a waste of resources at best, and deliberate sabotage at worst. I find it similar to Sarkozy going after the Gypsies while France is being overrun with mussulmen.
Take away the dark skin color and what you have is white trash as its own separate race. In no country would any leftist party give a shit about that. No, the Left only cares about trash when it's colored.
Makes me wonder what would happen if the thousands of impoverished, inbred hillbillies still scraping by in the Appalachian states were to suddenly abandon their vermin-infested shacks in the woods and make their way, en masse, to DC.
I honestly can't imagine what the reaction to their arrival would be - from the local residents or the occupying elites of both political persuasions (or from the national media for that matter). It certainly would be entertaining and informative to see it play out.
Anonymous said: "The Irish 'travelers' are gypsies."
I think the debate is still open on this, but at least one genetic study has indicated that the Irish Travellers are not genetically realted to gypsies but are, rather, an endogenous Irish group.
At the very least the western nations need to rewrite their welfare laws to require 10 years of residence before eligibility and couple that with the no-work or your out rule that France is using. We can't do that in the US (California tried) because of equal protection. I don't know EU law, but if they cannot enact something like that, they are in deep trouble.
Alternatively, they could eliminate state welfare programs and have it all done by charities, which can discriminate on a much wider basis. But of course this will never happen.
I wouldn't want to be a gypsy in Europe today. The last time they had real economic trouble - the hyperinflation of the Wiemar Republic - there arose a regime that had nasty ideas about how to deal with gypsies.
Albertosaurus
Steve,
Totally off-topic, sorry,but you may want to look at this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-your-child-a-prehomosexual-forec-2010-09-15
Scientific American (bastion of orthodoxy) finally catches up with the Sailer theory, "why lesbians aren't gay." Also an acknowledgement that Bailey is a good scientist.
Bering is a pretty good science reporter with one major flaw: he always find a way to drag his own homosexuality into the discussion, often in petulant ways. "I often say that I wanted to get out of a vagina at one point in my life, but ever since then I’ve never had the slightest interest in going back into one."
In a previous article about evolution and the male anatomy, he had to admit that heterosexual intercourse was the driving force, even though he was personally disgusted with the thought.
Steve,
I'm shocked and saddened by the fact that you don't want to admit that the current wave of Roma emigration isn't a repeat of the Huguenots and the Ashkenazi Jews.
Shame on you for stereotyping, otherizing, and blaming the victim.
I continue to be impressed by the propaganda-writing skills of NYT writers, viz:
"Their children, when they attend school, are frequently steered into classes for the mentally handicapped."
Lovely! "Steered" into those classes, as if IQ 80 Gypsy children would do well in regular classes.
"Experts say the Roma population has been battered by a combination of factors. Crafts that once sustained them, such as making brass pots and shoeing horses, are now obsolete. Recent European regulations standardizing the sale of livestock pushed them out of one of their few remaining businesses because they could not handle the required paperwork."
Yep, making brass pots and shoeing horses are now obsolete-- and have been, even in Eastern Europe, since perhaps 1925 and 1950, respectively.
"Battered" and "pushed" are verbs like "steered" which implicitly deny the agency of the Gypsies themselves. Pity the Gypsies, "pushed" out of stealing and fencing livestock because they can't handle the paperwork. Of course, Gypsy aversion to paperwork is partly reluctance to document their own crimes, and partly due to the illiteracy which naturally accompanies a sad deficiency of intelligence.
The Gypsies do represent a complex problem and it is hard to figure out what to do with them. Despite their musical and verbal gifts, they are mostly not very intelligent. They live off welfare and the proceeds of crime because they are too stupid, on average, for modern industrial work. They have their own cultures and ethos which promote and sanction extremely hostile treatment of non-Gypsies. They really are shameless and incorrigible criminals outside of their own communities.
The only way to integrate Gypsies is to persuade them to adopt a different ethos-- but it is nearly impossible to persuade adults (Gypsy or non-Gypsy) to do any such thing. Of course Gypsy children acquire the culture of their parents, so no policy short of such a horror as kidnapping all Gypsy infants at birth for adoption by normal people would likely interrupt the transmission of Gypsy culture and enable people of Gypsy ancestry to assimilate to the general population.
