Later in the text: "An excerpt from a 17th-century German chronicle, containing the following report of one such hunt: “one beautiful stag was slain, five does, three sizeable wild boars, nine smaller boars, two male gypsies, one female & one baby gypsy.”
Just some fun facts I came to share today... European history is really so sickening to learn about.
They also used to kidnap kids from families and put them to work on farms or churches. But Switzerland is the "peaceful" country of course.
I figure it needs to be added, this wasn't some 17th century stuff, that was common until the 1960s and persisted 'till the 70s.
Fuck... I knew Europe is the birthplace of fascism so I shouldn't be surprised... But fuck... This is new to me.
Yeah... It’s bad. You think you hit the bottom of the barrel on European fascism but there’s always lower to go when it comes to antiziganism.
There was a German baron or whatever who bragged about taking the heads of a young Roma mother and her son as trophies.
It was the same in Scotland at that time too :ukkk:
This also happened with native Americans. Interestingly, Elizabeth warren’s ancestor was a man who was noted as a “good shot” for his marksmanship with killing natives
I think you mean ancestor, unless things are much worse than I thought.
Some history about Romani in Sweden. Killing Roma was made legal as they were seen as Ottoman spies by Gustav Vasa. They were called "tattare", which is derived from Tatars, which is still a derogatory term today (the Crimean Tatars were vassals of the Ottoman empire at the time). That on top of the widespread belief that they were witches, thieves murderers (the usual). Laurentis Petri, the arch-bishop of Sweden, also forbade priests from baptising or burying romani people in 1560.
In 1617 the clergy made a suggestion that all romani should be banished, which came to pass in 1637, after which killing the men was allowed while the women and children were to be banished.
The attitudes started to get a bit less hostile (as in, you wouldn't be murdered or banished) around the 18th century (largely by proving themselves through military service, the brief Swedish Empire had a huge need for manpower there were 200 thousand dead soldiers from Sweden and Finland, who had a combined population about 2 million, during the Great Northern war alone), but in the 20th century scientific racism came in. There was a ban on Roma travelling into Sweden between 1914 and 1954, including during the holocaust. There was also the State Institute for Racial Biology that was trying to solve "racial hygiene" by sterilizing 63000 "undesireables" (among them about 400-500 Roma people) between 1934 and 1976.
To quote Bertil Lundman from 1939, translated (TW, old school scientific racism)
It should simply be the case that the Nordic tribes, who formed the Indo-Europeans, were keenly aware of their mental and physical superiority and did not tolerate any mixing. (...) An element of gypsy blood even in strong mixing often seems purely destructive to the moral (less its intellectual) content of the individual. (..) Unfortunately, to begin with, racial hygiene can hardly go much further than holding back the worst degrees of degeneration.
Not great reading, but I wasn't surprised that hunting Roma was a thing. The only reason that Sweden hasn't done more to harm travelling people is lack of opportunity more than anything.
