The plight of the Italian Roma and migrant travelers is a clear warning from history: we ignore it at our peril!

On the same day that philosopher Professor A.C. Grayling wrote in the Guardian that no one has the right to dictate to others how they live their lives, Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma gypsies on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves." This judgement endorses the Italian government, led by Silvio Berlusconi, practice of having a national register for all the country's estimated 150,000 Roma gypsies and travelers, whether Italian-born or not. The Interior Minister intends to go even further and finger print all gypsies, including children as according to this creep, a certain Mr Roberto Maroni, taking the fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, [to] remove the children from their parents.

Run that last bit by yourself again, “and if necessary, remove the children from their parents.” People like Maroni and Berlusconi have clearly not learned a thing from the 20th century, for make no mistake, they are determined to repeat all the abuses their class heaped on the economically poor in the 19th and early 20th century. It is not as if we do not know what happens to children when they are taken en masse by the state from their parents. The children of Native American’s, Australia’s Aborigines and previous generations of Roma all found themselves in the most wretched of children's ’homes,’ having been placed there by the State for much the same reason as that second rate crooner Silvio Berlusconi and his fellow satraps now intends inflicting on gypsy children. Whilst in these so called ‘homes,’ these children were abused by sexual perverts, beaten and forced to accept Christianity and deny their own traditions.

Whilst the Italian governments looks for ways to round up, deport and steal the children of gypsies and travelers. The Italian media stokes the flames of racism and the fear of crime; and in the process all the old chestnuts about gypsies are being regurgitated. Scare stories about Gypsy women enticing and stealing babies and young children as reported by Seumas Milne, have already triggered an orgy of racist violence throughout southern Italy against the Roma.* "Often carried out by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local Mafia, the Camorra." The response of Roberto Maroni the Interior Minister in Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing was fascistic? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," *

Within living memory over one million gypsies were murdered in Nazi Germany’s Nazi death camps, the largest number of Hitler's racial victims bar the Jews. That within approximately 55 years of those tragic and obscene events Gypsies once again find themselves being targeted by a European State, finger printed and segregated in a bureaucratic manner from their fellow citizens should send a shudder down all Europeans. For if the Italian governments current attacks on the Roma is not a chill wind from history I do not know what is.

Some may feel I am over egging the pudding, if so they should take a look at the propaganda the Nazi State used against Gypsies to justify their slaughter. They stole aryan children including babies, Gypsies were all thieves and criminals, there children if aryan in appearance should be placed with German families. In other words the mass murder of Gypsies was necessary for the good of society as a whole.

Has the Italian government been called to account and censored over this matter by the EU parliament? Were the wires between various European Chancellories and Rome burning hot. Did Brown, Merkle, Sarkozy and other EU big shots tell Berlusconi he has more than overstepped the mark of common decency; and remind him that the European Union was partially formed as a warning against history. 

Not at all, only days ago the new Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was welcomed back into the G8 elite group when they recently met in Japan; and as far as I am aware the plight of Italian gypsies were not even touched on, just as the discrimination and violence inflicted on gypsies who live in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania failed to stop these nations assent to full EU membership. 

A clearer warning from history than the current plight of Italy's Roma and travelers I cannot think of and we ignore it at our peril.**

*http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/10/race.humanrights

** Photo's  above,-----

1/ Members of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, also known as Gypsies, lay down a wreath to commemorate the Roma murdered in Nazi concentration camps, at the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, on Friday, Dec. 15, 2006.

2/ Roma homes burning in southern Italy 2008.