Failing such drastic and improper intervention, probably the best way to deal with Gypsies would be to relocate them to places where their low IQ's would not be abnormal and they could sustain themselves by work within their capabilities rather than by crime and welfare.
"I say: Send all the "Roma" to the mansions where Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, and other such plutocratic globalist traitors live. See how these bigwigs like a few gazillion bits of pickpocketing, self-pitying trailer-trash installed permanently on their front lawns."
My suggestion is to buy 5-6 homes in each pro-amnesty congressman's neighborhood and rent them out to illegals.
Tom Regan said..."When locals are forced to live cheek by jowl with the detritus of society living off benefits, theft and prostitution, while all the time being told to welcome them unreservedly, then perhaps they'll start questioning their previously credulous embrace of 'diversity'."
But the locals aren't the ones who embrace diversity, it's the elites. And the elites don't live cheek by jowl with any of the detritus they foist off on the rest of us. They don't do business with or send their kids to school with the detritus, either.
It's a win/win situation for the elites. They don't have to put up with the violent and parasitic detritus as lower-class whites do and they can condescend to and lecture less wealthy whites for not being as tolerant as they are.
Of course, the elites only hold this tolerant attitude toward people of color. They have only contempt for the white underclass.
Besides, the elites aren't "credulous". They know exactly what they're doing. They just don't believe their horrible policies will ever have any negative effect on them.
The ending of the NYT article is the best part:
Twenty-eight Roma residents from Barbulesti were recently expelled from France. Among them was Ionel Costache, 30, who said he would return to France in a week or two.
“My son, who had eye problems, he got a 7,000-euro operation there that he would never have gotten here. And when you don’t have work, you can still eat with their social assistance,” he said. “France is a much better place than Romania.”
“There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way,” said Bernard Rorke, the director of Roma Initiatives for the nonprofit Open Society Foundation.
Wow. In other words, pay us or suffer. There's a real threat of violence and extortion implicit in this statement. And it's likely to work, at least until the money runs out and control slips from the elites to the man on the street.
Ah, gypsies! I live in a central European city with a fairly large population of them and though god knows they are a pain in the ass, local joke and anecdote-telling culture would be set back 60 years without them. (Not an arbitrary number, either: it was 60 years ago that the communist authorities imported them from the east to fill in the inner-city neighbourhoods emptied out when the German population was ethnically cleansed after the Soviet liberation.)
ERM, are you by any chance Czech? I understand that the Czech gypsies were wiped out by the Nazis and the Czech collaboration government during WW2 and the gypsies there now are actually Slovak gypsies.
I wonder what happens when a gypsy and an Irish "traveler" pass each other on the street? Do they each walk away with the contents of the other's pocket?
HAHA! Of course!
I assume that they exchange familial greetings. The Irish "travelers" are gypsies.
You are assuming, of course, that they wouldn't view each other as competition? I mean, Irish gypsies (Travelers) and Indian gypsies (Roma) may be similar in many ways, but they both are their own ethnic group. Although, Shelta (Traveler cant) does have Roma words in it so perhaps there's a bit of that too.
Spanish gypsies are called Gitanos and they tend to be different from the other gyspy groups. Historically, the Gitanos were better integrated into Spanish society and tended to be, roughly speaking, lower middle class by the standards of the Spanish society.
Maybe average Gitano IQ is high for gypsies. Consequently, I also wouldn't be surprised if Gitanos looked on the Romanian gypsies moving in amongst them as trash. Now there's something.
Article says, “There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way.”
Americans have had an army of poor people heading our way for some time now. I don't see any mental focusing occurring.
Sarkozy is worried because of l'affaire Bettencourt. He needs to pull his poll ratings up and voila! two-thirds of the French approve of his actions. The Roma will doubtless return - I bet the coach fare to France is less than 300e.
Re Irish tinkers and Romany, there's a long history of mutual dislike. George Borrow in Wales, 1854 :
"Only think," said I. "And now tell me, what brought you into Wales?"
"What brought me into Wales? I'll tell you; my own fool's head. I was doing nicely in the Kaulo Gav and the neighbourhood, when I must needs pack up and come into these parts with bag and baggage, wife and childer. I thought that Wales was what it was some thirty years agone when our foky used to say — for I was never here before — that there was something to be done in it; but I was never more mistaken in my life. The country is overrun with Hindity mescrey, woild Irish, with whom the Romany foky stand no chance. The fellows underwork me at tinkering, and the women outscream my wife at telling fortunes — moreover, they say the country is theirs and not intended for n*****s like we, and as they are generally in vast numbers what can a poor little Roman family do but flee away before them?
