Hospitality and The Hairworm

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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:42 pm

Thank you, AD.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 05, 2017 6:46 am

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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 19, 2017 7:17 am

Steffen Krüger
Barbarous Hordes, Brutal Elites: The Traumatic Structure of Right-Wing Populism

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The website hoaxmap.org maps debunked reports, stories, and rumors circulating online and off about refugees and immigrants to Germany and Austria.


“Sexual assaults of female high school students by refugees; the case is hushed up”; “An older woman gets raped and dies of the consequences”; “A thirteen-year-old is attacked, robbed, and injured by four Syrian asylum seekers, the family receives death threats. The police keep the case, as well as ten other cases, secret”; “Parents and students in a school in Wurzbach are asked not to put liver sausage on students’ sandwiches out of respect for the Muslim students.”
—hoaxmap.org1


Since February 2016, Karolin Schwarz, an ethnologist living in Leipzig, Germany, has been collecting debunked reports, stories, and rumors circulating online and off about refugees and immigrants to Germany and Austria. Each tells of a fake crime that these refugees have purportedly committed and about the scandalous ways in which the German authorities have responded, or failed to respond. Schwarz has registered over 450 such cases so far. With the help of an embedded Google map, her web page, hoaxmap.org, maps these fakes onto the cities, towns, and regions to which they refer.

Clicking on one of the pins opens a text box with a short description of the story’s main drift as well as a link to a mainstream news article debunking it.

Schwartz’s page helps us understand an emerging form of ethnocentrism in contemporary Germany. Reading the rumors collected here as one cohesive “fantasyscape” helps us to understand how populism is lived and experienced by the people to which it appeals.

There are two basic, nonexclusive ways to use hoaxmap.org. One can focus on individual rumors and analyze their development in depth, or one can use the map’s breadth and swiftly open one text box after the next, gliding from node to node in a network of hearsay and fantasy. Each single case that is marked on the map can be scrutinized, unpacked, and traced from hoaxmap.org to local and regional news platforms and blog posts. This makes for a chilling and fascinating experience. Looking at photographs of a retirement home rumored to be permanently transformed into a refugee shelter, casting its current residents adrift, exposes one to the mundane material realities to which the rumors attach themselves, exacerbating their harshness.

Yet the map’s true potential unfolds when using its breadth. Upon loading the page, the Google map confronts the user with chaotic clusters of pins. The map is so covered with pins that its contours are partly drowned out. With each pin standing in for a rumor that has proved unfounded, the map’s primary gesture is to the immense quantity of those rumors and the densely knit fantasyscape they weave. As a fantasyscape, however, these rumors tell us less about the refugees and migrants than about the people who planted them. The need on the part of official sources to debunk the circulating stories goes to prove their “spreadability,” i.e., their resonance with significant parts of the German population. Like myths and legends, their ability to travel and replicate, to become told and retold as personal truths, relies on their touching upon and reverberating with preexisting dispositions—wishes and desires—that become unfolded and articulated in this way.

As Freud wrote about the fantasies of “neurotics,” hoaxmap.org “possess[es] psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.”2 The lesson suggested by the map and other attempts at public enlightenment is not the “neurosis” at work in the fantasies shooting up all around us so much as it is their “reality-effect” for the people creating and circulating them. As with all neurotics, it is often more productive to first account for what makes this vision “the decisive kind” for the people holding to it, rather than bluntly trying to correct it immediately.

To the map’s right, there is a box with labels categorizing the various crimes that the rumors entail. In the fashion of a “word cloud,” the size of the labels is indicative of the frequency with which the imagined crimes show up in the collected material.

“Criminal assault,” “robbery/theft,” “Payments/Benefits,” “rape,” “damage to property,” “business closure,” “cover up,” “waste of public funds” … As informative as these juridical labels are, their variety actually makes the readings seem more creative and specific than they really are. The forty-eight distinct categories water down the sameness and repetitiveness that emerges from a reading of the material at large. Not only do the same rumors show up in various different places, often with minor changes in detail, but the entirety of the mapped stories points toward a strikingly limited number of traits.

Toril Aalberg et al. have recently defined right-wing populism of the kind exemplified by hoaxmap.org as a “complete populism.” This is because it combines an appeal to the people with a double rejection of both “the elites” and an outgroup.3 Hoaxmap.org allows us to see how this double rejection manifests itself in the structure of populist rumor along the lines of barbarism and brutality respectively. Time and time again refugees are imagined as barbarous—uncultured, uncivilized; rude, rough, wild.4 The “elites,” by contrast—i.e., the government, politicians, intellectuals, and first and foremost, Angela Merkel—are imagined as brutal, i.e., reckless, careless, and “coarsely cruel.”5 In other words, while refugees are fantasized as uninhibitedly following their sexual and bodily instincts, brutality is located in the “elites” who knowingly and cynically abstain from protecting “the people” from the barbarous hordes. This is how populism is imagined and experienced in the reality constructed by the fantasies.

In the vast majority of cases, the imagined wildness and barbarousness of the refugees coincides with an equally imagined and invariable young male identity. Fittingly, their victims are nearly always ethnic German women. In general, the rumors are intensely sexualized: rape is the second-most imagined crime (seventy-one cases), after “robbery/theft” (eighty-four cases). Frequently, the victims are imagined to be either very old, or extremely young—children. The younger the children, the less important the gender becomes; although they rarely attack elderly men, the projected sexual appetite of the refugees apparently does not discriminate between small boys and girls.

