Porajmos

I reckon few of you would recognise that word, and even fewer would know today is the official memorial day of it. Not that you're the ones to be blamed for that, it denotes a historical event that is a but a footnote in any history class even where I live. Where this thing happened.

Porajmos, in Romani means to dissect or destroy, and in History, it refers to the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Gipsy race during the second world war. This was an objectively smaller scale genocide than its big brother the holocaust, yet I fail to see why it's so much less well known. The usual estimates put the number of victims between two and five hounded thousand people though some estimates go as high as 1.5-2 million. Which would be one third of the Holocaust.

And yet the silence around this issue is deafening. Strange expression, isn't it? I'm not sure how often you take the time to appreciate what it means, it's surely the first time for me. But the more I think about it, the more it fits and the more horrifying that becomes. The lack of information we all get about it makes us so insensitive about the situation, we are no longer able to register the already infrequent blips on our Radars.

George Floyd for example, was only one man, but because people are inundated with the news like his, his death was able to spark riots that's been going on for months. Yes his death particularly gruesome and disgusting, but if we were to compare Derek Chauvin to the SS my money is gonna be on the Germans. Sorry. And if we were to add up all the innocent victims of all the police shootings how long would we have to go back in the annuls of history to get more than 200,000 let alone 2.000.000? Until the Civil war? Further?

With all that being said I'm not gonna argue here that whatever is happening on the other side of the pond is justified or not, that's not my business. The argument I want to make is that maybe not the most obvious cases of Racism we should be most afraid of. They are apparent, they are well known, they are actively being taken care of. Yes maybe we're not doing a good enough job, maybe there isn't even a good enough job, but at least things are being done.

But what of those who we don't know about, (and at least in the case of my fellow countrymen) we know we don't know about? Maybe the reason we don't hear about it because the problem, if not already solved, is so miniscule it's no longer worth talking about? That's certainly a possibility, but not even my most ethnonationalist, white-supremacist acquaintances (and make no mistake, I know a couple of fucked up dudes) would try to claim the Gypsies have an equal footing in our society.

So I guess, my message is this much: Rejoice you happy westerners that you have the ability to speak about your grievances, even if many of you seem to be hell bent on wasting it on atavistic tribalism. Cherish it because it's far from self-evident. And maybe sometimes take a moment and try to realise how much you don't know, and help those you don't hear about everyday. Often they suffer the most.

Do this today, not because of the issues urgency or anything, but because tomorrow we're all gonna go on with our lives without even wasting a single thought on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

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[Trick Question]

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(Unrelated, but related.)