A pretty journey I have made into Wales. Had I not contrived to pass off a poggado bav engro — a broken-winded horse — at a fair, I at this moment should be without a tringoruschee piece in my pocket. I am now making the best of my way back to Brummagem, and if ever I come again to this Hindity country may Calcraft nash me."
"I wonder you didn’t try to serve some of the Irish out," said I.
"I served one out, brother; and my wife and childer helped to wipe off a little of the score. We had stopped on a nice green, near a village over the hills in Glamorganshire, when up comes a Hindity family, and bids us take ourselves off. Now it so happened that there was but one man and a woman and some childer, so I laughed, and told them to drive us off. Well, brother, without many words, there was a regular scrimmage. The Hindity mush came at me, the Hindity mushi at y my juwa, and the Hindity chaves at my chai. It didn’t last long, brother. In less than three minutes I had hit the Hindity mush, who was a plaguey big fellow, but couldn’t fight, just under the point of the chin, and sent him to the ground with all his senses gone. My juwa had almost scratched an eye out of the Hindity mushi, and my chai had sent the Hindity childer scampering over the green. ‘Who has got to quit now?' said I to the Hindity mush after he had got on his legs, looking like a man who has been cut down after hanging just a minute and a half. 'Who has got notice to quit, now, I wonder?'
Well, brother, he didn't say anything, nor did any of them, but after a little time they all took themselves off, with a cart they had, to the south. Just as they got to the edge of the green, however, they turned round and gave a yell which made all our blood run cold. I knew what it meant, and said, 'This is no place for us.' So we got everything together and came away and, though the horses were tired, never stopped till we had got ten miles from the place; and well it was we acted as we did, for, had we stayed, I have no doubt that a whole Hindity clan would have been down upon us before morning and cut our throats."
Like many of the readers of ISteve I live in Southern California and my knowledge of Europe is not as great as it could be.
Different parts of the USA have implemented different policies towards groups like the Gypsies.
I would define the Gypsies as a "permanently poor" group. They have non maleable traits that cause them to be poor. We can argue why the Gypsies are likely to stay poor for generations in to the future (is it genetic), but there is no argument that they will still be poor 100 or 200 years from now. Why debate whether their sad state is the result of genetics or something else, the relevant thing is that any country that lets them in is setting itself up to have a permanent criminal underclass.
The City of Manhattan Beach has made it clear city policy to not settle groups like the Gypsies inside Manhattan Beach. Manhattan Beach is set up to be pretty open to any person of any race or religion who is financially successful and who embraces an athletic healthy lifestyle. All of the city's public policies and all of its citizens pretty much work to keep it free of the permanent poor, keep it free of the hereditary underclass. The nearby city of Los Angeles has adopted the opposite policy, rolling out the welcome wagon for groups like the gypsies that have the genetic material and culture that will keep them poor for the next 100 to 200 years.
A visitor need only drive around the City of Los Angeles and compare it to the City of Manhattan Beach to see the impact of public policies. A small difference in how welcoming a city is to the permanent underclass can make a huge difference. And for anyone reading this blog that hasn't taken the time to spend a few days in Manhattan Beach and then see MacArthur Park, I encourage you to do so, just to vividly illustrate this.
I am a Californian and not a European but my understanding is that certain European nations are most aggressive about inviting in millions of members of the "permanent underclass" and certain European nations are most aggressive about keeping them out.
I would cite the UK and Sweden as countries that are most aggressive in allowing the genetic underclass of the world to settle within their borders and I would cite Denmark as exemplary in terms of keeping the genetic underclass out. I have heard that Malmo is the MacArthur Park of Europe and that Copenhagen is the Manhattan Beach of Europe.
Of all the countries in Europe, is Denmark really the most distinguished in this regard? I would like to hear from Europeans as to whether I am giving Denmark too much credit.
