Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

Repost from the old site. Here is a great paper (very factual, academic and hardly biased at all – come on, Morris Dees, find that bias!) on Gypsy crime (or actually, Roma crime, since the proper term for Gypsies is now Roma) in Europe, mostly in Czechoslovakia. It’s obvious English is not the author’s native language, but the paper is still pretty much intelligible. I always wondered why the East Europeans hate these people so much, to the point of killing them, attacking them, etc. Now I understand. Completely. The Left line on East European Roma, as it is with all criminals nowadays, is appeasement and denial. Are Roma criminals? Well, the Left chortles, they say all Roma are criminals! Surely they are not all criminals? An example of this line are these Wikipedia articles, where Roma crime is barely mentioned, except to say that Roma are arrested at a much higher rate than non-Roma. The reason given is the usual specious nonsense – Roma are arrested more often due to discrimination! The same nonsense is said about Blacks in the US. Well, gosh, could it be because they commit so many more crimes? The Left argument is appealing, until you look at some facts. In the case of US Blacks, globally, there is no evidence at all that Blacks are more likely to be arrested for their crimes, or more likely to be prosecuted, or to receive heavier sentences. Recent studies that show Whites more likely than Blacks in the South to receive a capital sentence even question whether they are more likely to get the death penalty. Another reason given by Wikipedia for Roma crime is that society is mad at Roma for their extreme rate of welfare dependency. Due to the fact that society is hostile towards them, this automagically turns them into criminals! Amazing. Society often seems like it doesn’t like me too much, but the Hell if that is going to turn me into a criminal! The real problem with the Left is an allergy to facts. According to the report linked above, the majority of Roma in Czechoslovakia are either bums, welfare leeches, petty criminals, pimps, whores, thieves, drug dealers, con artists, loan sharks, or some combination, or, if they do not do these things, they defend them in other Roma, which is almost as bad. I realize that that’s not a scientific analysis, but that was what the paper stated. Those on the Left who object are asked to produce sociological studies showing that the majority of Roma are not either engaged in or supportive of these activities. I would still like to see some statistics on how many Roma are actually involved in crime (not how many just get caught), and how these rates compare with non-Roma. As it is, their crime rate seems astronomically high. Like Ashkenazi Jewish culture in Europe, which Kevin MacDonald points out also had a notion of cleanliness-uncleanness – Roma culture divides the world between the tainted and victimizable and the pure and familial. Roma are related to people from India. They probably came from Punjab about 950 years ago. East Indians have a low crime rate in general, so it is dubious that the Roma crime rate is genetic. Extremely dubious! Looking at the individual case histories in the paper, one image flashes over and over: the Black and now Latino underclass in America. It’s the same: broken families, incompetent parents, chronic unemployment, welfare dependency, thievery, illegitimacy, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, pervasive dishonesty, drug dealing, use and addiction, prostitution and pimping, long arrest records, delinquent peers modeling general thuggery, poor grades, aggressive acting out in and eventual dropout of school, on and on it goes. Mostly multi-generational. Both the young and the old appear sociopathic. People in India seem to have low rates of sociopathy along with a surprisingly low crime rate. Much of this is attributed to the Hindu religion. Therefore, comparing them with their genetic twins the Roma, one questions just how genetic sociopathy really is, especially since the best scholars in the field – Lykken – now divide sociopathy into psychopathy (mostly genetic) and sociopathy (largely environmental). It is the latter that Lykken 1, etc. are invited to prove that the (Indian) Roma of Eastern Europe are hereditarily tainted. I have a feeling this will be difficult to prove. What possible selection pressures (great paper, BTW) could have occurred in European Roma populations over 950 years to actually select for criminality, anti-social behavior, con artistry, and general cultural pathology, especially while the most criminal Roma were being slaughtered and imprisoned (thereby thwarting their breeding potential) for centuries? One can argue for a Roma IQ of 85 as a causative factor, which is a fact, yet Indians have the same IQ and commit comparatively little crime. There is a very serious Roma crime problem in the US. Common scams are fortune-telling and Irish Travellers. The race realists are going to have an even harder time explaining this group, who are nothing but White Irishmen who have adopted a “Gypsy” way of life over centuries, all the way down to incorporating Roma phrases in their cant language. Race realists are asked to prove how Irish Travellers are different genetically than other White people. The existence of a group like the Irish Travellers, ordinary White Irish who have adopted and mimicked Roma lifestyle and customs all the way down to fine details, is a perfect case of culturally transmitted criminal and social pathological behavior without a trace of genetic influence. I feel that immigration officials should be extremely judicious in which Roma they allow into the US, and no Irish Travellers should be allowed in period. Only a few carefully selected Roma immigrants should not be allowed to come to this country. I believe I had an experience with Roma recently. I was outside the Walmart when a family band approached me. The woman appeared Hispanic but spoke in a gang-inflected manner peculiar for a woman of 40 or so. She and her band of girls were selling cheap plastic flowers for a 13 year old girl named XXX who was tragically killed by a drive-by shooting in Fresno the week before. They got $1 out of me but then tried to bully me for a $5 or more. As they walked away, they started speaking a strange language. They told me it was Romanian. I then asked if they were Gypsies and the matriarch quickly said no. But Romanians are not as dark-skinned as these people. Now that I look back on it, there was no 13 yr old girl tragically shot dead in a driveby shooting. The dark skin, the clever con game, the wandering matriarchal clan, the large brood, the Romanian language, the gang speech in an older woman, it all adds up. They could only have been Gypsies. In the end, I am having a hard time explaining Roma crime and social pathology, though it is clearly cultural and probably not genetic. How did they end up this way, why, and what is the way forward? Is there a shining path to liberation for these people and those they victimize?

