Commentary: Czech Government vs. the pigs
This column is not about corruption, government politics or the scandals that we are learning about today in all the media and on the front pages of the most-read periodicals. I am also not going to write about coexistence between the majority and the minority. The main aim of this piece is to revive what we usually call “humaneness”. This revival is what has inspired my thoughts.
Globalization in the civilized world is leaving its mark on people, a mark that today cannot be called anything other than a desire for Mammon. This god holds total sway over our minds in all areas of life, right at the time of the greatest technological predominance humanity has ever known since the world began. For example, satellites have been sent into orbit and circle us without crashing into each other or into anything else of a similar design created by the human brain in the past.
Our consumer life is directly reflected in the qualities of our character, even in the most intimate aspects. We rarely choose our partners because of our feelings. Today we prioritize how much money they have in the bank or what their position is. Even though we later realize what blinds us and depresses us later in life, we will not admit the truth to ourselves. We are amazed by high divorce rates, by families with only a few children. We are amazed at our demographic decline without asking ourselves: Why? The pursuit of Mammon has suppressed all our other senses. Should we be surprised that we are blind to all other values?
The answer to this is simple. Focus on your feelings, revive them, because only there will you find satisfaction and wealth.
One of these feelings is a sense for what is and is not humane. This characteristic separates us from the animal kingdom only to the extent that we let ourselves be governed by it internally, by how close we are willing to move toward it. Unlike animals, people have cultivated their consciences and written them into law. Because of what is and is not humane, we have created certain moral norms and values, and according to our intellects we instill them in our children. One such essential value is, for example, patriotism, which is basically a lexicon of all the cultural, moral and spiritual values created by a society.
Our sense of what is humane and our patriotism morally dictate the preservation of “memorials”, the cultural and spiritual values of our ancestors, so we can not only learn about them, but also transmit their message from one generation to another. This value is also expressed in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which reminds us of our responsibility to future generations for the fate of all life on Earth.
There is no doubt that the Second World War is one of the most important historical events of our time. As a result of this military conflict, several tens of millions of people died. The Nazi ideology attempted to annihilate other nationalities and races but the “Aryan” one. When this fearsome war ended, all states pledged to preserve the death camps of the Second World War in their original conditions as national memorials.
Of course, these pledges did not refer to Roma people. To this day, the Holocaust against the Roma people has not been recognized by either the government nor the public. This might be because the camp at Lety by Písek was built on the basis of instructions by the Czech authorities and was managed by Czech bureaucrats and guards. Nevertheless, hundreds of Roma people, including children, perished there in remorseless conditions of cold, cruel treatment, exhaustion and hunger. This happened to them because they were born Roma – and it happened despite the fact that they worked properly at their jobs. Those who survived Lety were then deported to the extermination camps. Who knows how it might have ended with all Roma people if the war had not come?! We might not even be here today. We can speculate about this and we can also thank the Allied Forces and the Red Army for releasing us from the extermination and forced labor camps.
Roma people were sent to these punitive concentration camps of death only on the basis of their skin color. The first drops of satisfaction for these crimes did not come until 13 May 1995, thanks to then-President Václav Havel, who opened a symbolic memorial on the site of the labor camp at Lety by Písek. Close to this sacred site, however, a monumental pig farm had already been previously built. Nothing against pig farms, but why not build it, for example, on Petřín Hill in Prague, where the memorial to the victims of communism is? It was the communist regime that did its best to cover up the suffering of Roma people and desecrated this sacred site. From that perspective, the Roma were the victims first of Nazism, then of communism, and now also of a democracy that has not managed to grapple with the past. Why does the pig farm stand near this site, sacred to the Roma, to this day? People died there under inhuman conditions. Try to imagine a pig farm next to the Lidice memorial! What kind of dignity and reverence is the government showing the victims and their relatives by making this possible, by privileging pigs over what is humane?
I am calling on all of you in the name of what is humane – all Roma and pro-Roma organizations, associations, government and non-governmental organizations, all people of good will. Let’s join forces to shut down the pig farm at Lety. Let’s tell the government pigs cannot be valued over people. Let’s tell the government it should not continue to desecrate human remains, that it should allow them to rest in peace with dignity. The 13th of May is coming up, the day for sacred remembrance of the human suffering at that camp. Come take a look at what the post-communist governments have done.
For everyone else who continues to desecrate the remains of the murdered Roma through their discussions: The Bible says spirits even know how to inhabit the bodies of pigs. Bon appetit.