Yet, the kind of sexualization attaching itself to the migrants appears most clearly in the many rumors that entail an unmitigated, uninhibited orality. Repeatedly, refugees are imagined to steal horses directly from the fields of their German owners and eat them; pets from children’s zoos are slaughtered, barbecued, and devoured on the spot; dogs are eaten, swans on a city lake caught and consumed; supermarkets are driven into ruin through uncountable small acts of shoplifting. These fantasies bleed into more clearly and aggressively sexual ones in which refugees grab, fondle, and molest schoolgirls or female cleaning personnel in their shelters. A rumor originating in the Zwickau area has several “dark-skinned men” jumping out of some bushes by the roadside, in front of the car of a female driver who they then harass. That rapes are frequently imagined as being perpetrated by large groups of “men of color” who force themselves on one single German woman itself reveals an oral dimension: the high number of attackers triggers associations of consuming the victim, of using her up.6

“Oralization” continues even in imagined acts that have no obvious sexual dimension. When outright brutality is attributed to refugees, it is for utterly trivial reasons. A refugee sees a two-euro T-shirt in a shop and beats up the clerk in order to get it. The cheapness of the shirt is intended to signify refugees’ proximity to primitivism, and their eagerness for antisocial reversion. In another case, petty cash starts a brawl; in another it is a purse; in yet another it is the small change in the cash register of a local shop. Invariably, refugees are thus fantasized as spontaneously resorting to brutality in order to satisfy immediate, bodily urges and drives. This same body is then perceived as the refugees’ only source of power. The reduction of refugees to mere existence or “bare life” when they arrive in their host countries is perfectly misrecognized: it is not seen as powerlessness, but rather as a dumb, “corporealist” power. Refugees are imagined to use their bodies in order to force their will on others. One recurring fantasy sees them suddenly entering the car of an unsuspecting German citizen and violently demanding to be driven to a shelter or a registration office.

If the obscene closeness of the Fremdkörper, the alien body, drives the above set of fantasies, in another, this same body loses its individuality so that the many are turned into one big organism. In these cases, refugees are imagined to cover the body of the country or the self like a plague, feasting their way through the land and leaving behind destruction and barrenness. The rumor of the supermarket that has to close due to a massive onslaught of stealing migrants shows up all across the map: from Freiburg to Donaueschingen, Meßstetten to Münsingen, from Roth to Erfurt, from Eisenberg to Dresden. The pettiness of the crimes, their uninhibited, hand-to-mouth nature, again appeals to the sexualized character of the acts; it describes people who are naturally compelled to steal, grab, and incorporate—dumb, unthinking, headless, and purely instinctual masses, one gigantic mouth that demands infinite feeding.

At times, the emphatic corporeality of the imagined migrants is extended into the magical and totemic. In these cases, refugees are envisioned as attacking Christmas trees in market squares and other public places, because they identify them as tokens of a tabooed Christianity. Other narratives again complement this associational logic with that of contagion: a physical therapist is rejected because she is a Christian; mattresses are not accepted because Christians have slept on them; cooking utensils are refused because they have been used to prepare pig meat. In these latter cases, the refugees, whose corporeality is otherwise imagined to be crudely oral and a sign of their primitiveness, are characterized as hysterically anal, i.e., scrupulously and squeamishly focused on a notion of purity that the overall direction of the rumors has flatly denied them. Thus, kitchens, bathrooms, toilets, beds, and all kinds of furniture are imagined to be ripped out of flats, thrown out of windows, hacked into shreds or burned in the yard, out of a fetishistic wish for purity that can only appear as absurd in view of the dirt and mess that the foreigners allegedly make. The rumor that captures both ends of this logic goes as follows: “Afghan refugees cut open the seats of [regional] trains and relieve themselves into them, because Christians have sat on them.”

All across the hoaxmap, the refugees’ barbarity is characterized by a sexuality that careens between the extremely oral and the extremely anal, i.e., the totally uninhibited and the hysterically controlled. The result is that a perverse notion of innocence emerges: these fantasy-foreigners are a force of nature and, as such, they simply cannot be blamed in any conventional sense for their wrongdoings. They are beyond the reach of rationality. They cannot be reasoned with; they can only be stopped by other means. This putative irresponsibility of the refugees is crucial, because it allows for the entire responsibility for their imaginary crimes to be placed at the feet of the elites.

The first theme that emerges in how the authorities—the “elites”—are presented in the rumors is that of disappointment. Commonsense surely demands a heavy-handed response to the refugees’ rumored behavior, but, inevitably, the reaction of the authorities is nowhere near sufficient. Instead, the authorities are depicted as willfully ignoring the refugees’ barbarities, while treating ethnic Germans with the contempt that the refugees seemingly deserve. It is this scandalously unequal treatment that creates the image of an utterly cruel and brutal “elite.” A significant number of stories envision crimes of all kinds to be hushed and covered up by the police and/or other state authorities; e.g., parents of harassed, even raped children are forcibly silenced and threatened with retributions—apparently in order to cover up the true nature of the immigrants who are let loose on the Germans. Other fantasies deal with situations in which the local authorities talk shop owners and supermarkets into secret deals so that the refugees can continue to steal from them without being prosecuted. Businesses are offered reimbursements so that the refugees can do as they like, without their crimes becoming public. In other examples, the authorities tacitly tolerate stealing and theft. The obvious ingratitude of the migrants towards their host country is another related theme; the state is imagined to respond to this naive ingratitude with even more financial support, gifts, and privileges. Whereas ethnic Germans are forcibly expropriated and thrown out of their homes to make room for foreigners, these foreigners, who are spoiled rotten, move into the Germans’ homes and are given brand new furniture—and we’ve heard what they do with that.

The brutality of the authorities thus resides in standing by and letting the “barbarians” come over and befoul native Germans; they are even imagined to invite this onslaught, to facilitate and extend it artificially, all while cruelly savoring the unfolding scenes of suffering, like a cinematic Roman emperor consuming the sight of gladiators devoured by animals. One of the most repeated rumors has regional authorities handing out “brothel vouchers” to immigrants, or hiring “sex workers” and bussing them to the refugee shelters, apparently in order to abate the uncontrollable sexual hunger of the incoming male hordes. In the logic of the fantasyscape, such an arrangement amounts to the prostitutes—German women—being used as animal feed, as pieces of meat thrown into a piranha tank.

In this constellation, only the elite are granted any sort of agency, and this is what defines their brutality. Whereas the refugees’ barbarism arrives without any self-awareness, as an instinctual, infantile force marked by its orality, there is control, purpose, and design in the authorities’ cruelty, even if this purpose remains vague and conspiratorial. In a way, then, this constellation puts ethnic Germans and immigrants on par; since neither has control over their situation, they are like antagonistic, underage siblings in a seriously dysfunctional home. With Angela Merkel as the German chancellor, this familial dimension comes clearly to the fore. Merkel is the mother of the nation—Mutti, as she is ironically called—who, according to the circulating rumors, prefers her newborn “bastard” offspring over her older, rightfully conceived children. The German people in this populist fantasyscape are thus identified as abused, neglected, or otherwise unfairly disinherited children.


