Thought you all might be interested in the Radio Program I did quite a while back on
this stuff.
Bob
This is the final draft report for Straightfacts radio on the growing racist
atmosphere and semi-fascist solutions now becoming a reality here in Europe! Taped on
June 8, 1998.
A growing racist atmosphere and semi-fascist solutions are now becoming a reality here
in Europe!
Two Czechoslovakian cities are moving to wall off their 'problematic' Gypsies!
Good Evening. This is Bob Malecki reporting for Straight Facts from northern
Scandinavia,
quite near the Polar Circle!
In previous reports I've described the atmosphere of racist hysteria spreading
throughout Europe, and especially in former deformed workers states of Eastern Europe
-- Nazi's marching on the streets once again through Europe and the latest round of
electoral victories, once again putting the Nazis on the political map of Europe in
countries like Germany, France, and Norway ... not to mention the recent electoral
victory of the Nazis in Hungary.
Now, in a most extraordinary turn of events, we have two cities in the Czech Republic
are beginning to build new ghettos along the lines of infamous Nazi ghettos, with
names like "Warsaw and "Lentz"! This time around, the ghettos are aimed to pen in
so-called "Gypsies" or Romanic peoples.
Reporting from the publication USTI NAD LABEM in the Czech Republic, Peter Green has
the following to say about these developments in the Czech cities of Usti and Pilsen:
"Two Czech cities have decided to fence in what they call ''problematic" public
housing residents, creating what is virtually a ghetto for the residents, mainly
Gypsies, who officials say ruin the calm, orderly life of their neighbours.
City officials say fencing in such citizens, and guarding them with round-the-clock
police patrols, is the only sensible way to deal with people who refuse to pay rent on
their city-owned apartments, throw garbage into the street and gather on sidewalks
talking, singing and sometimes drinking until late in the night.
Street-side socializing may be a way of life in Madrid, Rome or New York, but in this
depressed industrial city on the banks of the Elbe river, city officials have agreed
to spend 350,000 koruny ($10,900) to stop such behaviour. They will build two
four-meter-high (13-foot) walls around a pair of decrepit two-story apartment
buildings that house 39 Gypsy families."
Green cites Milan Knotek, a spokesman for the Usti city hall:
"The fence will separate this problematic community from those people who have private
houses on the road'' said Knotek
''The wall will not stop them from moving about. It will not be a ghetto enclosed on
four sides.''
But, says Green:
"In fact, three fences and an abandoned building will effectively limit access to the
two buildings, on Maticni Street in a poor, crumbling district of Usti, and city
officials have promised to maintain their around-the-clock police patrols."
And Green continues about the city of Pilsen..
"In Pilsen, the beer-brewing capital of Bohemia, elected officials plan a fenced-in
compound on the city's outskirts for several hundred public housing residents. Ten
portable cabins will hold several hundred residents in a dormitory setup. Residents
will be free to come and go, while a police station inside the compound will keep a
24-hour watch. A city-appointed warden will supervise the cabins and grounds."
Green quotes Petr Cekal, a Pilsen city council official, interviewed by the newspaper
Mlada Fronta Dnes:
''The caretaker would have the right to enter any room, whether the resident agrees or
not'' said Cekal.
According to Green, objections are being raised to the move.
''This is a concentration camp'' said Pavel Dostal, a Social Democratic member of
Parliament, cited by Green.
According to Green, "He said it was clear that the Pilsen camp would be
disproportionately filled with Roma, as Gypsies prefer to be called, who are usually
the poorest and least educated of Czechs."
''This is how the Nazis started to 'solve' the Jewish question,'' Dostal added.
''This is pure racist segregation,'' says Dimitrina Petrova, executive director of the
European Roma Rights Center in Budapest. ''It's incredible. It's totally unacceptable
in a civilized democracy.''
''We have noticed for some time that the Czech Republic seems to be the champion of
racism against Roma'' Petrova added.
And Green notes that
"In World War II, about 77,000 Jewish Czechs were deported by the occupying Nazis and
killed in the death camps. Nearly all of the country's Roma population of 8,000 were
also deported by the Nazis and all but 600 died in the camps."
And Green finishes with these observations:
"Most of the estimated 300,000 Gypsies in the Czech Republic today (out of a
population of 10.3 million) arrived from Slovakia after World War II. They live in
grinding poverty, trapped in a vicious circle of poor education, teenage pregnancy,
unemployment, petty crime and alcoholism. In scenes reminiscent of the segregation-era
South of the United States, the Roma, who tend to be darker-skinned than most Czechs,
are often denied work, housing or social benefits simply because of their skin colour.
Roma children are routinely shunted to schools for the learning disabled, and Roma are
regularly harassed by the police and often physically attacked by groups of skinheads.
In the latest incident, a Czech Roma died two weeks ago after he was beaten by
skinheads, then run over by a passing truck as he lay unconscious in the street."
And this last paragraph captures the real living reality for millions of immigrants
throughout Europe today.
Behind all of this is the fundamental new situation that the working class in this
part of the world as elsewhere is faced with after the enormous historical defeat that
the destruction of the Soviet Union through capitalist counterrevolution has meant.
<STRAIGHT FACTS>> Bob, what kind of program is the revolutionary Marxist left
counterposing to this racist assault against the "Gypsies", or Roma people?
<MALECKI>>
Well, all communists, all socialists, and class conscious workers must oppose this new
attempt to re-introduce Nazi style ghettos enforced by the armed fist of the
capitalist state along with the vicious and increasing terror inflicted on large
groups of immigrants by the ever bolder Nazis who burn, plunder and kill while the
cops attack leftists for trying to stop this filth here in Europe. Connected to this
is the demand of Full Citizenship Rights For All Immigrants!
What's especially needed is a powerful trade union and immigrant mobilization to stop
these provacations and to smash every attempt by the Nazis and capitalist governments
to use the immigrant issue to split the workers movement.
Because if we allow the immigrants to be put in ghettos, terrorized, and deported en
mass, as it is posed in many countries in Europe today ... well, then, tomorrow it
will be the mass organizations and parties of the workers movement which will be on
the agenda for destruction. Time is getting very short, my friends.
The destruction of the Soviet Union is the fundamental Rubicon that has been crossed,
and the *real* start signal of a whole new era of inter-imperialist rivalry, growing
nationalist, bonapartist, and semi-fascist and fascist solutions and preparations for
a new round of imperialist war to once again redivide the boundaries of influence and
spheres of the competing imperialist predators on this planet.
In the crucible of these events, a new Bolshevik Party must be forged along the model
of the original Bolshevik Party led in Russia by Lenin and Trotsky.
And this is connected to reforging a communist International based on the first four
congresses of the Communist International, The history of the left opposition (not
least, the struggle against fascism in Germany) and the founding documents of
Trotsky's Fourth International..
And as reports from Europe, South East Asia, and Latin America of late prove, time is
getting extremely short.
<STRAIGHT FACTS>> Thanks, Bob. That was our European correspondent, Bob Malecki,
reporting for Straight Facts Radio in Sweden.
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