Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [117]
The Romanians have also continued to persecute gypsies, who suffered as much as Jews from Romania’s wartime profascist racial policies. Romania is hardly the only country to oppress gypsies or “Romani” (“Roma”)—a Times Mirror poll suggests “the one sentiment that unites Western and Eastern Europe is hatred of Gypsies”19—but it is the only one where official opinion seems to support popular prejudice. Romania Mare, Romania’s largest weekly, recently demanded the expulsion of all gypsies from the country (there are 2½ million) and a number of gypsy dwellings have been burnt down and several gypsies murdered.20 Unlike the Free Democrats in Hungary, which includes a statement about fair treatment of gypsies in its party platform, Romania’s political parties are eloquently mute on the subject.
Prime Minister Roman (like ex-Ambassador to the United States Sylviu Brucan) is Jewish, but President Iliescu’s National Salvation Front party does nothing to disavow Romania wartime leader Ion Antonescu whose Iron Guard of the Legion of Saint Michael assisted the Nazis in exterminating gypsies and Jews alike.21 Indeed, Romania was the only power outside Germany to set up and run extermination camps. In the western Ukraine, Antonescu’s minions buried children alive to save bullets and finally drew the ire of Adolph Eichmann [sic], who was appalled by the inefficient and clumsy brutality of the Romanian camps.22 Late in the war, with the writing on the wall, Antonescu changed his stripes, but not soon enough to avoid execution by the Russians in 1946. But today his reputation has been refurbished (he appears as “the great Patriot”), while Jews are again accused of betraying Romanian national interests by siding with the Soviets during the Holocaust and thus made responsible for precipitating their own liquidation! Revisionist history places blame for the mass murders in the Ukraine on the Russians and their allies the Jews.
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, wrote of this tumultuous region of a hundred inextricably entangled, intermarried, warring peoples: “Every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool … political life is characterized by a peculiar mysticism and theatricality.”23 What imagination has contributed is an often mythic history that makes variety the occasion of antagonism and gives to subtle, changing, and often unperceived differences the murderous force of other-hatred. Eric Hobsbawm seems to be echoing Stoker when he observes that “history is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and T.V programs.”24
The hatreds of the region are as often learned as remembered, more frequently inspired by hate-mongering ethnic radio programs than inherited from ancient feuds. Actual identities are more commonly multicultural. “It is perfectly common for the elderly inhabitant of some central European city,” writes Hobsbawm, “to have had the identity documents of three successive states. A person of my age from Lemberg or Czernowitz has lived under four states, not counting wartime occupation; a man from Munkacs may well have lived under five.”25 Unfortunately, such tolerance-breeding genealogical uncertainties are today contrived away by terrorist rhetoric. Loosed of the imperial bonds that under the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires dissolved particularist identities, today’s subnationalist fragments seek a reduction to minimalist forms where local dialect, sectarian religion, and ethnic identity can merge and, courtesy of a constricting logic of ethnic self-determination, can forge a narrow nationality