More at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/142185 ... -populism/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 20, 2017 8:23 pm

Solidarity doesn’t end at borders

Federation of anarchists in Bulgaria

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Fear and hatred towards refugees should be turned towards those who put them in their situation.

Over the last year, over a million people illegally crossed the borders of the EU. This is three or four times higher than in 2014. The effect on the world’s largest economy was insignificant, but the media has worked hard to show otherwise. Although winter slowed the migration, the ‘refugee problem’ was still manipulated by journalists, politicians, and government/intelligence agencies for their own personal goals.

People have reached our border and are asking us to let them in. Should we take care of these people, or should we turn them around? Do we choose solidarity or security? We have been placed at this decision by the our “defenders” and opponents of refugees. However, the problem is of a very different nature.

The uncertainties of these new arrivals are many – how many are there, where are they from, and what kind of people are they? If we want to answer these questions, we can look at government data, however uncertain that is, and the situation in Bulgaria – where in less than 25 years, over 25% of the adult population left the country.

The refugees that reach the EU aren’t the poorest nor the toughest of their respective nations. Those in the direst situations don’t get far – if they are Syrian, they are probably in Turkey, Lebanon, or other neighboring countries. 60% of the arrivals in the EU are young healthy men with a clear goal – a standard of life similar to the EU. In front of them is a clear example – millions of people from their countries have achieved this in EU.

They are not afraid of borders, because the borders have been removed long ago. There are no borders for the ‘international police’ mandated by UN, NATO, or the USA who authorize themselves to police entire nations. There are no borders for petrol, gold, and other resources which flow from poorer countries to richer. There are no borders for bombs, which are dropped in the countries that have the most refugees. There are no borders for the cheap workers of foreign European colonies, who have spent the last decades washing European dishes for their children to be born as European citizens.
Today millions of their descendants fill ghettos of European capitals as “second hand Europeans”, surviving with state assistance, while some are so disgusted by Western civilization that they join ISIS. Still, millions of their friends and kin are risking their lives to join them with the hope of “living a normal life”, not “to be integrated”.

The real problem with refugees isn’t that they don’t want to be integrated, but that they are already integrated. In today’s global economy, entire peoples are turned into a national resource – a population of slaves on exploited territory where they act as a reserve for cheap labor. The battle of the refugees is to turn them from a natural resource into dishwashers. Even if a couple of million people run away to a better life, beyond the crumbling EU borders will remain billions who don’t like their role as weeds in the field of the global capitalism.

In its most basic form, the refugee wave is a migration of the hungry to the bread, even if there is barbed wire guarding it. Today they are not that many, but if the hunger continues, tomorrow there will be many more. And the next time, they won’t be as friendly.

Of course, there is no dangers of reaching actual clashes between repressive states and organized refugees – state influence over European citizens is currently at an all-time high. The mafias ruling over the poor countries will probably be forced to mitigate the effect of social instability in well-known way – to turn the conflict political. In one of many possible scenarios, Turkey can try to transfer its internal problem in areas liberated by Kurds into an outside problem, by starting a local war with its historical enemy, Russia, or by liberating “historical Turkish land” such as Kardzhali in Bulgaria or occupying parts of Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), in the name of peace. In another scenario, Bulgaria, will have to deal with its preassigned role as a prison and a threat for hundreds of thousands of refugees in order to keep the peace in Western Europe.

Every similar scenario would be a result of the huge gap in the standard of living between the ‘West/North’ and ‘East/South’. The gap has never been this deep, while the geographic distance between the two groups can be passed by a few hours on an airplane. This gap will not be closed, regardless of whether we accept the refugees, shoot them at our borders, or send them on their way to Germany with our warmest regards.

Well then, what is there to do? Geographically (and even social) speaking, the Bulgarian people are at the edge of the gap, the border which must be overcome if we are to live “normally”. It is understandable that most of us are scared of the flow of refugees – intuition tells people that behind the harmless groups of immigrants which the government settled around the country lies a significant problem, able to fundamentally change the world as we know it. It is good to know that, regardless of this, there are people who turn their feelings into solidarity, into real help for the people that left their homelands. Surprisingly, that so few from a people such as ours, who traditionally pride ourselves of our hospitality.

Exactly why is obviously very complex, and it would be hard for us to explain it in its entirety. We will still point to one factor, which all other analysis of the issue would ignore – the blood ties between The Bulgarian and Bulgaria. From the wealthy businessman to the vagabond under a bridge, all are complaining about the state. At the same time, the state is the only thing which we can turn to for help, even elementary problems such as crime, simply because it ensures we have nobody else to turn to.


http://libcom.org/library/solidarity-doesn’t-end-borders/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:01 am

"Nation states are a relatively new concept; migration is as old as humanity. Borders seek to regulate and restrict that basic human custom for the distinct purpose of excluding some and privileging others. They discriminate between all people with the express intention of then being able to discriminate against some people. They do not simply set boundaries for countries, but are metaphors for the boundaries of how we might think about other human beings. Immigrants are not the problem. Borders are."

— Gary Younge, End all immigration controls – they’re a sign we value money more than people
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 31, 2017 8:45 am


The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over

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In order to stop the flow of migration from southern to northern Europe, E.U. leaders enforce the Dublin Regulations, or “first entry” laws, which trap asylum seekers in the first European country they enter until their legal cases are complete. For the most part, this means asylum seekers have been stuck anywhere from six months to several years in Greece and Italy with little to no institutional support for housing or working. By holding asylum seekers in “first entry” countries, most of which already resentfully operate under the thumb of richer nations like Germany and France, northern European states provide scapegoats for fomenting fascism and racism in southern European states such as Italy and Greece. Defend Europe isn’t just a boat of racists trying to kill migrants at sea; as a propaganda project, it also acts as an accelerant for increasingly deadly policy.

