By Fidel Castro
Although several articles on this subject were published before and after September 1st, 2010, on that day the Mexican daily La Jornada published one of great impact entitled El holocausto gitano: ayer y hoy (The gypsies’ holocaust: yesterday and today) which reminds us of a truly tragic history. Without adding or deleting a single word from the information contained in the article, I will quote some lines referring to some events that are really touching. Neither the West nor -most of all- its colossal media apparatus have said a single word about them.--------------------
“1496: boom of humanist thinking. The Rom peoples (gypsies) from Germany are declared traitors to the Christian nations, spies paid by the Turkish, carriers of the plague, witches and warlocks, bandits and children kidnappers.
“1710: century of Enlightenment and rationale. An edict ordered that adult gypsies from Prague be hanged without any previous trial. Young persons and women were mutilated. In Bohemia their left ear were cut off; in Moravia, their right ear.
“1899: climax of modernity and progress. The police of Bavaria founded the Special Section for Gypsies’ Affairs. In 1929, the section was promoted to the category of National Central section and was moved to Munich. In 1937 it was based in Berlin. Four years later, half a million gypsies died in the concentration camps of Central and Eastern Europe.”
“In her PhD’s thesis, Eva Justin (assistant of Dr. Robert Ritter of the Racial Research Section of the Ministry of Health of Germany), asserted that gypsies’ blood was extremely harmful to the purity of the German race. Someone called Dr. Portschy sent a memorandum to Hitler suggesting that gypsies should be submitted to forced labor and mass sterilization because they jeopardized the pure blood of the German peasantry.
“The gypsies, who were labeled as inveterate criminals, started to be arrested en masse, and as from 1938 they were put into special blocks at the Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Gusen, Dautmergen, Natzweiler and Flossenburg camps.
“In a concentration camp he owned in Ravensbruck, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Gestapo (SS), created a space to sacrifice gypsy women who were submitted to medical experiments. One hundred and twenty zingari girls were sterilized. Gypsy women married to non-gypsy men were sterilized at the Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld hospital.
“Thousands of gypsies were deported from Belgium, the Netherlands and France to the Polish concentration camp of Auschwitz. In his memoirs, Rudolf Hoess (commander of Auschwitz) wrote that among the gypsies deported there were old people almost one hundred years of age, pregnant women and a large number of children.
“At the ghetto of Lodz (Poland) […] none of the 5 000 gypsies survived.”
“In Yugoslavia, gypsies and Jews were equally killed in the forest of Jajnice. Farmers still remember the cries of the gypsy children who were taken to the places of execution.”
“At the extermination camps, only the love of gypsies for music was at times a source of comfort. In Auschwitz, starving and infested with lice, they gathered together to play music and encouraged children to dance. But the courage of gypsy guerrillas who fought alongside the Polish resistance in the region of Nieswiez was also legendary.”
Music was the factor that kept them together and helped them to survive, just as much as religion was for Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Of course, not much has changed. This history is in the news because France is deporting hundreds of Gypsies because of their apparent 'criminal nature'.
Fascinating how Hitler's and Goebbel's style of racial hatred still works today. Of course, they can't use Jews as the scapegoats anymore. But there are apparently plenty of other targets out there for whom such racial bigotry is perfectly acceptable.
One of the blessings of largely ignoring the corporate media is that I've heard remarkably little of the apparent debate of a mosque in lower Manhattan. But apparently, this sort of race baiting still works rather well with a decent sized portion of the US public, as long as the targets are 'muslims'.
If you read history, you know what a frightfully short journey it was from the age of enlightenment and reason at the end of the 19th century, to Auschwitz. And what powers that journey is this mental virus of hatred that somehow convinces some people that its perfectly fine if others are robbed, tortured and killed. Its this same racial hatred that we see today towards Gypsies and Muslims that drives that journey to a hell of war crimes and atrocities.
Of course, the truly bizarre part is that this is done in the name of Jesus Christ, who got himself hung on a cross because he got too loud about telling people not to do exactly this.
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