Doing “something bad to the Gypsies”

After these first few days of the Vítkov arson trial, people are asking whether the lawsuit should perhaps extend beyond the four indicted right-wing extremists to include others who bear responsibility for the attack. Animosity and hatred cannot be imprisoned, of course, and last year’s attack was a hate crime. As one of the arsonists said, “We wanted to do something bad to the Gypsies.”

According to the available information, the trial in Ostrava is being conducted correctly, according to the penal code. Be that as it may, no one doubts the defendants will be found guilty of attempted murder – except their attorneys, who are legally required to represent their clients.

As the law requires, the defendants will be sentenced under the penal code that was in effect at the time of the crime, and that is advantageous for them. According to the current penal code, the sentencing for the crime of which they are accused could be even stricter. They face the possibility of between 12 and 15 years in prison, but the court may hand down an extraordinary sentence, either 25 years or even life in prison. The question, of course, is whether the court will actually issue a life sentence.

This trial is not addressing a dispute between Natálka’s parents and the perpetrators, nor is it addressing a conflict between neo-Nazis and the Roma minority. The state is prosecuting the perpetrators of a crime that poses a threat to society as a whole, not just Natálka and her family. However, those who monitor anti-Gypsyism and anti-Semitism are correct: It is not just the defendants who are on trial here. Society’s prejudices are also on trial, all its intolerance, both its open and its hidden animosity.

The German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, reflecting on the “German” responsibility for Nazism, divided that culpability into the criminal/legal, the political, the moral and the metaphysical. In this case the court will seek to determine only criminal/legal guilt, the guilt of the four defendants.

Since 1997, statutory regulations have been improving in this country. Fomenting hatred against any group of people, not just for racist reasons, is prosecuted even more strictly now than before. However, many bear a share of the political and moral guilt here nonetheless – from the parents of these young men, to their teachers, to the politicians and journalists who label people using expressions such as “gypsies”, “inadaptables”, “welfare abusers”, or “they have it in their genes”.

All of us bear a bit of political guilt – every person, as a citizen, is responsible for the results of the state’s behavior. The regional court does not determine moral guilt, but the court of last resort does. To put it in civil terms, our consciences decide.

The core of this problem is not, of course, political correctness, but something we have not managed to get rid of since the Middle Ages. It is the reductive view that transforms complicated social phenomena into the word “they”. “They” used to be heretics, or on the other hand Papists. Then “they” were the bourgeois, the imperialists exterminated by the proletariat. Then “they” were the Germans, the Russians, and today “they” are the communists and the “gypsies”.

In their day, Protestant reformers refuted Manichaeism, based on the bond between light and dark, and proved that while good and evil do exist, the reduction of their polarity, the restriction of one’s view of life to “plus” or “minus”, to “black” or “white”, can lead to tragedy. These days, the author Milan Kundera and the philosopher Václav Bělohradský are warning us against this mindset.

Reflecting on that black-and-white view of the world is a good way to leave behind hatred and prejudice.