Leftists haven’t been the only side to oppose Defend Europe. Local and international activists, along with some refugees, responded to the news of C-Star’s scheduled arrival at the Catania port on the coast of Sicily with a protest flotilla of small boats, rafts, and canoes carrying banners reading, “CLOSED FOR RACISTS” and “STOP THE ATTACK ON REFUGEES,” to “symbolically block” the port. While such symbolic actions can garner media attention, the broader panoply of anti-immigrant policies indicates Defend Europe’s cachet isn’t necessarily ebbing. The fact that it can successfully fundraise large amounts of money in a short time while also normalizing fascistic policy in mainstream discourse and law is a dangerous and urgent matter, especially because anti-fascists don’t enjoy the same access to state power as our enemies.

In May, the U.K.-based publication Searchlight, which gathers and analyzes intelligence on Far Right extremism, released a report titled “The growing Nazi axis,” a 200-page research dossier that sheds light on the growing “alt-right” white-supremacist phenomenon and the international far-right’s institutional power by revealing financial ties between high-level executives and aristocrats in Europe and fascist organizing. The report describes how organizations like the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), Génération Identitaire, and Nazi Forum groups are loosely coordinating their messaging through a National Socialist publishing group called Arktos Media, whose leadership is well-connected in the continent’s business world. “The extensive international connections of the alt-right and extreme right, reaching right up to the seat of power in both the USA and Russia,” the report concludes, “mean that the threat from the extreme right is now at its highest since 1945.”

Without the access to state power and global institutions that the Far Right enjoys, Amalia Rossi, the anti-fascist in Genoa, believes the left and anti-fascist movement across Europe and globally are going to have to do more than fist fight. “It’s not just about meeting them with force,” she says. “We can definitely challenge them in the streets and beat them miserably, but then they have the police to protect them. As we all know of course, many of these fascists are connected to the Far Right parties so they also have the support and protection of the politicians. And with the right and even center-left repeating anti-refugee rhetoric to stir up hate and gain votes, the media is mostly repeating this garbage,” Rossi says, adding that she believes it is similar for the U.S.

Beyond brawling with Nazis in the streets, research and exposure of the networks backing fash at sea and their ilk must continue being a critical component of anti-fascist struggle. The information revealed by such research—namely, the breadth of the Far Right’s reach—is dangerous, because the inescapable truth is that those of us who can must do more. As Europe becomes increasingly desperate to deal with the influx of refugees by disregarding and breaking international laws, a principled approach for anti-fascists would be to inflict consequences on those who have orchestrated and turned a blind eye to the deaths of the at least 2,400 people so far this year who have drowned trying to cross from Libya to Italy.


More at: https://thenewinquiry.com/fash-at-sea/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 20, 2018 11:17 am

Arizona Teacher Bonnie Verne Says Immigrants Should be Violently Killed

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Arizona teacher Bonnie Verne resigned from Pardes Jewish Day School in the state's town of Scottsdale after news erupted that she had written violent and xenophobic tweets calling for the death of immigrants.

"Why deport? Just kill them," Verne responded to a tweet by Ann Coulter. "Or we can just put a bullet in their head immediately," she added later.


http://www.latina.com/lifestyle/news/ar ... -be-killed
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:21 pm

The road to barbarism - an interview with Robert Kurz - Anselmo Massad

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A brief 2011 interview with Robert Kurz about the ongoing slide towards barbarism caused by the crisis of capitalism.

The Road to Barbarism – An Interview with Robert Kurz – Anselmo Massad

Anselmo Massad (AM): You came to Porto Alegre to participate in activities regarding migration. What is your assessment of this phenomenon?

Robert Kurz (RK): Migratory flows are nothing new in the history of modernization. Generally, however, they were flows from rural areas toward urban centers in response to a violent process of land expropriation. The English peasants were dispossessed of their means of survival in a forced movement during the 18th century. This was a typical case. The poor were free to sell their labor power because they no longer exercised control over their existence. Today, migration has a universal character, caused by the crisis of the capitalist system of commodity production, which arose with the third industrial revolution: the introduction of electronics. It is a transformation of society by means of a negative globalization, whose result is social exclusion on an ever expanding scale. Microelectronics brought an intense rationalization of production, rendering labor superfluous. In the peripheral regions of the world, the process is even worse because the social base of capitalist reproduction cannot be put to work by microelectronics, due to a shortage of capital. Capital is in no condition to absorb labor power. This represents a new, cynical concept of economic growth. The former concept of economic growth was related to an entire country, to a national economy. The new concept is based in very small areas. It is the production of these oases that guarantees economic growth. For the rest of the country, there is only crisis management.

AM: But not everyone migrates….

RK: Yes. As I mentioned before, national territories no longer exist: all that remains are oases of productivity. There are no cycles of growth capable of absorbing all the labor power. Beyond the new migratory flows of refugees who are fleeing towards Europe and the United States to escape rape and murder, the major consequences are the global wars for the preservation of order, waged by the White House. Their purpose is to make a show of force in order to retain access to markets. Contrary to the motives imputed by traditional theories of imperialism, the objective of today’s military occupations is not the conquest of the resources of a country, except perhaps for oil, but that is not the most decisive factor. Their purpose is economic. The last world superpower possesses overwhelming military superiority. The US has become the guarantor of capitalism’s continued functioning. Capital is losing its capacity for productive investment and is turning to the financial markets, which are more profitable. It is with this money that the war machine and the trade deficit are financed. The oases of prosperity scattered throughout the world, which are becoming smaller and fewer in number, have been concentrations of export industries for the US market over the last ten or more years. An entire export zone exists in China merely because of the North American deficit. Control is exercised by war, which has direct economic implications. If the US were to lose any of these wars, the entire financial sector would lose confidence, which would lead to the collapse of the global economy. The US is under great pressure to constantly show that it is in control. Even the countries of the European Union have a major interest in the maintenance of this order. I am afraid that, as the collapse approaches, the US and its allies will accentuate their military actions to an inordinate degree. I am even afraid that they will use nuclear weapons in this attempt to demonstrate that they are in control.

AM: If the situation of capitalism is leading to such a reality, what comes next: total barbarism?

RK: It is barbarism. And we do not have to wait, it is here now. Capital is no longer capable of utilizing labor power. This will continue until the critique of this society, and of this model, is pursued to its ultimate consequences. Unless this happens, the road leads to barbarism.

AM: What alternatives can be constructed?

