Pliable at the Overgrown Path has a powerful and moving post about the current horrific plight of the Roma in Italy, in which he also describes the origins of Bartok's Romanian Dances and links to this article from yesterday's Independent. Here in the midst of happily multicultural London, it's horrifying to think that such inhumanity is taking place so nearby.
Not that we have a leg to stand on. Less than a decade ago there was an influx in London of Roma from eastern Europe - Slovakia or Romania, I think - who were seeking to escape the persecution and discrimination they'd been experiencing there. They used to beg on the Underground and elsewhere and the tabloid press laid into them with full complement of teeth and claws. After a year or so, they vanished. Presumably they were deported - back to the persecution that will always do its utmost to prevent them from escaping their deprived situation.
Here is a history of the Roma from the Patrin Web Journal.
Whatever happened to that old-fashioned notion that human beings have human rights? Hungarian Dances, which features a Hungarian Roma-descended heroine, has been contracted by publishers in Hungary and Romania as an anti-racist novel, but I wish it could have proved less timely.
As a tribute to the musical achievements of the Roma, here is the astonishing Roby Lakatos playing Hejre Kati, one of the most famous Gypsy melodies that dates back to the legendary violinist Janos Bihari, of whom Lakatos is a descendant.
2 comments:
I do not -- and this is an understatement -- use words carelessly, and much thought has gone into my conclusion, finally reached, I am sorry to say, as I was trying to read some sense into developments in my native Britain these past years, that we are seeing globally a turning toward a new form of the corporate state, and that is part of the ideology of Fascism. The best indicators of it, I think, are the unholy alliances between the state and corporate business evident in Burma, Russia, the United States, Italy, and other states, and the others, I'm afraid, in some measure include Britain. Today the corporate structure is all -- we see it in government, charities, universities, academy schools, health services.... Western governments most often rationalize it as a form of polity in terms of efficiency, but it is all about power, the power that first comes from economic control, and then, in these days, from draconian security and crime measures, justified by putative dangers most often concocted for the purpose. And these horrific measures in Italy, this persecution, follows from all this as the night the day. The Northern League, with which the Prime Minister has happily allied himself, is a very real menace, and Berlusconi himself an egomaniac running rampant. The only glimmer of hope I can see at present is the possibility that Berlusconi's present attempts to exempt himself from any possibility of criminal prosecution for past misdeeds and the fact that he has put himself on more than more course of collision with the Vatican will bring him down. But then, that happened before and, like some political Freddy Krueger, he came back. In any case, his fall would not help the Rom and other minorites -- Pandora's Box cannot be closed, and nothing so rapidly takes off under its own dynamic than racism and persecution. Italy is far from alone in this, the potential targets and scapegoats are many, and we shall be seeing much more of it. For the Rom and others, I can only weep and despair.
Thanks for pointing to that Independent article, I've been following the aftermath of the Italian election with horror but hadn't yet seen that. Reading 'Hungarian Dances' over the last few weeks only made it more immediate!
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