Social Trust in Romania II: the GQ I

romania vs România

In my last poast (Simon & Schuster why no call?) I coined the cumbersome anti-mnemonic ‘The Seven Cs’:

Conscientiousness -> Civility -> Credibility -> Compromise -> Covenant -> Constancy -> Comity¹

This long and unmemorable list was intended to summarise the crucially functional set of psychosocial pre-dispositions and behaviours undergirding the high-trust societies characteristic of NW Europe.²

I then declared, logically but baselessly, that the general absence in Romania of these attitudes and attributes explains the Scientifically Demonstrated fact that the country is lower in interpersonal trust than any other European nation.

In this follow-up I want to examine the influence wielded by the population in Romania that is most obviously bereft of ‘The Seven Cs’. I mean of course the Hungarians Gypsies. My finding—that the Hungarians Gypsies have an entirely negative effect on social trust in Romania, and many other things besides—may well shock and scandalise you. Buckle up and line your panties! You are about to experience *at enormous length and in intimidating depth* le frisson de unmitigated antițigănismul!

ORIGINS

As is pretty well known by now, genetic studies have proved that the Gypsies—whom the Romanians call țigăni and whom they, and you, are now supposed to call by the endonym Rom (pl. Roma, adj. Romani)³—originated in the NW Indian Subcontinent. They are thought to have been one among the untouchable castes, possibly sharing forebears with the Dom, dalit musicians of today’s India. They are first recorded as appearing in Eastern Europe (outside Romania) in the late 14^th century, but it is unknown when they first arrived in Europe.

Some historians claim that the Gypsies came to Wallachia with the Mongols in the mid-13^th century, meaning that the Romanians at the Dismounting must have found them already roaming about the stricken countryside. Another possibility is that the Gypsies’ European arrival dates from the mid-14^th century, in the wake of the Ottomans. Either or both would fit the known chronology.

Recently a tale of ‘Roma slavery’ in pre-modern Wallachia and Moldavia has begun to circulate outside Romania (betcha you’ll never guess why).⁴ It’s true that many Vlach peasants in the quasi-feudal Romanian Lands, before the 1850s, were hereditarily bound to their lord and his land, and could be sold with it (that’s so TRAD!). Gypsies, being then still nomads, were not tied to the soil and so could not be transferred as appurtenances to it, though they were bound to their lord and so could be sold as persons.

In the broad, this seems to me very like West European villeinage, with necessary adjustments (cultural sensitivity!) for nomadism in the case of the Gypsies: villani sui generis, extra villanus. It’s notable that the Romanian boyar, unlike his properly feudal Western counterpart, had no legal power of pit & gallows over any of his subjects, yet no serious historian classifies as ‘slavery’ the rather more rigorous institution of West European villeinage. Frankly I don’t care whether the Gypsies of the Romanian Lands WUZSLAVEZFO’FO’HUNNERYIAHS, so I decline to go any further into the matter.

Q&A on the GQ

When I started writing this piece, my intention was only to describe in one shortish chunk of text the Gypsies’ wasting effect on social trust in Romania. I have since come to realise that this plucky minority ‘produces’ much more than I had previously thought—thus the looming behemoth of verbosity you now confront on your screen.

To guide us in our discovery of what the Gypsy presence ‘produces’ for Romania, let’s you and me now have a little Q&A session. I will pretend to be you and ask the questions on your behalf and I will be me and give you the answers. Does that seem fair and balanced to you?

Q: You said before that the Gypsies are estimated now to form only at least maybe as little as five per cent of Romania’s population. What effect then can they have on social trust? Surely five per cent is too small a proportion to be very influential at all?

A: Well…maybe you ought to find a time machine and tell that to DALOF TIREHL AND THE ZINAS before they try to exter

You obviously don’t understand that quantity ≠ quality (we’re talking about the Gypsies here, so pliz construe the latter word in as value-neutral a sense as you possibly can). Also, you are not taking into account the marvels (read: horrors) of hybridity: the sheer fitness of Gypsy genes and memes within the literal body of the host society! Neither do you apparently realise that snapshot population statistics reveal nothing about the rate of change⁵ and its qualitative (as above) ramifications—e.g. for national IQ.

