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Comment by gdy | Hacker News Reader

"you either call yourself russian or get marginalized"

Marginalized for not calling themselves Russian? Marginalized how?

"yet all the federal websites are only in russian and maybe english"

That's true, but only 3% of Russian citizens are Tatar language speakers and there are even fewer speakers for other languages.

Maybe you'll tell me where I can find Spanish version of the Congress website?

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So at which percentage of the population should you start to respect the culture of minorities?

I'll make it even easier. Go to any LOCAL government website in Russia where there is a concentration of these ethnic minorities and find me a version in their language.

Good examples of treatment of minorities are Finland with their treatment of the Swedish minorities there.

Yeah, sure:

- Komi Republic (Komi - a Finnish/Uralic language): https://gov.rkomi.ru/kv/kontakty-pravitelstva-respubliki-kom...

- Tartarstan (Tartar language): https://tatarstan.ru/tat/

- Adygheya Republic (Adyghe aka West Circassian): http://www.adygheya.ru/ady/

That's just a handful that I'm personally familiar with. It's easier to search in Cyrillic.

Cool! Let's validate. Let's find a useful content page in russian and see if it works say in Tartar.

https://tatarstan.ru/documents.htm

So, a guide through all the relevant administrative documents you might need. Let's click the "TAT" button to switch to the Tartar language... Oh wait, what's this? It doesn't exist? Imagine that. Another Potemkin website. The most ironic thing is that the "Report of the Tatarstan Foundation for Citizen's Right Protection" (PDF) is russian only.

Regarding your pre-edit statement about seething in anti-russian hate: if russians don't like it, they can stop invading, stealing and killing. Maybe that'll help?

So bigotry and hatred is okay against all Russians. Got it.

Glad my country never invaded or killed anyone recently...

Any German person I spoke to has a deep feeling of responsibility for WW2. Even today, even younger generations. Believe it or not it makes the society stronger. Russia is far away from that.

Being liked is a privilege you have to earn. Thinking you are owed nuanced, friendly treatment is a bit naive after what russia has done.

You avoided my question: Is bigotry against all Russians justified?

If so, you have more in common with Azov than traditional Western values.

Some measures (like the visa ban) are justified. Telling them what you think - sure. Unjustified violence obviously not.

And how is visa ban justified? Just curious how you would manage to avoid the words 'collective guilt'.

1. Why would I need to avoid it?

2. Visas are not a right, but a privilege.

3. Skripal case.

"Why would I need to avoid it?"

Because it's a slippery slope to collective punishment.

"This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about ‘the Armenians’ as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_responsibility

Life is a slippery slope towards death.

Collective responsibility seems to have worked for post-WW2 Germany though. And made the society as a whole stronger.

Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.

Personally, I have zero interest in letting someone into my country for them later to claim that learning my language is "nazism".

I'll ask again, my country (USA) has killed millions of innocent people since 1991. If we're keeping tally, that's a whole lot more than the modern Russian state in the same time period.

Should Americans (including me) collectively be punished for this (of those of us like me who were actively against it)?

Do you feel entitled to a comfy holiday in Kabul?

Taliban was at war with the US.

Is the EU at war with Russia? Maybe you should stop buying Russian oil and gas right now? Trading with the enemy, you know. Financing Putin's government.

Don't the russians claim they are at war with whole of NATO? And by the way, thank you for this push, now we'll finally ween Germany of its russian gas dependency.

You mean Putin and his propagandists? 146 millions of Russians can't claim anything with single voice.

You are doing exactly what the genocide scholar I quoted warned about.

Then sort it out. Telling you guys to sort your country out is not "genocide".

Again a strawman.

That's what I was talking about from the beginning. If you were talking about something else, that's on you.

Please don't misinterpret my words.

You asked what's wrong with 'collective guilt' and I answered that using this justification is the slippery slope towards "collective punishment" that includes "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". I never said that denying visas is "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants".

But I can give you an example: I've seen many times the calls to stop the export of medicaments to Russia thus killing or disabling most vulnerable civilians [0].

[0] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/970136

You literally set the subject:

> And how is visa ban justified?

You didn't quote my comment fully and left out "Just curious how you would manage to avoid the words 'collective guilt'."

