by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
While the Romani People suffer persecution and deprivation all over the globe, basically, the epidemics – pardon, I meant academics – Gadje and Rom alike, keep wasting time and money on one gabfest after they other. Much like the majority of politicians they are. They fiddle while Rome and the Rom, and the latter in some cases quite literally, burn. Academic and political aggrandizement is the aim of those conferences and gabfests and not the poor Gypsy, wherever they may be.
But dare anyone attack those “grand” men and women, whether of Gadje or Rom origin, and their actions, regardless whether it is the academics, the Gypsyologists, or the politicos. Then immediately legal threats are uttered and slander is forthcoming against those who disagree with them and with what they do and how they behave.
We have seen this by now more than once. Much like in the field of “climate science”. There too dissent results in such actions from those conspiring together to get themselves a nice living via research and what-have-you, funded by grants from universities and taxpayers' money.
The Gypsy “leaders”, by whatever title they may go, also, in the main, work along the same lines and like we have seen in Britain not so long ago when Romani journalist Jake Bowers was invited to, and then did, speak at a conference and one had “forgotten” to invite someone who thinks of himself as the only real Gypsy leader in the whole of the UK, if not even all of Europe. The ranting and raving against Mr. Bowers was just unbelievable, even to the point of stating that, according to the “great leader” Mr. Bowers was not Gypsy, etc.
The academics and the “leaders” alike seem to be the ones that think that they can decide and declare who is and who is not Gypsy, or, as they want to have it all nowadays, Roma.
The only reasons they beleaguer the point of “Roma” and trying to make all Romani into tribes and sub-tribes of the Roma is because only the Roma are willing to teach them the Language and aspects of the Culture. No Sinto would ever do that.
Most of the academics, even the Romani ones, have never grown up in the Language and the Culture and are about as far removed from it often as are the often despised Romungrie and such who do not speak the Language and/or have lost much of the Culture. As soon, however, as they have learned a little of the Language and Culture from the Roma they set themselves up as judges over what is the real version of the Language, etc. and that despite the fact that there are around sixty plus different dialects of the Romani Language and that there are cultural differences between many of the Romani groups, such as between Sinti and Roma, for instance.
But the academics (and “leaders”) do not want this even discussed as it interferes with their status as the great experts and leaders of the People (oh dear!); in the eyes of the Gadje world, at least.
Every time that a Rom is talking to some folks, especially in authority, about this or that aspect of the live and Culture of the Gypsy People it is being compared to what the academics have said in books and lectures and if what the ordinary Rom says is not in line what Prof this or that has said then the Rom must be lying; so the conclusion of the others.
Tell someone in government that Sinti and Roma are different they will retort with that “according to Prof this or that” this is not so and that all are Roma.
In the EU, because of what those academics have created, all Gypsy and Travelers are heaped together under Roma, including the Irish Travelers, and others, who have no link whatsoever, culturally and ethnically, to the Romani-Gypsy.
That is also why all those gabfests. Namely in order to keep perpetuating the myth that they are the experts and others are nothing.
Those experts would be nothing, none of them, without some Rom here and there having been stupid enough to share various bits of information with them and their careers have been built upon the backs of the poor Rom,, to who they give no credit.
© 2010
