eastern bloc party

Jacque Ranciere’s comments at a forum on the recent expulsions of Roma from France:

….Today’s racism is thus primarily a logic of the state and not a popular passion. And this state logic is primarily supported not by, who knows what, backwards social groups but by a substantial part of the intellectual elite. The last racist campaign wasn’t at all organised by the so-called ‘populist’ extreme-right. It was directed by an intelligentsia that claims to be a Leftist, republican and secular intelligentsia.

… I conclude: a lot of energy has been spent against a certain figure of racism—embodied in the Front National—and a certain idea that this racism is the expression of ‘white trash’ (‘petite blancs‘) and represents the backward layers of society. A substantial part of that energy has been recuperated to build the legitimacy a new form of racism: state racism and ‘Leftist’ intellectual racism. It is perhaps time to reorient our thinking and the struggle against a theory and a practice of stigmatisation, precariatisation and exclusion which today constitutes a racism from above: a logic of the state and a passion of the intelligentsia.

(reblogged from ontologicalterrorist)

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

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 Gypsy Holocaust: yesterday and today) which reminds us of a truly dramatic history. Without adding or removing a single word from the information contained in the article, I have selected some lines referring to certain events that are really moving. Neither the West nor -most of all- its colossal media apparatus have said a single word about them.

 fidel castro on roma and the ‘gypsy holocaust’ in europe

redguard:

 

Civil rights campaigners have accused governments across Europe – not just France – of adopting explicitly anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies to win popular support and gain electoral success.

The criticisms follows the rift between Nicolas Sarzkozy and fellow EU leaders over his determination to demolish Roma camps and deport their residents. At an EU summit in Brussels Sarkozy was isolated, except for the backing of the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

The French leader claimed he had the support of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, but German officials denied his assertion that Berlin planned to clear camps.

Amid accusations that France is breaking EU law, campaigners said that anti-Roma sentiment predated the economic crisis but had escalated in the past two years.

socialisimo:

Rarely has a leak done more valuable work. A memo from France’s interior ministry this week confirmed that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s war on Traveller camps had an explicit racial dimension, with Roma people being deliberately targeted. By doing so, it has jolted the European commission out of indulging the Sarkozy stunt, and into a full-throated attack on Paris. It has stirred overdue introspection in France about how minorities are treated, even while its politicians stampede to use the lawto persecute those few Muslim women who wear a face veil. And it has highlighted how Europe’s largest minority, the 10 million-plus Roma people, suffer right across the continent’s boundaries.

For France is not alone. The systematic discrimination against Roma in eastern Europe – where Gypsy children have often been routinely packed off to schools for the “mentally deficient” – is an acknowledged if underreported reality. But with the EU’s eastward expansion and the migration that followed, eastern attitudes have been spreading west. While the Danes have been seeking to expel some Roma, Swedish police have been caught illegally forcing others out of the country. As Germany has repatriated Gypsy children to Kosovo, the Belgians have driven a camp out of Flanders and the Italians have used the presence of Roma as reason to declare a state of emergency.