That was dishonest.

Communicate better.

To reitterate:

> Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.

Again a strawman.

I'm not interested in talking about collective guilt until you acknowledge how it impacted Germany. Everything else is just you whining about loosing your privilege.

It 'reeducated' Germans in profound way, but before that it led to a lot of war crimes towards civilian German population.

Now, where is collective Ukrainian guilt for the genocide of Poles and Jews during WW2 on part of Ukrainian Insurgent Army? Looks like it's absent, Ukrainian ambassador to Germany compared Bandera with Robin Hood to the disgust of Germans, Poles and Jews. [0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-07/stepan...

Really? Which war crimes and which war?

Oh look, a (presumably) russian lecturing me about my country’s history with an OPINION piece, while simultaneously knowing dick-didly about it.

Receipts:

https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/SpeechPdf/Por...

https://www.rferl.org/a/1068362.html

I gave you this link as a source for the statement of the Ukrainian envoy in Germany about Bandera being like Robin Hood.

Perhaps, you will like Israeli [0] and German [1] news more.

"The statement made by the Ukrainian ambassador is a distortion of the historical facts, belittles the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people," the Israeli embassy said.

Polish deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz wrote on a local online platform that "such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable."

And if you want historical information about Ukrainian Insurgent Army, I gave you wikipedia link in another comment here.

[0] https://www.israelnews.net/news/272606794/ukrainian-envoy-li...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/ukraines-envoy-to-germany-irks-israeli...

Wait, so you're just going to ignore each point of mine every time I give you evidence and switch to something else? Because right now it looks to me like you're saying "Ignore what you know, pay attention only to the articles I cherry pick for you".

Kind of like calling Bandera's collaboration with the Abwehr "nazism", but pretending that it wasn't nazism or even nazi-collaboration, when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to divide Europe and conducted joint military invasion of Poland in full knowledge of what will happen to the Jewish population there...

No visas until you guys work on your own self-awareness! :D

P.S. Just to make it a bit easier for you, because I suspect The Cult of the 9th Of May is interfering here, but Ukrainians understand that history is not a Marvel movie - heroes can be flawed to say the least. Just because OUN/UPAs actions were criminal against Poles and Jews doesn't negate the fact that their fight against the Nazis and russians were heroic. THAT'S HOW BAD YOU GUYS WERE.

"you're just going to ignore each point of mine every time I give you evidence and switch to something else"

Quite the opposite, I keep the conversation on track and ignore your sealioning [0]. You can't possibly be ignorant about the fate of German civilians when war moved to German territory. Especially about 'which war' was it.

"their fight against the Nazis ... were heroic"

OUN/UPA didn't really fight Germany. [1]

"Just because OUN/UPAs actions were criminal against Poles and Jews"

What were you saying about 'ethno-fascist roots'?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nati...

My country (USA) has killed more people than Russia in invasions in the last 30 years.

As a US citizen by birth (zero control), should my visa/passport also be banned?

Go to any LOCAL government website in France where there is a concentration of indigenous ethnic minorities and find me a version in their language (Breton, Corsican, Basque, etc.)

So what, you approve this standard?

Do you have different standards for Russia and France?

No. I said elsewhere that a good example is Finland. Your whataboutism isn't helpful.

I agree that Finland is a good example, but you claim somehow that its existence makes Russia "fascist by assimilation". So what about other countries that don't meet Finland's standard for treatment of minority languages? Are they "fascist by assimilation" too or "it's different, you don't understand"?

It's different. This poster seethes with anger, hate and bigotry towards Russians in his posts.

How dare I seethe! Majority of russians support the ethnic cleansing of my homeland, but seething - that's going too far.

Look, I get it. My daughter has Ukrainian blood pulsing through her veins (Zhitomir). But Russian blood (higher percentage), too. American blood (hello chattel slavery and native people genocide). And even some Nazi blood from another grandfather.

Is my 9 month old little girl collectively guilty?

Does your girl identify culturally with putinist russia and its values? Did she actively support the russian government since 2014?

Of course not, nor do all Russians. Thank you for making my point.

