Vojtěch Lavička: Czech Senator Kovářová is spouting a bunch of nonsense about the words "Rom" and "gypsy"

This is not the first time Madame Senator has focused on the use of the word “gypsy”. She sees no problem with it.

For her, we Roma have simply always been “gypsies” and always will be, because the Czechs have used this exonym (a name for the Romani nation created by non-Roma) for centuries. She cooks her soup of xenophobia according to the same recipe the famous doggie and kittycat use to bake their “cake” in the children’s story.

The senator has grabbed a bunch of ingredients that have nothing in common and combined them such that they might seem to make sense. She throws in Orwell, antigypsyism, Romani political activists, the Tower of Babylon, the right to use “her own language”, etc.

The result is disgusting. The senator explains that the word “gypsy” is the official designation for a person of Romani nationality and says she does not understand why the word “Rom” should be used.

She argues that the word for a German person in Czech, “Němec“, is based on the word for mute (“němý“) and asserts that this doesn’t bother anybody. She claims it’s just the professional Romani activists who keep shouting that the word “gypsy” should not be used as part of political correctness.

Here I would note that German people have absolutely no idea that we label them as “mute” in Czech, and if they did, they might not like it either. This aspect may be the source of her elementary failure to grasp this problem.

Madame Senator has forgotten that Czechs have occupied the same space as the “gypsies” here for approximately seven centuries now. From the start, the term “gypsy” has been used in unflattering contexts and has had a pejorative meaning.

If a Czech person wanted to insult another Czech person because his house was a mess, he’d say “It looks like a bunch of gypsies live here”. In Slovakia, one of their favorite phrases is “necigáň” (“Don’t gypp me”), which means “Don’t lie”.

The senator gives examples of the Czech words for the Dutch, the Germans and the Hungarians, but it’s all the same time to them what the Czechs call them because they don’t have anything in common with them, they don’t live here, they don’t even know the Czech “official” words for their nations. If I could wave a magic wand, I would bring Madame Senator’s thinking into the 21st century.

Madame Senator has gotten stuck in time somewhere during the Czech National Revival period, when Czech educated people and revivalists wrote incendiary anti-German and antisemitic articles emphasizing the Czech right to define the world around them through their own eyes. Back then it may have worked and been supported by society, but today we are somewhere else entirely.

While I myself am opposed to political hyper-correctness and am glad when things are called by the right names, I decidedly support the various minorities, and not just the national ones, who are doing their best to define themselves and fight for their rights. That is the trend today and Madame Senator should know how to respect it.

We have always been Roma, that is what we call ourselves when we speak our own language, and I don’t think anybody’s lips are going to fall off if they officially refer to us as such, not even Senator Kovářová’s, whose political program should not be based on whether she’s going to call us “gypsies” or “Roma” in public. At home in her own living room she can call us whatever she wants.

Madame Kovářová does not understand that if she uses the word “gypsy” during a debate on Czech Television, somebody will object. A Romani activist whom she does not name did speak up to reprimand her for doing so, and in her opinion piece she refers to him as “the owner of a gypsy surname”.

I didn’t watch that debate, but I would be interested to know whether the moderator also reprimanded Madame Senator for using that term. I think that in the case of public broadcast television, doing so should be a matter of course.

In response to that reprimand, Madame Senator recommends travelling out of the city to hear how the simple citizens of the Czech Republic speak. Apparently she does that and behaves accordingly.

Well, sure. The “simple citizens” of the Czech Republic are not public officials, they do not make political decisions or statements.

If those “simple citizens” were to be making decisions together with politicians such as Madame Senator Daniela Kovářová, we could expect to see the concentration camps reopened here. I know that’s an extreme opinion, and I may be wrong, but that’s how I feel.

I have a right to feel that way. Just as Madame Kovářová has the right to babble nonsense.