The Israeli Question under analysis: Holocaust versus Porajmos

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

For hundreds of years the Roma population had wandered from community to community, ostracised, derided and scorned not because it ever wielded power, not because it ever occupied positions of authority in disproportionate measures but because it lived beside society, marginalized. Yet after the holocaust, who claimed they should go back to India?

Some members of the Roma Community

For the Roma (gypsy) people, the holocaust is called the Porajmos. Due to the extreme complexity in drawing up figures for the Porajmos (devouring) and due to the fact that the Roma community did not have sophisticated methods of registering and counting at their disposal, the total number of Roma murdered in the Nazi years is estimated to have been between 220,000 and 1.5 million - a huge difference, compared with the constant figure of 6 million Jews estimated for the same period. Could the Roma Porajmos have been as large as the Jewish holocaust?

This does not mean the holocaust did not exist

Concentration camps existed in Romania in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. How many gypsies were crammed into them?A large part of the historiographical records have been concentrated on Jews and not on other groups which suffered the same fate. This does not mean the Holocaust did not exist; however, it does insinuate that the Porajmos could have been underestimated. 

The question is further complicated by the debate, even among the Jews, as to what or who a Jew is. Who counted, then, in the holocaust? And who did not count in the Porajmos?

In fact, do the Roma people count at all? How many speak of the Roma or the Porajmos, how many speak of the Jews (and what Jews?) and the holocaust? Why did the Jews get to inhabit an area which had not belonged to them for thousands of years, when the Roma did not get a homeland which they had left hundreds of years beforehand?

Romani children under holocaust

Why did nobody remember, in 1945, to state that the Roma had been raped, murdered, disembowelled, forced into trains, tortured, held in deplorable conditions and branded Untermenschen (sub-Humans), that millions of them had been slaughtered by Fascists, and why did nobody then remember to carve out a swathe of Northern India (from where they came hundreds, not thousands of years before) and declare it a Roma homeland?

The Porajmos was the Gypsy equivalent of the Jewish holocaust. Period. Were millions of Indians moved out of their homes to accommodate them? Let us in future not insult the collective memory and identity of peoples by concentrating on some and excluding others.

The Noble Peace Price Winner

By Fidel Castro

I shall barely talk about the Cuban people, who one day swept away United States domination of their homeland, when the imperialist system had reached the peak of its power.

Men and women of all ages could be seen marching through the most emblematic plazas of the country’s provinces on May Day.

Our Revolution arose in the place least expected by the empire, in a hemisphere where it acted as absolute master.

Cuba was the last country to liberate itself from the Spanish colonial yoke and the first to shake off the odious imperialist tutelage.

Today I am fundamentally thinking about the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its heroic struggle against the merciless plunder of the resources which nature bequeathed to this noble and selfless nation, which once took its soldiers to isolated parts of this continent to bring the Spanish military power to its knees.

Cuba does not need to explain why we have acted in solidarity, not only with all the countries in this hemisphere, but also with many in Africa and other regions of the world.

The Bolivarian Revolution has also acted in solidarity with our homeland, and its support of our country took on major importance during the years of the Special Period. However, this cooperation was not the result of any request on the part of Cuba, nor was it to enforce any conditions on people who required our educational or medical services. In any circumstances we would have offered Venezuela our fullest support.

For Cuban revolutionaries, cooperating with other exploited and poor nations was always a political principle and a duty to humanity.

It satisfies me greatly to observe, as I did yesterday via Venezolana de Televisión and Telesur, the profound impact on the sister people of Venezuela of the Ley Orgánica del Trabajo (Comprehensive Labor Law) promulgated by the Bolivarian leader and President of the Republic, Hugo Chávez Frías. I have never seen anything like it within the political scenario of our hemisphere.

I paid attention to the enormous crowds who gathered in the plazas and avenues of Caracas and, in particular, the spontaneous words of citizens interviewed.
I have rarely seen, perhaps never, the degree of emotion and hope which they put into their statements. One could clearly see that the overwhelming majority of the population is constituted of humble workers. A veritable battle of ideas is being forcefully waged.

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador bravely declared that, more than an era of change, we are experiencing a change of era. Both Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez are Christians. Obama, on the other hand, what is he, what does he believe in?

On the first anniversary of the assassination of Bin Laden, Obama is competing with his rival Mitt Romney to justify that act perpetrated in a facility close to the Military Academy of Pakistan, a Muslim country allied to the United States.

Marx and Engels never talked of murdering members of the bourgeoisie. In the old bourgeois concept, judges judged and executioners executed.

There is no doubt that Obama was a Christian; in one of the currents of that religion he learned the trade of conveying his ideas, an art which was very important to him in his rapid ascent within the hierarchy of his party.

The Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia in July of 1776 affirmed that all men are born free and equal and that their Creator conceded them all certain rights. It is known that, three quarters of a century after Independence, Black slaves continued being sold in public squares with their wives and children, and almost two centuries later, Martin Luther King, winner of the Nobel Peace prize, had a dream, but was assassinated.

The Oslo jury awarded Obama his and he almost became a legend. However, millions of people must have noted the scenes. Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama rapidly traveled to Afghanistan, as if the world was ignorant of the mass killings, the burning of books which are sacred for Muslims and outrages committed on the corpses of murdered persons.

No honest person will ever be in agreement with acts of terrorism, but does the President of the United States have the right to judge and the right to kill; to make himself at once the court and executioner and to commit such crimes in a country and against a people located on the other side of the planet?

We saw the President of the United States sprinting up the steps of a steep stairway in his shirtsleeves, advancing rapidly to a temporary stage and stop to give a speech to a large contingent of soldiers who half-heartedly applauded the words of the illustrious President.

Those men were not all born U.S. citizens.
I was thinking about the colossal expense implied by all that and which the world is paying, as who is going to carry this enormous expenditure which is already in excess of 15 trillion dollars? That is what the illustrious Nobel Peace prize winner is offering humanity.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 3, 2012
7:50 p.m.