That's not what I claim. I claim that there is a history of fascism in russia that has been so common place that people stopped noticing it. This can be exemplified by a number of things:

- Treatment of minority cultures (Finland as a counter example, which I give) - Popular media (movies -i.e. Brat 2-, and especially now the outright genocidal state media) - Popular culture (a cursory scroll through VK on the topic of Ukrainians should be enough) - I don't even mention the systemic antisemitism during the soviet times.

If you are russian, you have a choice. You can nitpick and misinterpret my arguments, which -personally- I don't care about. Or you can think about how your own society has failed to uphold humanist values both towards your neighbours and your own compatriots. You can point fingers at the USA, but it won't make your country better and honestly, I bet the majority of people would feel safer having USA on their side, rather than russia. Armenia is a case in point. Nobody says the Americans or EU are holy, but russia is worse, china is worse, iran is worse.

At this point, it is safer for the rest of the world to not engage with russia and contain it until, at the very least, it starts upholding the international treaties and agreements it signed.

"Treatment of minority cultures (Finland as a counter example, which I give)"

If you use the comparison with Finland as indication of Russia being 'fascist', then whole lot of countries including Ukraine are 'fascist' too. Which devoids the word 'fascist' of its meaning.

"Popular media (movies -i.e. Brat 2-)"

And what is fascist about it? Main hero is negative about fascism. [0]

"the systemic antisemitism during the soviet times"

Which is not the case in today's Russia.

As for the past, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which are treated as heroes in modern Ukraine, was quite busy butchering Jews [1] and Poles [2].

"you can think about how your own society has failed to uphold humanist values"

I don't think that vast majority of Russians believed that Putin was going to start the war.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2G1tL235aM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army#Holoc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army#Massa...

"you start to respect the culture of minorities"

That's quite a leap from questioning why the federal government websites aren't translated into local languages. Care to share examples of such disrespect?

"Good examples of treatment of minorities are Finland with their treatment of the Swedish minorities there"

How would you rate pre-war treatment of language minorities in the Ukraine?

"In April 2019, the Ukrainian parliament voted a new law, the Law of Ukraine "to ensure the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the State language". On 16 June 2019, the law entered into force. The law made the use of Ukrainian compulsory (totally or within certain quotas) in the work of some public authorities, in the electoral procedures and political campaigning, in pre-school, school and university education, in scientific, cultural and sporting activities, in book publishing and book distribution, in printed mass media, television and radio broadcasting, in economic and social life (commercial advertising, public events), in hospitals and nursing homes, and in the activities of political parties and other legal entities (e.g. non-governmental organizations) registered in Ukraine." [0]

"So at which percentage"

Ukrainian answer was 10% [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine

That's the same level of laws that you get in Western countries, including Finland. Ukrainian is a state language and public servants must be able to speak it at a minimum.

Of course not. Finland has both Swedish and Finnish as state languages and the study of Swedish is mandatory for all citizens [2].

Compare it yourself.

Ukraine: "Under the bill, all schools and universities will be required to teach in Ukrainian. All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian, although special exemptions apply to certain ethnic minority languages, to English and to other official languages of the European Union.

Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law." [0]

Finland: "All teaching from children’s pedagogy to university studies is available in Swedish in Finland." [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...

[1] https://www.svenskfinland.fi/education-in-swedish/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Swedish

"IS AVAILABLE". Teaching in Russian is also available in Ukraine. The problem that law is solving is that Ukrainian isn't available everywhere(!). It's not about optional courses, it's minimal standards. Nobody is preventing schools from teaching russian (as a subject). But Ukrainian is the state language. Are you saying that minimal standards in Ukraine should be education in russian at the cost of ukrainian?

"Teaching in Russian is also available in Ukraine."

Not according to the law. It simply had 3 years of grace period, starting from 2019. [1]

"members of national minorities who do not speak an official EU language — Byelorussians, Gagauzes, Jews, and, significantly, Russians — will only be able to study at the secondary school level their language as a subject." [0]

"But Ukrainian is the state language."

And Finland has two state languages. [2]

"Are you saying that minimal standards in Ukraine should be education in russian"

No, it's what you are saying when you state that Ukraine has "the same level of laws that you get in Western countries, including Finland".

[0] https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(20...

[1] https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/parliament-passes-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#Ethnic...

