Racism and Fascism - new material (16)
01 July 2010
Blood on the Carpet, Simon Cressy. Searchlight No. 425 (November) 2010, pp. 12-13. Article on a split in the racist English Defence League, which pitches the northern leadership (under John Shaw) against the south in an argument over the misappropriation of funds, a theme only too familiar among far right organisations. According to the article, Shaw has been expelled by the EDL’s “leader”, Tommy Robinson (aka Stepeh Yaxley Lennon) and Cressy predicts that the “EDL could find itself in open civil war by the start of 2011.”
Rom e non-zingari. Vicende storiche e pratiche rieducative sotto il regime fascista, Luca Bravi. CISU, 2007, ISBN 978-88-7975-403-3, pp.75. An interesting booklet that examines the rounding up of gypsies, their containment in concentration camps in the 1940s in fascist Italy, using the camp in Agnone (Molise) in which a re-education programme was set up “to open their heart and mind to a healthy Italian education, so that one day...they may no longer follow in their parents’ footsteps”, as a starting point. Ranging from the slaughter of gypsies (known as Porrajmos) by the Nazis, with an interesting excursion into the different criteria and approaches used to classify and deal with them in different stages leading up to it, Bravi tackles the issue of whether the notion of the gypsies as a race or as criminals was prevalent, noting that there is a continuum in literature that attributed criminality as a genetic trait of this people. Bravi also explores scientific literature from the period that paved the way for the acceptance of racial laws and measures that targeted gypsies under fascism, posing the matter as a “racial” problem that could not be solved through “assimilation”, dispelling the notion that these were basically a result of Nazi influence. Variously described as “vagabonds, layabouts,...wanderers and thieves”, the author deems them a “resistance people” that did not and does not accept the social contract through which people become “useful citizens for the state”, which identifies them as “antisocial” and tries to organise programmes to “re-educate those who resist”, a recurring feature of nation-states. The author notes a lack of acknowledgement of the gypsy’s ordeal under the Nazis [and fascists] and shortcomings in historical research of this issue in Italy.