What the Gypsies really need is a leadership that regards the new Europe as a chance, and not as a bovine to milk or as a calamity against which disability insurance must be invoked.

“We want to steal” was the reported battle cry of those Gypsies (in PC lingo newly “Roma”) that “demonstrated” for their “rights” in Slovakia. The riots, more accurately put, the mass movement to pluck stores empty, is of interest to the global reader. It happens to be a very local event with general parallels and implications.

First of all, the problem with the officially re-baptized “Roma” minority is not uniquely a Slovak problem. Demographically, the liability is in Hungary and Romania — to limit the list to future and actual EU-members — of equal weight. At this juncture it is worth knowing that in Central and Eastern Europe there are three important ethnic minorities. First of all the 20 + million Russians are to be mentioned. They are located, partly as a result of the Soviet effort to Russify its Empire’s perimeter, in what became the successor states of the USSR. Since a great power, potentially a Superpower, stands behind them, this is no quantité négligable. Second, there is the case of the Magyars (Hungarians). About three million of them became the largest minority in Romania, Slovakia, “Greater Serbia” (or by whatever name it might carry by the time this is published) and Croatia. Their minority status is a consequence of the peace treaties — that turned out to be a mere armistice — that temporarily ended World War I. Disregarding history, demographics, human rights and whatever else might have been considered, their lot was meant as punishment for real and mainly alleged misdeeds during the thousand years preceding the French-dictated peace treaties of Paris in 1919. The third in numerical weight is the case of the Gypsies. They are omnipresent in the successor states of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also play a role in the remnants of the Soviet and the Yugoslav state. Lastly, there are the Jews whose number is now small but whose role, partly on account of their societal contribution and also in part because of their effective media representation, is considerable.

It is quite difficult to formulate an essay about the quandary of the Gypsies with modern times and the problem of modernizing societies with this ethnic group. The dilemma: if you tell how you think “it really is,” you are open to attacks as a racist. In case you are a member of the group being analyzed, you will become a “traitor.” If you say nothing you are personally fine but the problem will, to the disadvantage of all concerned, remain unsolved, festering on in the body of the societies concerned. Being silent in this and similar cases also implies guilt. The nice thing regarding this latter culpability is that no one will castigate you for it. Even though with this the boundaries of the essay are transcended, the writer wishes to articulate an unpleasant truth. The real “polit-criminals” of the 20th century were not those who “did it.” (SS, SD, NKVD, KGB and their minions).  Nor are only those to be blamed who “took it.” The really guilty are the unconcerned, the neutrals, those who, in the manner of the rightfully famous three monkeys, closed their eyes, plugged their ears and sealed their mouth. My point: those who repress the unpleasant truth help the impostors.

The hatred of minorities — in case they are “innocent” — tends to have two reasons. One is if, on the average, they do better than the majority. The classical case of this is that of the Jews, b.H. (before Hitler). To a lesser extent the Magyars, too, fit the case. (If Africa would be in the focus of the piece then the lot of the Pakistani and Indian craftsmen and traders would illustrate the thesis.)  In the instance of over-performing minorities the accusation is approximately like this: “they are all crooks,” and “by cheating they got, sucking our blood, ahead of us.”  The advantage gained by such leaches condemn them of crimes against decent majority types. The second reason for despising and then persecuting, naturally again in the name of higher justice, is when, collectively, an identifiable group under-performs in comparison to the hosting majority. In this case they are lazy, thieves and parasites. Tell me, what do you do when you discover that you have roaches? Righto! You fumigate them.

Unfair accusations aside, logic and experience indicates that certain ethnicity related comportments — whatever their cause — can become part of a problem in such a manner that the group’s victim status in the present becomes questioned. This is most likely to happen once the majority, under the effect of a social enlightenment, changes its discriminatory ways and removes the barriers that had hindered the rise of the able members of the under-performing minority. This, if we limit our scope to Central Europe, fits the case of the Gypsies at present.