RK: It is necessary to construct something new, a more profound critique. Traditional Marxism and the national liberation movements were captives of the old paradigms, always related to economic growth. The workers movement always fought for the goal of compelling capitalism to recognize the worker as a subject, that is: eternally embedding the worker in the system. The same thing happened with the national liberation movements, which sought recognition as subjects in the world market. These two conditions are disappearing because labor is becoming superfluous due to the innovations in electronics, and the international world market, in terms of imports and exports, no longer makes any sense in its current form.

AM: You often speak about the need for transnational social movements to fight against capitalism. What form will they assume?

RK: None of the previous national resistance movements that assumed traditional forms were capable of abolishing capitalism. If the anti-capitalist movements want to act on that same level, they must be transnational. This is different from a simple sum of international movements that only assume the nation as a basic element. They have to be transnational and from the bottom up.


https://libcom.org/library/road-barbari ... lmo-massad
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:10 pm

No borders’ politics needs no defending. It’s common sense.

Natasha King busts some myths around the No Borders debate


Doesn’t no borders just play into the hands of the far right by implying some kind of dystopian future of one homogeneous global state, a kind of globalisation on steroids, where community is over?

I’d say no. From my perspective, it’s more about undermining existing inequalities by everybody having the ability to move or to stay where they want. That isn’t the same as saying that place and belonging don’t matter. One of the biggest problems I think we face is how our connections to places and people are being undermined. We need to create places where the people in those places matter, whether they have been there all their lives or just arrived.

No borders isn’t about bringing on a permanently mobile population that’s disconnected from places, people and traditions, but about creating a world where people have value and their contribution is valued. That is compatible with a world where people can come, go and stay freely, where they can invest in the places they are in, feel valued and impart value. This isn’t a static vision that says that our cultures are fixed and we must keep out outside influence, but a dynamic one that accepts that change – and movement – happens.


https://www.redpepper.org.uk/no-borders ... mon-sense/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 05, 2018 12:13 am

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2018/02/k ... money.html

Sunday, February 04, 2018
Killing Syrian children to make money
"Costello said at the time that the contemporary Syrian war – now in its eighth year – could not have lasted for more than a year without armaments profiteering. As a result, there had been more than 300,000 people killed, including thousands of children, 13.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 6.3 million people internally displaced and 5 million people turned into refugees." "Between 2012 and 2016, the 10 largest arms exporters were, in order: the US, Russia, China, France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Ukraine and Israel."
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 14, 2018 7:45 pm

How to write history like an Identitarian
February 14, 2018

In the orange light of their blazing torches, a small crowd made its way through the streets of Paris. Carrying the coats of arms of various French monarchs, the group of white French youth chanted: “Paris is our nation,” “Paris for the People, Paris for the Identitarians.”

They had gathered for the identitarians’ yearly march, held in honor of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris who led prayers to divert the Huns away from the city in the fifth century. This year, like most years, a few hundreds had joined to walk through the city. At a stop on a street corner, an Identitarian leader addressed them:

Sainte Geneviève is with us, more than ever, and she will bring us victory. Each time you make a slogan it’s a middle finger to Islamists, it’s a middle finger to lefties.

Held on January 13, the Sainte Geneviève march is put on yearly by Paris Fierté, a group affiliated with identitarianism, the political movement centering far-right politics around calls to safeguard European identity against the perceived threats of immigration and Islam. The movement comes out of the Identitarian Bloc political party created in 2003 (now an organization known as The Identitarians), whose youth activist arm, Génération Identitaire, has since metastasized through various European countries and developed a common European group, Defend Europe.

Compared to the blatantly anti-Muslim events put on by Identitarians, the Sainte Geneviève march seemed relatively innocuous: youth blasted the French crooner Edith Piaf through the streets, mingled and drank wine and shouted relatively curated slogans. But their true ideals were not far from the surface. A group birthed by racist skinheads, the Identitarians were formed by Fabrice Robert and Phillipe Vardon, two members of the neo-Nazi oi!/hatecore punk band Fraction Hexagone, launched in 1994: Robert was its bassist, and Vardon joined as lead singer in 1999.



Birthed by racist skinheads

Fraction Hexagone was one of the key groups on the French Identitarian Rock scene whose goal was to “attract new people to nationalist ideas,” as Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg write in their book Far Right Politics in Europe. Identity rock was not about any particular genre: it regrouped a variety of styles, including oi! punk, rap, metal and acoustic ballads, and was only named as such because rock, unlike rap for instance, was perceived as affiliated to whiteness.

Fraction Hexagone (later renamed Fraction) came out of the white nationalist Rock Against Communism (RAC) tradition, born in the UK. But the band members preferred the terms Rock Against Capitalism, and perceived themselves as nationalist-revolutionary — a seemingly easy label for racist skinheads to adopt. This rebranding was part of a larger trend for post World War II fascist movements: rather than upholding Nazism or to a lesser extent Italian fascism, which came with a hefty baggage, European fascist movements rewrote fascist tradition as one of resistance to the state and the liberal order, as historian Nicolas Lebourg writes in his article, “The Productive Function of History in the Renewal of Fascism in the 1960s.”

This included cherry-picking of fascist history and appeals to leftist language, notably the language of anti-globalization and anti-capitalism. In keeping with this historical tradition, Fraction adopted the hammer and sword of the Black Front (Scharze Front) of Otto Strasser, a 1930s anti-capitalist Nazi group, as its logo. Strasser’s influence in far-right circles in France was key in helping sketch a more palatable, “leftist,” national-Bolshevik version of Nazism.

French far-right music, and French Identitarian Rock more specifically, became instrumental in developing fascist movements in the country: they helped launder a type of speech otherwise banned by law, since French speech laws, which cracked down on hate speech, allowed for more freedom of speech in art, as Kirtsten Dyck writes in her overview of white power music, Reichsrock. As Camus and Lebourg recall, Robert attempted to unite skinheads politically through his ‘zine Jeune Résistance (Young Resistance), which pushed Bolshevik-nationalist tendencies. In an interview around that time, Robert declared: “we want tracts and arms to start the social revolution in Europe.”