Anyway I’m gonna get to all of this by and by. We will begin by exploring the vibrant-but-not-particularly-diverse world of Roma social life (and I ain’t talkin no SPQR!)

THE NATSIA AGAINST THE NATION: ROM SOCIETY

Social relations among the Gypsies are hierarchical and tribal. This means that among them there are binding and strongly policed concentric circles of ingroup loyalty and trust. Read KMac’s overview here; you won’t do a better thing in your entire worthless life, you filthy anti-Semite.

For those of you who regard KMac as terminally LoW STaTus CodEd (just open the link faggot), here’s a very long quotation:

[First is] the basic household consist[ing] of a three-generation extended family, often including more than one married child and their children.

At the next level Romany families are organized in familia consisting of several related families typically under the leadership of one individual, usually a male (the rom baro—’big man’) who has exhibited leadership and negotiating abilities. Closely related households constituting a familia tend to live in nearby areas.

The next level of organization is the vitsa or tribe. The vitsa, sometimes translated as ‘clan’…is not a face-to-face social grouping but rather a set of familia descended from a common ancestor. Families from different vitsas avoid living near each other, but do regard each other as Rom.

In addition, the kumpania is a social grouping of households and familiyi. It is not based on kinship but rather serves to regulate interactions of diverse Rom who are working in a particular area.

A kumpania may consist of only one familia that actively prevents non-relatives from being members, or it may include familiyi of different vitsas who live in an area and are subject to the economic, political, and moral regulation embodied in the Rom legal system.

The highest level of social organization is the natsia or nation…These groups have different dialects, customs, and appearance but acknowledge the others as Rom.  

The kris Romani is the main Romany legal institution. It serves as a mechanism for resolving economic (e.g., infringement of fortune telling territory, stealing from another Rom) and social disputes and contracts (e.g., marriage and divorce) among the Rom.

Members of the same vitsa regard themselves as relatives with obligations to help in time of need. In general, helping and obligations for ritual events such as funerals are at the level of the vitsa, which, as we have seen, is a kinship group...Finally, the wortacha is a work group formed to accomplish an immediate task, such as cooperating in an auto repair business.

Conflicts within Rom society generally occur on the fault lines created by kinship relationships. Close relatives generally cooperate with each other in conflicts, while non-relatives are regarded as untrustworthy…

Allegiance to other Rom is a direct function of kinship distance in a hierarchically branching social organization: People have most allegiance to their familia, then to their vitsa, and to the kumpania, and finally to the natsia.⁶

BARO BARO ROM BARO BARO: THE KING OF THE GYPSIES, DORIN CIOABĂ (MORE ON HIM NEXT TIME)

How would you expect people like this to regard their non-Gypsy hosts? KMac again spits mad troof (references excised):

The Rom think of themselves as morally superior, and this self-appraisal is not threatened by the oftentimes negative attitudes held by the gadje (i.e., non-Rom)…They enjoy deceiving the gadje and do their best to prevent outsiders from getting information about them, so much so that obtaining information about them is difficult and much of what they tell anthropologists must be taken with a grain of salt…

For the Rom, the maintenance of boundaries between themselves and the gadje…is a continuous, almost daily concern. It is based on two factors: (a) social contact with gadje is limited to specific kinds of relationships, namely economic exploitation and political manipulation for advantage. Purely social relations and genuine friendship are virtually impossible because of the second factor; (b) a whole symbolic system and set of rules for behaviour (romania)⁷ which place the gadje outside social, moral, and religious boundaries in a multiplicity of ways, the most important being their marime [ritually unclean] status.

