Play gypsy, play!
Imaginary good old days
Italy has a gypsy problem. That is nothing new for most European nations, but for this country it is, and the Italians have no idea what to do about it.
If gypsies are thin on the ground wherever you live, in the US or Japan say, you may enjoy a romantic vision of a colorful nomadic population of tinkers, fiddlers and fortune tellers. Possibly a little inclined to knife fights and perhaps charmingly light-fingered, but fundamentally harmless.
That is of course one way of looking – or not looking – at the phenomenon.
Italy is not good at immigration (as opposed to ‘outward’ emigration) anyway. There never were too many immigrants here. The country was always a net exporter of the huddled poor and has only in fairly recent decades become wealthy enough to attract its own, mostly from North Africa and the Balkans. Beyond that, Italian society is highly stable and so, tendentially xenophobic.
It has been unlucky too. Two different gypsy-based trends collided and brought the Rom pouring in. The first of these was the series of Balkan wars that finally drifted to some kind of conclusion – for now – in the first years of this Century. Much of the Balkan trouble had to do with Christians and Moslems not getting along – but both hate the gypsies, of whom the former Yugoslavia harbored many, making it seem to these last like a very good idea to someplace else, and Italy was close.
The second and even more massive source of incoming gypsies is Romania. This not very nice country was brought into the European Union – largely by the French, for their own complex policy reasons – even though it was perhaps not quite completely ready to take its place among the, ah, “Western democracies”.
Once fully into the club, Romania went back to its bad old ways with a vengeance. One of the things that it proceeded to do was sort out a difficulty left unresolved by the old dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, by forcing as large a part as possible of its massive and intensely unpopular Rom minority into leaving the country.
Many headed for Italy, attracted by the considerable similarities between the Romanian and the Italian languages as well as by the relatively forgiving nature of Italy’s cops – particularly as compared to the Germans, since that country would have been the obvious alternative.
Unfortunately, these “new” gypsies then revealed a positive genius for high-profile crime and social disorder. In Naples – and the Neapolitans, out of historical necessity, could probably assimilate Martians without any great difficulty – an enraged mob recently attacked and burned two gypsy encampments.
Things are not much better in other parts of Italy and the Government, eager to find cheap ways of showing it is doing something about all this, has recently launched a highly dubious plan for fingerprinting Rom children so they can at least be arrested when they come of age. As it stands now, in practice they simply declare that they are thirteen years old and must be released, whatever the crime and however often it has been committed – and however old they are, since there is no real way to know.
All this has raised a huge political correctness problem, and that’s really the point of today’s note. The Italians are very nice people and truly dislike having to admit they are having, well, “racist” thoughts. They always thought that was something Americans or Germans did. On the other hand, those gypsy bastards are making life a hell, don’t seem to know how to get along with decent people and should probably be shot…
That’s why “Upper Italy” was so taken by a recent decision of the Italian Supreme Court in relation to the case of the Mayor of Verona, Mr. Fabio Tosi. His Honor had been convicted by a lower court of “inciting discriminatory sentiments” by declaring in a political meeting that the gypsies should be sent away – to where he didn’t specify – since “whenever they appear a spate of thefts is sure to follow.”
After due and careful consideration, the high court has now determined that a legitimate distinction can be made between the behavior of a minority and other characteristics relating to the group. Specifically, the court said Tosi’s was not discrimination because this by nature, ”...must be based on some particular quality of the subject group and not on aspects of its behavior. Discrimination because others are ‘different’ is not the same as discriminating on the basis of their criminality.”
In other words, Mr. Tosi was not basing his remarks on the ethnic affiliation of the gypsies, but simply on the fact that the whole damned lot of them are a bunch of thieves – and that’s OK…
The Supreme Court’s finding barely made the papers and attracted no particular comment that we are aware of. The determination has been transmitted to the Court of Appeals of Verona, which emitted the original verdict, with instructions to retry the case bearing in mind that it “not consider to be a crime political initiatives that have as an objective the illegal behavior of those belonging to an ethnic minority rather than the minority in itself.”