Today, September 2010 life in Manhattan Beach is superb in every way. But no one in Manhattan Beach believes that our little enclave is safe forever. Eventually the tide will overwhelm us. Am I correct in assuming that Denmark is the appropriate refuge from the invasion of what I would call the permanent poor, am I correct in assuming that Denmark has drawn the line?
Trust me, compared to having a bunch of Somalis home-invade your neighbour, the gypsies are no big deal.
I recall an old joke about a dish called "Gypsy Chicken."
The recipe began, "First, steal a chicken..."
Anonymous said..."The Roma are EU citizens. If Eastern Europeans have a right to go life[sic] in France, then so do Eastern European Roma. Case closed."
If the Roma are going to accept the rights of citizenship, then they should also accept its responsibilities. Case closed.
How did communists fail to change the gypsies? Eastern Communists sure beat up the hardly Cossacks, tamed the aggressive Germans, and much else. Maybe communists decided they didn't want gypsies to be part of the larger community and decided to let them be on their own.
Stalinism, if applied ruthlessly enough, can do anything.
I would cite the UK and Sweden as countries that are most aggressive in allowing the genetic underclass of the world to settle within their borders and I would cite Denmark as exemplary in terms of keeping the genetic underclass out. I have heard that Malmo is the MacArthur Park of Europe and that Copenhagen is the Manhattan Beach of Europe.
Right now, add Belgium, Norway, Spain, and Italy, and to a lesser extent France, to those with the floodgates open. Along with Denmark, one would have Germany, Netherlands, and Ireland in the restrictionist camp.
One must also keep in mind the history. The PIIGS were taking in a lot of people, at least until the economic crisis, but this was very recent; their immigrant populations are quite new. Also, the Netherlands and Denmark may be more restrictive, but they have had troublemaking Muslims there for a few decades already.
It's also funny to observe Germany. Its main problem group is Turks, but they have quietly put so much bureaucracy in the way of getting a foothold in Germany that net Turkish migration is negative (net emigration back to Turkey). France, however, still lets in Muslims and blacks. Due to its constitutional ban on collecting ethnic statistics, the possibility remains that the large gap between French (2.0 child/woman) and German (1.4) TFR is due to France's large black/Muslim population.
"Of all the countries in Europe, is Denmark really the most distinguished in this regard? I would like to hear from Europeans as to whether I am giving Denmark too much credit. "
You might be. The kid from Copenhagen who spent a month with us after my son spent the previous summer in Copenhagen, who is a wonderful kid who vigourously would defend their welfare state while playing chess with me, admitted that he's been attacked by muslim gangs over half a dozen times. He is very tolerant and lib (gays are great people too, we'll all one day be part of the United Colors of Benneton-type ideology, etc), but he really fears the muslims (and he's of Bosnian descent!) and how they are altering the character of the city. He says, and my son confirms, that there are definite no-go zones in the city now.
I wonder what would happen if Muslims wanted to take over the hippie island there, Christiana?
Added note. The toughest gang in Copenhagen though, is the Banditos, who have apparently made a successful transition from the American South to Europe.
Seem to me that British gypsies/Roma look quite unlike the new Eastern European arrivals who are doing their part to enrich our dull white culture. A lot of them really do look Indian.
I presume being on island with some interbreeding with the indigenous population has made them a somewhat different group.
The Roma fill a niche in the immigration ecosystem as those amerindians from Mexico. In Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria etc they have never been assimilated by the local population. Yet now our Brit SWPLs believe (insofar as they ever coherently address any HBD subject at all) that a quick burst of education and plenty of welfare will seen have them settling down without a hitch.
Begging and stealing (mostly begging) can be very lucrative. There were reports in Romanian newspapers about quite a few clans of gypsies that were able to amass (small) fortunes from their foreign "tourism" (after all, even citizens of EU member states need a work-visa to work in other EU states; I'm sure gypsies do not bother with these formalities.). It seems that 700,000 or even 1,000,000 euros are not that uncommon. And this is in the space of only a few years!
Some gypsies openly say that the expulsion from France is just payed vacation and by Christmas they will be back on the streets of Paris.
Corvinus,
No I am not Czech but I do live in the country. You're correct that the Czech gypsy population comes from Slovakia, though I don't think that the gypsy population of the Czech lands pre-WWII was very large at all relative to more easterly places, even if it was apparently enough to attach the name of their kingdom to the idea of the wandering, musical vagabond, the bohemian.