…the Rom exhibit an ingroup-outgroup morality in which lying to the gadje and being secretive and elusive toward them are socially expected forms of behavior…

…attitudes toward the non-Rom world are amoral. The legality of an activity is a consideration only because engaging in it might result in penalties such as being arrested. Stealing from a gadje is not considered immoral, and in fact the Rom have a myth in which God allows them to steal food and other necessities because a Gypsy had swallowed a nail intended for the crucifixion of Jesus…

The Rom value being able to obtain money from the gadje by outwitting them. Apart from deception and illegal activities, common tactics include making a loud commotion to embarrass the target, alternating flattery and hostility, and begging and pleading. These activities require an extraverted personality type, and the Rom regard shyness as a severe liability.

So there ya go: non-Gypsies are unclean creatures and therefore beyond moral obligation; predatory and mendacious behaviour towards them is socially encouraged, if not strictly obligatory. None of this bourgeois ‘Seven Cs’ nonsense for the TRAD Roma!

The implication, I hope, is clear: never—but *NEVER*—trust an elf orc a person of Romani heritage (an orc)!

FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS WHITE MAN! DO YOU TRUST THIS FACE? (#656,565,885 in the Physiognomy is Real series)

INTERPENETRATED COMMUNITIES

Q&A continues…

Q: m-b-b-but surely such people would avoid the gadje wherever possible—right right right?

A: No no no! It is not so! Allow me to explain.

You, Q: Die Fascist scum

Me, A: No but really! The next thing I want to tell you about is what Trotskyists might refer to as the increasing interpenetratedness of the Rom and Romanian nations.

KMac once more, on Gypsy reproductive strategies:

Marriage among the Rom is endogamous…Sutherland (1975) found that endogamy had increased among the Rom in the U.S., since marriages occurred more commonly among closely related vitsi rather than among unrelated vitsi. Fraser (1992/1995) also finds increasing tendencies toward endogamy as well as consanguinity (marriage of blood relatives), although marriage between first cousins is not approved. However, marriages with people from other vitsas in the same Kumpania may be made in order to create closer kinship ties within working groups.

Now this is all very well: among Gypsies who migrate in quantity to countries other than their ‘own’, endogamy is no doubt the rule (they RETVRN to tradition). But it is increasingly not the rule in Romania.

Last poast I mentioned that intermarriage between Romanians and Gypsies is not as unusual as you might think. How common is it though? I would say, with admitted impressionistic roughness, that in the larger cities—other than the capital—maybe five to 10 per cent of people have recent Gypsy ancestry. In the countryside, in country towns and in smaller regional cities it’s nearer the lower end of this range. In Bucharest it’s more like 10 per cent overall. There, among those under the age of about 18, it’s certainly higher, approaching maybe 20 per cent. In fact recent Gypsy admixture appears to be much more prevalent among the young everywhere in Romania.

I could be a bit off on the numbers (as I’ve said before, no statistics are kept), but I doubt I’m far away from the truth. Genetic interpenetration is happening, and it appears to be accelerating intergenerationally.

Now here’s the thing. Deluded Romanian rightists and right-leaning normies will either deny race-mixing, by invoking OUR MEDITERRANEAN BLOODZ CUZ WE WUZ ROMANZ or some other preposterous cope, or admit it and blame communism. They’re wrong on both counts.

COMMUNISM IS NOT TO BLAME (COMPLETELY)

It’s true that the communists compelled many Gypsies (TRADitionally nomads, you remember) into sedentarisation. Vitsi were settled wholesale in villages abandoned after the Second World War by the Transylvanian Saxons. Prefab apartment blocks were built to accommodate Gypsy clans in formerly Romanian- or Hungarian-only hamlets. Many ended up the cities, housed often in crumbling former residences of boyars exterminated or fled. This new interethnic proximity resulted in fraternisation to a previously unheard-of degree.

In this connexion, however, it has to be remembered that the pre-communist ‘fraternisation baseline’ was very low. Gypsies had always occupied a niche in older social hierarchies as musicians, țuică still-makers, basket-weavers, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, bear-trainers and so forth. Nevertheless, given the dictates of romania (xexexe I can’t help but chuckle at the name) and marime, there was very little mixing above the transactional level. The Rom weren’t interested in anything more, and neither were the Romanians.