Literally in the sources you quote:

> Classes taught in ethnic minority languages will be allowed at Ukrainian-language schools, and some subjects at Ukrainian-language universities can be taught in English or one of the official languages of the European Union.

And yes, maybe the Ukrainian language that has been repressed by russia since 19th century at the latest needs a bit of an affirmative action.

Again, you say 'literally' and then leave out essential part of the quote: "Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law."

That's dishonest.

"maybe the Ukrainian language that ... needs a bit of an affirmative action"

Maybe, but then discrimination of minority languages doesn't allow you to claim that the Ukrainian policy is on the same level as in Western countries.

Of course it does. Or is Russian, Belarusian or Yiddish an official language somewhere in the EU?

Plenty of languages that have fewer percentage of speakers than Russian in the Ukraine are official languages in the EU. And I'm not aware of any civilized country deliberately targeting particular minority languages for discrimination like the Ukraine did in regard to Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish.

And you do know why there are few Yiddish speakers in the Europe now, right? Yiddish might have been an official language somewhere in the EU if not for mass extermination of Jews. In which Ukrainian heroes took part [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army#Holoc...

> only 3% of Russian citizens are Tatar language speakers and there are even fewer speakers for other languages

Ever stopped to wonder why that might be the case?

For similar reasons that people in the US no longer speak German, Dutch or various British Isle dialects (and the reason after a couple generations, Spanish speaking immigrants are more fluent in English than Spanish).

the world is not that different in some ways than five hundred years ago.. there are literate people and illiterate people, on a large scale. The rise and fall of literate languages is not the same story as the number of people that speak a language, or what colors are on the local police car. It is not popular to speak of this in the USA since there is a "unifying myth" of equality. What the USA did do brilliantly is use markets and local jurisdictions to let warring people settle nearby each other, and thrive. Over time the old ways show up however. Evolution is not practiced uniformly.

There are parts of the US that still have German-language newspapers. Detroit had a Dutch newspaper until 2018. Whether it closed because it was Dutch or because newspapers as a product are on the decline is academic; the point is that people in the US do speak German, Dutch, and various British Isle dialects, and furthermore there are third-, fourth- and more-generation Spanish-speaking people throughout the south and west. It's a big country, and a lot happens outside your neighborhood.

Yeah, but a lot of it has (unfortunately) dissapeared. Especially during the anti-German episode related to WWII. Assimilation happens by various means.

US didn't annex the Germans or the Dutch into their country. Stop pretending that russia somehow grew peacefully.

Did the US grew peacefully? I mean all the territory of the United States was taken from Native Americans. Do you get as agitated about this as you are about Russia?

But Native Americans weren't Dutch, were they? Immigrants CHOSE to come to the USA and CHOSE to adapt. A bit different in case of most russian minorities.

If you consider what the Americans did to the natives bad (which you should) you should be as concerned for russian minorities. This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome.

What exactly should I be concerned about?

Disappearing small languages? I am, but what about it is specific to Russia?

"This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome."

Of course it is tiresome. Especially after you say 'American history is good, Russian history is bad' and get reminded about Native Americans. So tiresome!

You seem to have an answer. Would you mind sharing it?

Systematic genocide.

Care to elaborate?

The current genocide against Ukrainian-ness is one example.

Some other examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

What I've seen look like war crimes, what is the argument for qualifying them as genocide?

Stalin's (and bolshevik's in general) crimes are horrible, but ethnic Russians weren't safe from them either. Have you seen breakdown of their victims by ethnicity?

The point is that Russia is the largest country by land area, composed of a great many regions and ethnicities, and yet all the language-speakers have vanished.

This didn't happen by accident. It is the result of a program of systematic, violent, erasure.

"yet all the language-speakers have vanished"

Now that is just false. [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_of_Russia

The most common non-Russian language is spoken by just 3% of the population.

All others are below 1%.

Which is order of magnitude higher than, for example, in Canada, where less than 1% in total speak indigenous languages. [0]

Or look at Poland where only 1.8% in total speak a language other than Polish. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada#Indigenous... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Poland

The lengths this guy will go to, to deny his country's ethno-fascist roots. Russian-exceptionalism is a hard drug to come down from.

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