Fraction in its heyday was invited to perform at two concerts organized by the French far-right party, the National Front (FN), in 1996, in front of hundreds of attendees, thus attracting the attention of the government. In response to Fraction’s performance, the minister of culture Philippe Douste-Blazy called on the National Front to “clean up its act.” Fraction’s song “One Bullet” courted scandal as it called for bullets to be shot at cosmopolites, Zionists, Yankees, elected officials and the police — even the FN had had to ask the group not to perform the controversial song at their concert. Fraction, now in the public eye, was sued for incitement to hatred because of the song but the charges were eventually dropped.

Initially motivated in part by anti-Americanism, antisemitism, anti-Zionism and opposition to immigration and Islam, the members of Fraction took a solid pivot in favor of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment around 9/11. Their 2001 album, Reconquista, called for the reconquest of Europe.

Before forming the Identitarian Bloc, Robert had been quite active on the far-right, beginning when he was just 20 years old. He soon ran afoul of the law. Robert was condemned to prison in 1992 for distributing Holocaust-denial literature (and again in 2005 for defamation against a school principal.) In 1995 he was elected as a National Front representative in the French town of La Courneuve. He then joined a variety of far-right, xenophobic groups such as Nouvelle Résistance, Mouvement National Républicain and then Unité Radicale, an antisemitic group billing itself as anti-Zionist, of which Robert was one of the spokespersons. Its music label, Bleu Blanc Rock, was also heavily antisemitic.

During Fraction’s heyday, anti-Zionism held a place in the renewal of fascist ideology as leftist, which drew parallels between the genocide of Palestinians (a typically leftist cause) and the genocide of “Indo-Europeans,” which Lebourg identifies as having two principal tenets: cultural genocide (Americanization, globalization) and biological (immigration and miscegenation.) While the latter part of this ideology strongly echoes that of the Identitarians, the Palestinian side of the equation completely disappeared from view. Most of the time, however, anti-Zionism was used as a way to feed antisemitic conspiracy theories on the “Zionist Occupied Government,” also known as ZOG, basically the idea that Jewish people control the state.

In 2002, Unité Radicale, was dissolved by the state when one of its sympathizers, Maxime Brunerie, attempted to murder the French president at the time, Jacques Chirac — the day before his assassination attempt, Brunerie had posted on the neo-Nazi terrorist group Combat 18’s website: “Death to zog, 88!” (with 88 referring to the initials of Heil Hitler.) After the debacle, Robert and Vardon created the Identitarian bloc.

As Camus and Lebourg write, the Identitarian bloc led Robert and Vardon to publicly abandon antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and totalitarianism, among other views. Despite this redefinition, antisemitism sometimes crept back up. Benoit Loeuillet, the co-founder with Vardon of the Nice Identitarian group Nissa Rebella, went on to be an elected FN representative in Nice: he was suspended from the party in March 2017 after being caught on camera by an undercover journalist as he was putting forth theses shedding doubt on the Holocaust.



Repackaging old hate

As Martin Sellner and Martin Lichtsmesz, the Austrian leaders of the Identitarian movement (with Sellner the head of its European iteration, Defend Europe) told neo-masculinist Jack Donovan on his Start the World podcast, Identitarian actions serve as performance art; they aim to disrupt and influence the mainstream narrative by producing rapid fire images that the media will rebroadcast in outrage. They also attempt to unify a youth crippled by boredom in an unfulfilling consumerist society by enlisting them in a civilizational quest: the defense of Europe, described as under siege by immigration, “Islamization” and white demographic decline.

The Sainte Geneviève march, for instance, helps sell a narrative of a united French Christian civilization resisting the threat of immigrant and Muslim enemies. In keeping with the movement’s rich history of creating provocative propaganda to broaden their appeal, the march is an easy way of packaging their version of history.

Sainte Geneviève is only one of the historical figures featured in the Identitarians’ version of the European past: other icons include Leonidas, the Greek warrior-king who fought the Persian army in the fifth century BC; Charles Martel, the Frankish prince who helped defeat the Umayad caliphate troops during the 732 battle of Poitiers; or Prince Eugene, the French-born general who joined the Habsburg empire and helped win key battles against the Ottomans in the late 17th century. All inevitably feature a confrontation between a Christian “European” and a Middle Eastern or Muslim “other.”

Like their skinhead forebearers, the Identitarians position themselves as “nationalist-revolutionary.” They call for cultural rootedness and local economic and political independence from globalization, all the while framing far-right demands — such as their call for the “remigration” of Muslims and immigrants — as a defensive civilizational quest. When they yell out “Sainte Geneviève is with us,” Identitarians attempt to show themselves as young patriots stepping up where institutions have failed, a very deliberate strategy to mainstream their hateful narrative.

As Fabrice Robert explained to an enthusiastic audience at the American Renaissance conference in April 2013 near Nashville, Tennessee: “Our favorite field is street action, then relayed on the internet. It’s this combination of the two that allows us to bypass the media and break into the mainstream.” Though the Identitarian Bloc has run candidates for elections, it has been open about the fact that elections are simply a way to publicize their ideas, which is perhaps a way to excuse its electoral failures.

The tech-savvy youth arm of the Identitarians, Generation Identitaire (GI), produced a large swath of videos of their racist and Islamophobic actions, such as their 2012 launch with the occupation of a mosque in Poitiers, France. Gathering on the roof of the mosque, the group held up a banner reading “732,” the date of the battle of Poitiers, where Charles Martel defeated the army of the Muslim Umayyad caliphate. GI members allegedly urinated on prayer rugs, and could be heard shouting “In Poitiers, no kebab, no mosque,” “2012, Poitiers, we are your descendants” and “our identity, we fought to take it back, we’ll fight to defend it.”

Identitarian activists have become known for their openly Islamophobic and racist campaigns: they have demonstrated in fast food restaurants wearing pig heads and sought to interrupt public Muslim prayers with parties serving wine and pork, supposedly to denounce attacks on the French way of life. Generating outrage and internet and media attention, these events enable what Robert described “as an advertising campaign worth millions of euros for free.” In 2015, the Identitarians launched a campaign for “remigration” of immigrant populations, with the slogan: “France, we love it when you leave it” accompanied by images of a veiled woman in the subway, a group of petty criminals of Middle Eastern descent and a Muslim polygamist.