After WWII there was a huge amount of inner city real estate lying empty in Czech cities, vacated after the Jews were exterminated (up to 90% I think) and the Germans run off. In some cases, this was substantial -- in my city, 30% or more of the pre-war population were Germans. The communist government thought this was a prime opportunity to demonstrate what social engineering could do and engineered the transfer of thousands of gypsies out of the eastern marches of Slovakia where they had no doubt been living in some sort of 17th c. poverty conditions.
Lovely! "Steered" into those classes, as if IQ 80 Gypsy children would do well in regular classes.
This is a huge political issue here and foreign NGOs are getting quite aggressive about shaming the Czech state for maintaining de facto segregated schools. Current budget woes have brought the issue to a head and there may well be some consolidation. How this will play out, I have no idea as ordinary Czechs are, by Western standards, openly and unabashedly vocal about refusing to send their children to school with any gypsies in it. Czech primary education is also much more challenging than in the U.S. or U.K.
It's very likely that there are some gypsy students who are truly being misdirected to schools beneath their potential but the number cannot be terribly high. Even getting gypsy parents to send their kids to school at all is tough -- the local town hall has started withholding welfare from parents of chronically truant students.
Gypsy Kings - Gitano Soy
Time of the Gypsies The whole movie is up on youtube. It's very well-made. I recommend it.
"Maybe Spaniards and Gypsies are closer genetically. Spain is doing on a national level what gypsies do on a personal level: ripping off the EU."
The Spanish have an amazing culture. Not much can be said about the welfare Boers.
"Ah, gypsies! I live in a central European city with a fairly large population of them and though god knows they are a pain in the ass, local joke and anecdote-telling culture would be set back 60 years without them. (Not an arbitrary number, either: it was 60 years ago that the communist authorities imported them from the east to fill in the inner-city neighbourhoods emptied out when the German population was ethnically cleansed after the Soviet liberation.)"
That's a very bad bargain indeed: trading Germans for Gypsies. It certainly isn't worth it just for the jokes and anecdotes.
"Failing such drastic and improper intervention, probably the best way to deal with Gypsies would be to relocate them to places where their low IQ's would not be abnormal and they could sustain themselves by work within their capabilities rather than by crime and welfare."
That would be sending them back to where they came from: India. India certainly wouldn't notice a few million more dysfunctionals.
"The Roma are EU citizens. If Eastern Europeans have a right to go life in France, then so do Eastern European Roma. Case closed."
That's the best argument for taking away the EU citizenship of "The Roma" I've heard. You abuse it, you lose it. Case closed.
The way for the Western states to solve this problem is only going to be leave to EU and its freedom of movement. Otherwise, people who are paid to be deported will come back. That's the way it is.
That's a very bad bargain indeed: trading Germans for Gypsies. It certainly isn't worth it just for the jokes and anecdotes.
Well...looking at it now, you might suggest the bargain was bad. Having said that, whatever else their sins the gypsies have never welcomed an invasion by their brethren over the border, liquidated a substantial fraction of the population, seized the personal savings of the whole country, and redirected the entire national industrial output toward foreign conquest. Such are the limits of HBD analysis of human affairs.
'Tom Regan said..."When locals are forced to live cheek by jowl with the detritus of society living off benefits, theft and prostitution, while all the time being told to welcome them unreservedly, then perhaps they'll start questioning their previously credulous embrace of 'diversity'."
But the locals aren't the ones who embrace diversity, it's the elites. And the elites don't live cheek by jowl with any of the detritus they foist off on the rest of us. They don't do business with or send their kids to school with the detritus, either.'
Ah, yes. Recall Sam Brownback of Kansas? He was big - very big - on bringing Somali Bantu 'refugees' to the US. He, however, insisted that they not be settled in Kansas because they somehow weren't 'right' for Kansas. LOL.
We had about 6 families of same settled in our small town in Virginia. A neighbor was involved in helping them get settled in. I asked about the progress and here's what I heard:
A 16-year-old married 'woman' was pregnant with her second child.
The men were astonished that it was illegal to beat their wives. They had ALWAYS beaten their wives and nobody objected.
Speaking of wives, one woman who was the second wife of a SB man was unhappy that she was not allowed to be part of his family. Only his first wife was.