To begin with, let us turn to the beginnings. It is true that in the past the Gypsies were disadvantaged. In part this was so because the actions of some of those regarded as representative, acted in a manner validating the prejudices regarding the entire group. In generalizing, keep this in mind: most nationalities and ethnic groups are evaluated on the basis of the performance of their most inferior representatives. Time made the problem burning. The census of 1893 found in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today 10 states) 650,000 Roma. Their number is in the millions now. This demographic explosion made the gypsies — generally about 10% of the population — as a mass omnipresent in several locales. Nowadays the natives’ reaction is generally to avoid the places and the times one can encounter Gypsies. “Avoid” is in this case a euphemism: “flee” would be a more accurate term. The most glaring and publicly known sign of this was a wall the non-Roma inhabitants of a Czech town built to isolate themselves from the noise, refuse and especially the crime they regarded as emanating from the Roma district. (The wall — since there is none in Berlin any more, walls have a bad reputation — had to come down under pressure from “Brussels.” Europe’s “capital” signaled that such measures would imperil admission to the European Union.)

In general, since Western Europe likes to take a heroic posture against weak enemies, the European West’s attitude has not contributed to a solution. What they have achieved amounts to the suppression of the constructive treatment of the problem. Let a case from Hungary serve as an example. A few years ago the police had to investigate in a murder case that occurred in a gypsy village. The suspects — the drug related crime involved something close to lynching — escaped local justice by fleeing with their extended families to France, more exactly to Strassburg. There they claimed to have been persecuted and thus asked and received political asylum. While this was the easy way to deal with the immediate problem, the surprising reaction of France has hardly increased the sense of having to respect laws. It also created the impression that the reward of lawlessness followed by commensurate sanctions offers a chance of the good life on the dole abroad. (Meanwhile, the increasing inclination of criminally inclined Roma to go abroad has created resistance to admitting anyone from the countries that are a source of such migrations. Canada and England come to mind. Similar cases are — albeit openly unarticulated — behind some of the reluctance of the old EU members to accept migrant workers from the new members of the Community. It is not only racism, a sense of superiority and fear from competition, but to a considerable measure fear of criminal bands that explain this reluctance.

If one raises the rhetorical question such as, “what is the gist of the Gypsy problem,” one becomes presumptuous in implying that one has a reply that is to be regarded as the answer. A book could hardly provide a response that treats most aspects of the problem of majorities with the gypsies and the latter’s difficulty embedded in hostility with the majority. Therefore, the flaws inherent in a short sketch are realized and also accepted by the writer.

Although I remember a Gypsy who said that, “you know, Communism is bad for gentlemen and for Gypsies,” in a way the man was wrong. Soviet colonization gave Gypsies several chances. Nevertheless, they were, if it meant being taken by the Party-State in its service, of the dead-end kind. The motivation to collaborate came from being a disadvantaged minority with a grievance against the majority. In recruiting a State Security Service (under whatever name the local franchise of the KGB had) some gypsies were willing and welcome recruits that staffed the lower ranks. There is more. Forced Socialist industrialization that undertook to convert agrarian countries into “a land of iron and steel,” created primitive industries of questionable value in the modern world. These enterprises of the new State Capitalism had numerous openings for unskilled laborers that replaced, in the context of backwardness, modern means of production with cheap labor. This meant in the long run that after the collapse of Panzer-Socialism and competition with modern industries, the unskilled, a disproportionate number of them being gypsies, lost their jobs. Even at low wage-levels, — 1/10th that of the West — productivity of the underqualified could not compete with the performance of high-paid workers operating top-notch machines. This circumstance, being among the losers of the liquidation of state capitalism, makes the Roma today into one of the safe reservoirs of “Socialist” votes.

There is more. Perhaps the crucial problem why the Roma miss the train to modernity is the role that their “professional leaders” play for their own benefit with the Roma masses as pawns. Having secured official “victim status” for their followers they can control the “lumpen” element within the group by extending to them the hope of hand-outs.

What the gypsies really need in the long run is a leadership that regards the new political and economic situation as a chance and not as a bovine to milk or as a calamity against which disability insurance has to be invoked. The free market of a free country being a novelty to the majority, the chance to accept an equal challenge coupled to equal opportunities would promise an unprecedented likelihood for upward social mobility. To the misfortune of Gypsies and also of the societies in which they are embedded, leaders who would see change as a chance and who would accept challenges as opportunities, remained at a modicum. The “professional leaders” neglected to tell their followers to roll up their shirt sleeves and to begin to study and to work; to do more and do it better than the majority. Instead they succumbed to two temptations.