I’m informed (SOURCE? the missus and her mum) that, notwithstanding novel conditions of forced proximity under communism, mutual disinterest in the most intimate kind of interracial fraternisation was maintained. Intermarriage was still pretty rare then; it’s in the years since 1989 that things have really changed. Whatever other atrocities the communists might have committed, they’re not uniquely to blame for the interpenetration of Rom and Romanian.

THE EU IS TO BLAME (TO SOME EXTENT)

I cannot think of any people (apart from maybe Subcontinentals) that has been ‘emancipated’ to a greater degree than have the Gypsies by Our Supernational Institutions of Democracy Human Rights Free Movement of Everything. Since Romania’s full accession to the EU in 2007 (read: signing a pact to export people to Western Europe in exchange for shekels) the Rom have been wholly free to invest Paris, London, Rome, Milan and Barcelona with organised gangs of welfare cheats, beggars and pickpockets—from which ‘ecological niche’ activities many a Rom baro and his nearest kin/clients have acquired immense wealth and semi-covert prestige at ‘home’ in Romania.

Thus have the Roms adopted a newfound role as sort-of-secretly admired exemplars and purveyors of low-IQ, low-trust, garbled anti-culture to a society divested of the best of its professional class, and now significantly composed of uprooted and neurotically pushy parvenu nesimţiţi⁸—a mass of poorly differentiated people who properly belong to neither city nor soil. As a consequence, the fitness of the Gypsy genome, and its memetic extended phenotype, has been hugely enhanced.

Increasing Romanian (and still more, in relative terms, Gypsy) material prosperity under EU membership has been bought at the cost of…let us speak bluntly…the nation’s racial and civilisational integrity. Interpenetration—that is, genetic and cultural levelling-down—is much more the fault of Romania-in-the-EU than it is of Romanian communism.

YOU READ IT RIGHT: THE FITNESS OF THE GYPSY GENOME

INTERPENETRATION AND SOCIAL TRUST

Because intermarriage with the gadje tends to—but doesn’t always—result in shunning by the tribe, most intermediate types seem to ‘lean white’. They join the Romanian mainstream. They abandon vicious moral particularism. Jettisoning the prohibition on working for and among the gadje, they find proper jobs. They forsake the peculiar cargo-cult onomastics of the contemporary tribal Rom, rarely naming their quadroon offspring things like…

• Robinet (literally ‘tap’, or ‘faucet’ for all you Americans out there)

• Ambulanța (literally ‘Ambulance’, pron. hahmboolantsa)

• Mercedes (after the car make, pron. merchehdehs)

• Rambo

• Romeo (as in Alfa Romeo)

But cultural mainstreaming doesn’t mean that half-Gypsies become by default people of the ‘Seven Cs’; for in truth the mainstream Romanian attitude to Romanian strangers is functionally identical to that held by the Gypsies. The difference is that, while the Gypsies maintain trust only within the group, Romanians probably extend less default trust to their co-ethnics than they do to non-Romanians (excluding Gypsies of course). Put simply, mainstream Romanians treat other Romanians in practically the same way they would treat a Gypsy.

I will take up the matter of low social trust among the Romanians themselves (ie without especial reference to the Gypsies) in a separate poast. For now, I speculate that endemic low social trust could be due in some measure to ever more prevalent genetic blurring and cultural inter-assimilation among the general population. Only a fool treats a stranger as an honourable individual by default if there is any suspicion that he may be a Gypsy. The problem is that it can be really difficult to tell, without the plain diagnostics of the Gypsy ethnolect—almost every word-initial vowel preceded by an h sound—and/or ever-rarer traditional Gypsy attire, whether one is dealing with a part-Gypsy, a genuine tribal Gypsy or just a very dark Romanian⁹ (many such cases, without any known Gypsy ancestry).