These efforts embolden Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in a country where Islamophobia can be a unifying narrative across the political spectrum. The French courts judged as much. In 2007, the Identitarian Youth, under the leadership of Philippe Vardon, was fined for its incitement to discrimination with its tracts “Ni Voilées, Ni Violées” (Neither Veiled, Nor Raped) blaming Muslim immigrants for rape. Vardon was also condemned to prison and fined because courts asserted that the Identitarian Youth, which he headed, was a resurfacing of the banned group Unité Radicale, leading to a new youth group emerging in 2012: Génération Identitaire. In December 2017, a French court condemned five members of Génération Identitaire to one year of prison and a 40,000 euro fine for incitement to racial and religious discrimination, and destruction of property for their occupation of the mosque in Poitiers. (Both parties are now appealing.)


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 27, 2018 7:52 pm

In His First Online University Lesson, Theodore Beale Calls Immigration Worse Than War

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In the video, Beale compared immigration to warfare, and actually concluded that, in some ways, immigration is actually worse than war. “What’s interesting,” he said, “when you compare immigration and war, is that interestingly enough, war may actually be less of a problem.”


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 02, 2018 6:07 pm

Italian elections: How the far right is cruising on the anti-immigrant wave

March 02, 2018 Hatewatch Staff


As the March 4 election day approaches, Italy has become the latest European country to face an explosion in far-right political activity and sometimes collapsing into violence.

In a country plagued by high levels of youth unemployment and mostly stagnant economic growth, leading parties across the political spectrum have made immigration the key issue of the campaign. This move has provided a major opening to the Italian far-right and fueled street fighting between racist, openly fascist populist groups and anti-racists and anti-fascists across the country.

On February 3, Luca Traini, a failed candidate of the far-right League party (Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, or Northern League) with a Nazi tattoo on his forehead, shot and wounded six people of African origin in Macerata. The police later seized Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a white supremacist flag from Traini’s home.

The shooting was met tepidly by leading political parties including former Italian prime minister and 81-year-old media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, head of a leading center-right party. He promised to round up and deport 600,000 undocumented immigrants and called immigrants “a social bomb ready to ignite because these people live by expedients and crime,” before backtracking a day later. Attempting to pass as the reasonable centrist candidate, Berlusconi has proposed “a great Marshall Plan for Africa and the Far East” to tackle migration. During his time in power however, Berlusconi was one of the first to publicly redeem the image of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and to invite pro-fascist, far-right parties to join his coalition.

The comments are unsurprising for the former prime minister who resigned in the middle of an economic crisis in 2011 and whose tenure was marked by scandal and corruption: now leading the “center-right” party Forza Italia, Berlusconi has entered into a rightwing coalition with the smaller and openly fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) and the populist League. These parties have pledged to put “Italians First” and have singled out the country’s migrant population.

This coalition has already attained victory in the November 2017 elections in Sicily and is currently polling at 35.6 percent, according to the latest Ipsos polls. This is still short of the 40 percent needed to govern under the new electoral system.

A fascist and racist far-right on full display

Also leading the coalition is Matteo Salvini, the rabidly anti-immigrant head of the League. He has pledged to deport 500,000 migrants within five years if his party wins the election, pushing for an end to an “invasion.” Salvini has previously called for the razing of Roma camps and attacked Pope Francis’s efforts to engage in interfaith dialogue with Muslims. Salvini excused Traini’s Macerata rampage by declaring that “an invasion of immigrants will bring social strife.” The League has also collaborated with the openly fascist movement CasaPound in the past, which has since endorsed the party. Steve Bannon, the former White House operative and executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News operation, has alluded to his support of Salvini and traveled to Rome this week to follow the elections.

Salvini’s Northern League initially emerged in the ‘90s as a separatist party calling for the secession of the wealthier north, but recently dropped “northern” from its name as it expanded to the entire country. The libertarian-leaning, anti-European Union party remains predominantly popular in the north, and promotes racist stereotypes about Southern Italians and immigrants. Moreover, the League candidate for governorship in Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, has openly discussed the necessity of preserving “the white race:”

This is not about being xenophobic or racist, but about being logical, rational: we can’t [accept them all] because there isn’t the space. We need to make a choice. We have to decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society, should continue to exist or whether it should be erased.


He is currently in the lead.

This rightward shift is occurring in a violently and openly pro-fascist and racist climate. As compiled by the antifascist organization Infoantifa Ecn and published by The Nation, there have been 142 attacks by neo-fascist groups since 2014. In July 2017, an Italian reporter exposed the existence of an openly fascist beach south of Venice. It featured posters with fascist salutes, others glorifying Mussolini and rigorous signs calling for “order, property and discipline.” In November 2017, a group of skinheads disrupted a meeting of the migrant rights organization Como Senza Frontiere near the Swiss border. Forza Nuova, a fringe neo-fascist party, has been organizing “Bangla tours” in Rome to beat up Bangladeshi individuals.

While 100,000 people joined a demonstration against racism and fascism in response to the shooting rampage in Marcerata, clashes have been on the rise. A man putting up posters for the radical-left party Potere al Popolo was stabbed in Perugia. Demonstrators clashed with police in Turin, where anti-fascists faced off with neo-fascists during the visit of Simone di Stefano, a leader and candidate of the neo-fascist movement CasaPound on February 22 and 23. As many as 1,000 anti-fascist militants gathered in Bologna to protest a Forza Nuova rally on February 16 and were confronted by the police, leaving seven wounded. Meanwhile, a Forza Nuova leader was beat up in Palermo, Sicily, on February 20. With neo-fascists from Forza Nuova to CasaPound to the League party holding rallies and events across the country, security forces have been repeatedly deployed.

The inroads made by neo-fascist parties in Italy were foreseen in November 2017. A candidate with CasaPound, Luca Marsella, was elected as council member in the city of Ostia, near Rome. Marsella has openly mingled with members of the local mafia; in the aftermath of his victory, a member of an influential crime family even broke the nose of a journalist who attempted to interview him. CasaPound’s headquarters feature pictures of Mussolini, and they are named after the antisemitic and pro-fascist poet Ezra Pound. Members of the group can often be violent; a CasaPound activist murdered two Senegalese men in Florence in 2011. Their model of activism — described as fascism for hipsters — attempts to conceal their brutality by claiming to offer food and shelter to poor families exclusively of Italian descent and by building a social infrastructure of bars, bookstores and squats. Its curated front and media-savvy actions have inspired many other groups in Europe, such as the violent French group Bastion Social. In Italy, it has been at the forefront of the normalization of fascism.

