I just wanted to note my reaction to the dispute over France’s expulsion of gypsies who had settled ‘illegally’ in officially unrecognized caravan camps. Earlier in the week, the vice-president of the European Union, Viviane Reding, had criticized this decision, saying she didn’t expect to see something like this again, something that was reminiscent of scenes from WWII. Of course she was referring to the Holocaust and in particular to the deportations of Jews to the death camps and gas chambers. When the European heads of state got together this week, they unanimously defended Sarkozy, and derided this woman. Obviously Sarkozy can expel these people (European citizens) because they are gypsies. If they belonged, collectively, to any other (racial) group, this wouldn’t be possible (unless, of course they were black, or Hispanic). No one seems to remember, or want to recall the fact that the gypsies were the only other group that some scholars are willing to include in the Holocaust. And this is precisely because they, as a group, were targeted as much as the Jews, though they didn’t perhaps occupy such a ‘privileged’ place in the Nazi biological theories of ‘contamination.’ Perhaps this was merely because, unlike the Jews (particularly the middle and upper class Jews), who were fully integrated in Western Europe by the time the Nazis came to power, and especially in Germany, the gypsies always remained social outcasts. Regardless, they suffered decimation during the Nazi era similar to that of the Jews (and Poles, and Russian POWs), but unlike the Jews, who have Israel behind them now, the gypsies have no state (just as the Jews had no state at that time) and no one has made much of an effort to preserve the memory of their suffering during the Holocaust. But this is not because they didn’t suffer, or because they weren’t singled out, just as they are obviously being singled out now in France (this can’t be denied, can it, when the police circular that originally went around referred specifically to ‘Rumanian gypsies’?). After the catastrophe in Europe, the state of Israel usurped the memory of the Holocaust for the Jews. I have heard a Jewish survivor say in an interview that no other genocide anywhere in the world is properly a ‘holocaust,’ that this term needs to be reserved for the Jews, and that the Jews need not remember anyone else who was killed alongside other Jews, that such remembering is the business of those others, assuming they want to preserve the memory of their own people.
What is happening in France is very similar to what is happening in the state of Arizona. Whatever you want to call it (racial profiling), it affects the targeted people in the same way, by threatening them with expulsion from the place they have at least temporarily regarded as home. Perhaps you could make some sort of argument against the gypsy way of life. Throughout Europe gypsies are regarded as untrustworthy, and likely to be involved in illegal activities such as drug dealing and thieving. These stereotypes, like all stereotypes, obviously come from somewhere, and usually from the same place in our collective minds: that place where we harbor our fears and insecurities, especially regarding those who are unlike us. The thing to be remembered about the events of the Nazi era is not so much perhaps that the Jews were murdered in huge numbers, and merely for being—via birth—Jews (for having ‘Jewish blood’, defined as at least one of their four grandparents being Jewish by birth, and never by religion), but that the persecution of these people began with small crimes of humiliation committed against them. The Nazis murdered the Jews socially long before they burned their remains in ovens that operated around the clock. It’s this social ostracism that we ought to fear now in Europe, wherever it comes from. And we—the common citizens of Europe and the world—should be particularly leery when this ostracism is organized and carried out via the means at the disposal of our governments. It is always a politically popular decision to brand a scapegoat during times of economic crisis, when the demand for illegal immigrant labor is lowest. And this is the root danger we must watch out for, the way popular psychology works against our better judgment and our firm belief in the equality of all men and women, everywhere.