Notes

1. Lykken, D.T. (1995). The Antisocial Personalities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. (Excellent book by the way! Essential reading on sociopathy and psychopathy by one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on both.)
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7 thoughts on “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”

  1. I can’t find the thread that mentions Roky Erickson and the Aliens so I’m going to post the Jackson C. Frank video here. The French electronic ensemble Daft Punk used Frank’s forgotten l962 song for the final (and best) scene of their arty sci-fi movie Electroma. His story is grimmer than Roky’s because he didn’t survive his craziness and poverty and start performing again. He was wrecked by fate and stayed that way until relieved of his misery in l995 with his death at age 52.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BASLQBHbqM

  2. Explain Roma crime rates? If your people been persecuted and excluded from mainstream European society for 1000 years, you might be sociopathic, too. Note this isn’t a leftist cliche, it’s a fact. Exclusion does breed sociopathy, no doubt about that. And sociopathy breeds exclusion in turn. Vicious cycle. Of course it is nothing to do with “race” or genetics as nutjobs might allege.
    But it’s not simple. The exclusion is not a one-way prejudice, it’s also two-way: since Roma define themselves by what they are not (not us, not impure mainstream society) then the situation is doubly hard because they also exclude *themselves*. In fact the Roma beliefs that you refer to concerning cleanliness and impurity are actually what define them as a group – not the language, genetics or the lifestyle. Many Roma groups do not speak Romani. To integrate with mainstream society fully would mean the abandonment of these purity/impurity beliefs and rituals which effectively would mean they were no longer Roma ie they would have to surrender their whole historical identify, which of course they resist doing. However irrational and archaic their beliefs and self-definition might seem to us, it’s just another set of odd religious and cultural beliefs in a world full of weird religions and archaic beliefs. So to be Roma means to follow these beliefs and not be us. The strange fact that they believe these practices make them superior to the mainstream – despite their appalling social statistics – is not so hard to understand if you draw the analogy with fanatic religious groups, though this is only an analogy. It’s also a psychological defense and, as said above, what defines them. Roma are quite proud people despite their situation. Roma would probably dispute these are religious beliefs though clearly supernatural.
    A Roma man I know told me the purity practices have weakened substantially, which seems inevitable. But Roma traditionally do not tell us about these, it weakens the supposed power. So he may not have been giving me the full picture.

  3. I think its fair to say the Roma are now quite removed from India genetically and very removed culturally because they have mixed with host populations in Europe. Also it is difficult to say where in India they were originally from because some suggest they might have been Dravidian in origin, in which case they would be from the South. Even though they have remnants of the Indian look, their European mixture makes it difficult to pinpoint which region of India they might be from. On the whole, they now probably look more Turkish and even East European than the general Indian look.
    As for the Indian IQ, the low castes bring the average down greatly. Remember, there are only 13 million Jews in the world and they have been very productive people of society (in whichever society they’ve lived in), but there are a lot more Indians with a higher IQ average than the Jewish population.
    The upper castes (or the equivalent to upper castes because the Muslims, Sikhs and Christians do not fit any of the castes) in India have among the highest IQ in the world. This bodes well for India’s future.

  4. I believe it is now fairly certain the Roma came from north India, based on both linguistic and genetic evidence. Of course that doesn’t say they didn’t come from somewhere else before that.
    What is the reference for this claim about low average Roma IQs?

  5. Interesting topic. First off, just for the record, it’s Romani or Romany, but never Roma. Rom means man, Romani is plural. I suppose I need to read some of your other posts to get the point of this particular piece, but my experiences with Romani in Hungary while living there were, for the most part, hardly shocking. There are many different groups among Romani and linguistic variations. The Vlax are different from the Sinti from the Romnichals or Kalderar. Some are wealthy, some live in grinding poverty, some are footballers, some are musicians, some are thieves, some travel the world with internationally acclaimed dance troupes, some work in boring factories. Some are beautiful and charming, some are abrasive and obnoxious. You know, just like all people. All are descended from people displaced by the Muslim Invasions of India such as that waged by Tamerlane. There is no “genetic” predisposition to criminal behavior, just the same old result of marginalization, poverty, desire to have stuff one can’t afford, workplace discrimination, illiteracy and realities of the uneducated. Some of this they have only themselves to blame, some they can blame on the right wing nazi assholes who call themselves Christians. They aren’t stupid people and I can assure you that no Rom is going to give a darn about an IQ test or cooperate with any such demeaning nonsense. In fact, they are smart as hell and would have never survived in such hostile locales if it were otherwise. There is so much information out there about the Romany, no one should think there is any mystery to them or the Irish Travellers for that matter.

  6. “First off, just for the record, it’s Romani or Romany, but never Roma.”
    Do you have a reference? That is not true in any of the web sources I have read concerning Roma in Europe including those set up by Roma themselves. The officially preferred name in Europe is Roma. The spoken language is called Romani. But not all Roma speak Romani. In Greece they get called ‘tsingani’ which is a broader term referring to nomadic travelers but this has come to be disparaging though not as disparaging as “yifti’ (gypsy). Sometimes they refer to themselves as tsingani to avoid confusion but it is not the preferred term.

  7. Roma in US are better integrated and commit fewer crimes than Roma in Europe. Muslims in US are also better integrated and more accomplished than Muslims in Europe who life in ghettos. Culture and treatment of people does make a huge difference and US is way more tolerant and accepting that Europe.

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