So again: a partial explanation for low interpersonal trust in Romania may have to do with the relatively new challenge of reliably detecting the racial identity of one’s interlocutor by sight alone, in the growing absence of easily identifiable ethnic ‘tags’. In this general context, the only sensible default strategy in dealing with all strangers is zero-trust and zero-sum—to pre-emptively șmech before one is șmeched. As I hinted in part I of this spiteful series, home-grown diversity can corrode social trust among co-ethnics just as well as can immigration.

However, as I will explain somewhere down the line in a breathlessly awaited sequel to the present piece, low interpersonal trust is a longstanding feature of Romanian society. It makes no more sense to assign it solely to the relatively recent trend of intercommunal interpenetration than it does to blame it exclusively on communism.

But oh looky here! I’m already at 15,651,488 words and I haven’t even got very far yet. It’s time to stop. Tune in next time for further transgressive titillation on the subject of the GQ!

1. I know arrows suggest a linear causal relationship among ‘The Seven Cs’. But in fact they probably interact in non-linear fashion, better represented by some sort of concept map specifying a complex of mutually-reinforcing feedback loops but having said that whatever you get the idea

2. Eagle-eyes will have noticed that I tendentiously omitted mention of four arguably less functional NW Euro ‘Cs’: Credulousness, Coldness, Cravenness and Conformism.

3. At least I think those are the appropriate word classes. Anyway, the language of the Rom is known to linguists as Romani. In the Romanian language this word, with the addition of a diacritic (yielding români), is the ethonym ‘Romanians’. It’s comical how close these two words are when seen on the page. It’s almost as if the Gypsies have stolen these names from the Romanians and use them purposely to confound and deceive the rest of the world. Looked at this way, the endonyms of the Gypsies play up hilariously to the ‘stereotypes’ that all goodthinkers are supposed to reject.

4. In 2007, the ‘Commission for the Study of Roma Slavery’ was convened under the headship of Neagu Djuvara, a(n) historian who(m) I have cited many times elsewhere and whom(mst) I otherwise respect. I cannot understand Djuvara’s immoderate sympathy for the Gypsies in any way other than with reference to his Traditionalist inclinations. Note that among the committee’s recommendations were ‘the creation of a museum of the Roma, a research center, a Roma slavery commemoration day and the building of a memorial dedicated to Roma slavery’, none of which as far as I know have even been initiated. OK so Djuvara (RIP) obviously respected the Gypsies for some reason, I guess because he’s TRAD. But did he really have to agree to participation in this EU/Soros-sponsored, US grievance-politics-inspired white-anting of his own people?

5. I have dealt with the ‘snapshot fallacy’ once before.

6. All these words are ‘loans’ from Romanian or Slavic (maybe via Romanian). The Gypsy ‘language’ is in fact more in the nature of a jargon, with heavy reliance on lexical ‘borrowing’—i.e. theft, in which respect it is in perfect harmony with ‘the unique lifeways of the Roma’.

7. Can you imagine how infuriating it is for knowledgeable Romanians that the name of the code governing Gypsy parasitism reads to foreigners exactly like…THE VERY NAME OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY?! I mean ya gotta laugh but it’s sort of as if the outgroup-hostile attitudes that justify the repeated and premeditated Pakistani rape of tens of thousands of English girls were to be known by the name yookay. Anyhow that would never happen because I mean nobody thinks of Pakistani rape gangs when they think of the word yookay do they…

8. It’s hard to translate this word in the full sense; it means something like a coarse/crude/graceless/ill-mannered person…but much worse. ‘Spiv’ and ‘yob’ both come close, but neither quite captures it.

9. Oddly, the missus—who admittedly prefers to distrust everybody and is not particularly observant of such ‘details’—is much worse than I am at telling a ‘de-tagged’ Gypsy from a dark Romanian. The same inability to distinguish is, however, characteristic of most other Romanians around her age. I repeat here what I have said elsewhere: other than in their uninhibited recoiling at open homosexuality, most Romanians are not B A S E D (ie racist).