The leading anti-establishment party outside the rightwing coalition, the Movimento 5 Stelle, or 5 Star Movement, which is expected to garner 28.6 percent of the vote, has also embraced anti-immigrant rhetoric, including under the current leadership of 30-year-old Luigi di Maio.

In December 2017, the party further revealed its nativist turn when Italy was rocked by a fierce debate over the right of children of immigrants born in Italy to Italian citizenship. The proposal was fiercely opposed by far-right parties: but it was 35 parliamentarians from the 5 Star Movement and 29 from the center-left Democratic party who dealt the bill its death blow, by failing to show up for the vote.


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 8:04 am

‘Fash The Nation’ Hosts Praise The Separation Of Migrant Families, Say Asylum Should Be Granted To Whites Only

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On the June 16, 2016 episode of The Right Stuff’s Fash the Nation podcast, hosts Jazzhands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram celebrated the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. The pair were particularly fond of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tactic of separating children from their parents and stuffing them in cages.


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:09 pm

In Salvini’s Italy we Roma must renew the fight for our dignity

Dijana Pavlovic

I don’t want my child to go through the hatred I‘ve faced – but the interior minister has made that a real challenge

Wed 27 Jun 2018 05.59 BST

So few know that we are a people with our own beautiful language and culture, the largest ethnic minority in Europe, who have managed to preserve our own identity without having our own state. That since we arrived in Europe in the 14th century we have been persecuted and stereotyped – most brutally in the second world war, with the genocide of the Roma and the Sinti. More than half a million of our people died in Nazi death camps, an extermination that, as with the Jews, was based on race.

Few people know that after the war, and up until the 1970s, Roma communities were systematically persecuted in countries usually deemed civilised and tolerant, such as Switzerland, and Sweden – where Roma women were sterilised. Across Europe, research shows that we continue to be one of the most discriminated-against and stereotyped minorities. Our marginalised position today is the direct consequence of a history of persecution and discrimination: call it anti-Gypsyism.

Yet despite immense barriers of prejudice and hate, a large number of us still manage to study and find a place in society. Who’s aware of that?

I’m an actor and a Roma activist. Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, recently made headlines by calling for a census of Roma and for expulsions. But what strikes me most are not the threats, the forced evictions, the closure of the camps, the deportations, or any other manifestations of the resentment towards us. (Salvini’s League launched its campaign against the Roma in 2008, and the party has grown in prominence ever since.)

No, what struck me most was when Salvini recently claimed: “We do it for the children. They’re abandoned to parents who educate them only in the art of stealing.” This echoed what Elena Donanzzan, a leader of the League in the Venice region, had said months earlier in a regional council session: “We should take all Roma and Sinti children under the age of six from their parents, to start educating them properly to become good citizens.”

Roma history is full of such examples. The Austro-Hungarian empire removed thousands of our children from their parents in the late 18th century, and put them in re-education centres. The Nazis shifted to a more sinister solution, designed to eradicate the “Gipsy scourge”. To hear politicians today openly target us as unwanted people conjures up dark memories.

And today, once again, our persecution starts with our children. My friend Giulia is Roma, and a lawyer. Her community has been in Italy since the 15th century, and her five-year-old daughter, Angelica, is blonde with blue eyes. However, she was identified as Roma by children in her kindergarten through her surname. After that they refused to touch her; if they did, they would immediately wash their hands.

It’s difficult to explain to others how much we suffer when classmates treat our children badly or, as often happens, a teacher puts one of our children in a corner and just leaves them there. It is difficult to explain the extraordinary fortitude and energy we need to find every day to soften the blows to our children, to try to make the discrimination and humiliation more tolerable, to salvage our dignity as parents – and our children’s dignity as human beings.

I was born in Serbia (then part of Yugoslavia), in a poor family that was proud of its Roma origins and determined to struggle for its place in society. My parents believed deeply in the notion of equality, as did the rest of our community. My grandparents were illiterate, and they’d made great sacrifices to send their children to school. My mother found a job in a textile factory, my father in a general store. The purpose of their lives was to give my brother and me a sense of dignity and help us become successful individuals. They taught us to never deny our Roma roots, because that would mean negating our family and our ancestry.

So I grew up proud to be Roma, but realised early on what I would have to cope with. I happened to be good at school. When I was seven, my classroom friend turned on me. “You may have good marks,” she said, “but you’re Gypsy and you will always only ever be Gypsy.” When I came home in tears my mother told me: “Stop crying. To them, you will always be a Gypsy, but you have to be a proud Gypsy. You have to be better than them – always. They will never love you, but they will have to respect you.”

Even now that I am a successful woman, I still have to pay a heavy price for being a Roma activist. In 2015, Gianluca Buonanno, who was then a League member of the European parliament, publicly called me and all Roma people “the scum of society”. In 2016 my husband (who’s Italian, and not a Roma) was beaten up in front of our home for being “married to the Gypsy who goes on TV”.

Today I’m as determined as ever to fight for our rights, and to make sure that my eight-year-old son, together with millions of Roma children across Europe, can live in a more beautiful and more democratic world that respects minorities and diversity. I want them to walk into the future with confidence, and not suffer discrimination. In Italy that is a very challenging task.

The campaigns that have now been unleashed mingle the fear of an “invasion by migrants” with the fear of the “Gypsy thief”. “Migrant” and “Roma” have become slogans of hatred. So I think about Salvini’s children, whom he often mentions. What thoughts will they have for the poor, for migrants, for “Gypsies”. How much of their humanity will remain: the humanity that everyone, especially in childhood, spontaneously feels?

A few days ago my son told me: “When I grow up, I’ll make a law that punishes rich people who don’t help the poor, so there won’t be so many poor.” I know that if he grows in this way and with these ideas, his life won’t be easy. But at least I’m sure that I’m bringing him up to become a decent person and a good citizen.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ht-dignity
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