A new mother was dismayed that her daughter could not undergo FGM here in the US. We outlawed it in 1996.
How long will it be before we are getting sued for trying to maintain the laws that have made life more or less civilized on the grounds that we are violating some new group's civil rights?
Diversity, indeed.
Hardy cossacks I meant.
Canada recently began to require people coming here from Czechoslovakia to first obtain a visa. Canada did this because we were being swamped with thousands of Czech gypsies coming here and claiming refugee status.
We have an absurd refugee policy whereby anyone who sets foot on Canadian soil claiming to be a refugee is automatically given government benefits, free health care, legal aid, etc. They can live here for years while their refugee applications and appeals wend their way through the system.
I figure the Czech governments (maybe at the town level) were buying the Roma plane tickets to Canada and driving them to the airport. Thank goodness the visa requirement has stemmed the tide. The Czech government is furious about it though, as is Amnesty International, etc.
Here are some comments on a story about Gypsies coming to Canada (comments, if uncensored, seem to be the only place in the MSM where you can learn the truth).
I have Gypsies in apartment above and all over the building I live in. It's absolutely horrid. They're loud, obnoxious and dirty. The group above dance, sing, and play loud music through the night. I was forced to notify the police a couple of times and next day I had 3 gypsy goons knocking at my door. These people ought to be put on wagons and send to a wilderness.
Well we did have the unfortunate experience of having Gypsies next door and believe me it was like a living nightmare, verbal abuse and foul language was part of our experience, Police were called several times to remove the women often by ambulance {[ after being beaten by the men and lots of young skimply dressed young girls going back and forth day and night, oh and they were all recieving welfare and bragged about the stuff aid programs gave them. Finally they left the area en mass after being found not to be true refugees leaving Canada with a huge bill for social services.
http://www.canada.com/news/Canada+flooded+with+Czech+Roma+refugee+claims/1499804/story.html
(this article was written before the visa requirement was brought in)
I figure the Czech governments (maybe at the town level) were buying the Roma plane tickets to Canada and driving them to the airport. Thank goodness the visa requirement has stemmed the tide. The Czech government is furious about it though, as is Amnesty International, etc.
I can assure you gypsies are perfectly capable of running their own scams on gullible white people without any help from the Czech state. And although it's hardly the Czechs' fault that your government will hold the door open for any riff-raff with enough initiative to flush their passport down the aircraft lavatory on the way over, you shouldn't pay much attention to their hurt feelings -- as long as there is hockey, they will hate Canada's guts regardless of your visa policies. There's gypsies and then there are things that are really important in life.
Cue the gypsy violin.
If you want an enormously entertaining comic movie about "Roma" culture, here's part one of Emir Kustuica's magnificent "Black Cat, White Cat":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbX9Q5SjZg
Perhaps the funniest comedy I have ever seen, White Cat Black Cat
Brilliance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbX9Q5SjZg
Seriously, I can't recommend that movie enough.
Yah know, I am in awe of this board.
I did not think there would be so many Emir Kustuica movie links posted here.
I bow my head and go for the homemade slivovitz, gentlemen, be right back... (meanwhile, you notice that your pockets have holes in them and that your wallets are missing...)
There is far more interesting about the gypsies than just their tendency to pick pockets. They are human brood parasites:
http://haplor.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/human-brood-parasites/
The Thar Desert between Pakistan & India is empty with Gypsy like tribes.
Let's carve that out as a Gypsy homeland :P
Yes, the negative feelings towards Gypsies is the only thing that unites Czechs across the political spectrum. The main motif is - why should I, working taxpayer, support from my rather meager income an openly hostile, loud and obnoxious minority? Who refuses to obey any rules of decent behavior?
Only the NGO activists who thrive from "integration programs" are more hated than the subjects of their do-goodering.
And it's true - people are open and unabashed about the whole Gypsy problem.
I've read somewhere, that Soros invested into creating the Roma tensions to shame the East Europeans into the self-hate usual in the West, but if this is so, then he failed.
Unfortunately, he didn't fail in introducing the RWCT programs (you know, these without the teacher as the sage on the stage...) into the official Czech school curricula under the pretense of removal of the "drill kill".
The results are already here - the kids have lower understanding of written text than in the middle of 90's.
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