Last month, a harrowing video emerged of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a 46-year-old man. He pleads and writhes for six long minutes before suffocating to death. Despite the striking coincidence in circumstance, the victim was not George Floyd. He was Stanislav Tomáš, the most recent Romani victim of police brutality in Europe — this time at the hands of Czech police. Official responses have ranged from the shocking to the silent. Czech authorities immediately defended the police’s actions, tweeting “No Czech George Floyd” and claiming that their actions were proportionate to his apparent criminality. Meanwhile, grassroots solidarity protests have arisen across Europe to demand justice.

The killing of Stanislav Tomáš is not an outlier. It is a tragedy nestled within a general trend of structural socioeconomic discrimination and violence inflicted by a populace whipped into fascistic frenzies. This is now common across the entire continent. Stanislav’s case is tragically typical: a murdered Roma man from a community that struggles from discrimination in access to education, employment, sanitation, infrastructure, and housing — effectively ghettoized. Stansilav was purportedly homeless at the time of his death.

From Italy’s Matteo Salvini calling for “a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza” to the anti-Roma pogroms already taking place in France, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, a contemporary far-right international has been waging an escalating, popular war on Roma across the continent since the collapse of communism. This is inextricably linked with the almost universally dire economic condition of the Romani people. With the withdrawal of welfare safety nets and states implementing a regime of welfare chauvinism, Romani communities are deemed a lumpen, unproductive surplus population. As has been noted elsewhere in interdisciplinary academic circles, we have seen a biopolitical shift from the “making live” hegemonic within pre-neoliberal global political economy, to the “letting die” of surplus labor in contemporary capitalism. The empirical example of the condition of the European Roma population evidences this shift.