The Untouchables

"These are gypsies, a culture synonymous with swindlers.  The phrase gypsy and cheater have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: he gypped me.  Well the gypsies have gypped us.  Too many have come here as false refugees.  And they come here to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries...  They're gypsies.  And one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging."
Ezra Levant, Sun News Network

 Titian, Gypsy Madonna, 1510
 
What a hate-sizzling statement.  Hard to credit, harder to understand how and why anyone would sully his lips by allowing such a hate-mongering assessment of an ethnic group like the Roma/Travellers to be spoken.  One reads about the life of Roma in European countries, being forced to live in squalid, miserable conditions because society simply doesn't want them polluting the rest of society.

They are discriminated against in employment.  Their children are held in contempt and denied the same opportunities for educational achievement that other children may take for granted.  Their housing is always substandard, and they have few in power who will champion their human rights cause.
 Landscape With Gypsies, John Wootton, English, 1748

Their reputation precedes them.  Thieving and conspiring to do ill, begging.  A set of values starkly different than most inhabiting society.  Theirs is also a romantic tradition.  Their differences, their caravans as wandering people skilled in poetry and music, loving colourful things and particularly costly objects that belong to others, have made a legend of them. 

British 19th Century authors incorporated them in their novels.  A peculiar culture of a mysterious people who cannot be trusted, who squat on private property and become difficult to dislodge, whose quick eyes can sum up the value of objects they plan to take for themselves.  Whose propensity to violence instructs others to exercise care.

Gypsies were among those notably whom the Third Reich took it upon themselves to expunge from the face of the Earth, in so doing making the world a better place, free of the scum and scourges of society.  Jews, political dissenters, the infirm, the mentally retarded, homosexuals, they were all hugely expendable and deliberately expended.

Ages-old resentments and very particular slurs of debased human presence requiring to be obliterated remain the mark of an uncivilized society, a barbaric mindset.  Canada as a nation comprised of multitudes of people from various locations around the world representing unique cultures, historical backgrounds and universal aspirations, also has a population of about 80,000 Roma.

Many have lived in Canada for four generations, handing down the native Romani language and vestiges of a culture enriched for having been formed for centuries in various parts of the world.  Parts of the world that have rejected their presence, and so they have come to Canada as refugees.  Somehow, it's difficult to credit that France, Hungary and the Czech Republic, among others, treat their Roma like lepers.

Gypsy talk. Mount Pleasant artist JoEllen Brydon will share details of her large scale installation, Lost Histories: The Gypsies of 1909, on Saturday, April 21 during the Manvers Historical Society's annual meeting. The presentation includes images of her art as well as historic photographs. Special to This Week