The first (highly typical) temptation that caused damage was one that the writer would call the poison of “something for nothing.” A group can collectively attain the ticket to the “good life” in two ways. One is by building, (to quote the advice of Eric Hoffer on US television to a shocked and outraged “Leader” of a minority) “your city on the hill.” The other is to demand, referring to past wrongs that hardly any now living person has committed or been injured by, “compensation” for the sins of long-ago. Typically, as in the case of the Gypsies, this “non-negotiable” demand is amended with an insistence that habits and ways of acting, associated with the group enjoying victim status, be regarded as a manifestation of unalterable ethnic characteristics. This would make unconstructive, anti-community behavior, commonly considered as counter-productive or criminal, an ethnic trait. Such traits can claim protection analogous to that given bald eagles. Acting against these characteristics by the majority is labeled intolerant and classified on the level of “fascism.” In case enlightened “members” criticize the pattern they become “traitors” of the race. In addition to the right to be lawless — easily called in PC “cultural autonomy”– without accepting the consequences, is completed with the demand for economic support. The riots in Slovakia came about when this support was reduced. The measure was part of a reform that, among others, introduced a unitary tax of about 18% of the taxable income regardless of its total.

Where have the leaders of the Roma failed? They failed as statesmen while they acted as politicians. A statesman is willing to risk being unpopular as he educates his people to the reality of a truth many might not yet be able to grasp. In doing so he asks for immediate sacrifices to attain advantages later on. The politician caters to what his voters are able to demand at the moment. He delivers immediate advantages — or their illusion — at the cost of subsequent essentials. (Any implications regarding the coming election of an American President and Congress were originally unintended but hardly accidental.) To their clients these leaders promised assured welfare instead of the chance of earned wealth. Having been used to dependence — loosely you might place its roots issuing from a “slave mentality” — thanks to the promise to continue according to past patterns, the program drew support.

Emphasizing “getting” instead of “earning,” the hole in which un-integrated Gypsies find themselves in areas where their numbers give them weight as voters, deepened. The new economy eliminates the need for the unskilled, rewards knowledge, skills and adaptability as intellectual capital. Regardless of this, many Gypsies are reluctant go to school, if they do they proudly refuse to learn “white” stuff and so achieve unemployment rates hovering between 50 and 90%. By handing out passing grades, beleaguered teachers promote the “problem” an echelon higher. Doing so is reinforced by the parent’s threat of violence. If doing nothing in order to become qualified for something is rewarded, then, naturally, the willingness to qualify oneself through performance rather than by quotas diminishes. That there are educated and successful Roma is a miracle achieved against the guidance of the average “leader,” who benefits from representing dependent individuals.

The second error — for the average Roma but not for the beneficiaries of their shipwreck — is in the area of crime. Siphoning off what one needs is one of the traditions going back to when the Roma were nomads. With the collapse of authoritarian Socialism an existence based on petty crime became, in the case of those with a low horizon of expectations, more rewarding. Communism oppressed everything and everybody, and had a rather tight control over society. This made a crime-based family economy risky. With the new freedom its abuse and the benefits of non-conforming on the level of respecting constructive laws grew, while the risks of lawlessness diminished. The more so, since majorities can be intimidated by a strong correlation between membership in a minority and the latter’s readiness to engage in actions that lead to convictions. The accusation of “fascism” and “racism” is easily fired — and can be proven by a loose interpretation of statistics. A reluctant judiciary, a therefore helpless police and a few opportunistic politicians preaching the need to tolerate whatever is “different,” create an environment in which anti-social behavior brings benefits. With this trend the instinctive segregation of the majority from the Gypsies but also of the successful Roma from their fellows mired in the traditions of the past, has increased.

In concluding, the writer is under the pressure of the customs regulating correct pundit behavior: it demands a prediction of what is to come and what is to be done. As far as the Roma’s ability to join the modern world is concerned, the quality of the leadership that represents them will be critical. To no small extent regional stability and the absorption of East-Central Europe in the European Union, will also be determined by the ability of the Roma to do whatever it takes to become integrated. One thing is certain: going on the street demonstrating for rights by confusedly proclaiming “we want to steal” will be of little help to all concerned.