cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39086280
My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across [email protected], which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
Not to worry, the mainline of hexbear and .ml regarding Ukraine is completely messed up. They have a completely west-centric view and lack any serious context whatsoever.
Unfortunately stalinists can’t accept that the Soviet Union had plenty of flaws and oppressed people, including workers, in many ways. Instead of learning the lesson to avoid repeating past mistakes they just double-down.
I had a conversation once when someone called all the baltics “Nazi hotbeds” and to support this claim they linked a law that is gradually removing Russian schools in favour of having Russian as a foreign language. Someone was telling me that “people have a right to have education in Russian” and failing to provide that is a human rights violation. I asked to show me a country in which education in foreign language is a right, but sadly didn’t get any answer. I have also then linked soviet laws that forbid teaching in Ukrainian, and surprisingly I didn’t get any answer either.
I have also provided some interesting sources from Ukrainian leftists, one specifically was from a historian. But obviously the American fella on Lemmy - who doesn’t speak a word of any language which is not English, never read anything from a non-western source, lacks cultural context etc. - knows better.
I think life is too short to deal with silly things, and even shorter to deal with idiots. I - a communist from Western Europe - ended up blocking both instances because I have no interests in being associated with zealots of a Stalinist cult.
Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark: Both minorities on both sides of the border are guaranteed their own schools. Not a settler-colonial situation, though.
Lessons are generally in the minority language, the majority language is taught to a native level, graduating gets you both a German and Danish diploma. Technically they’re private schools but receive plenty of state funds and help from both education ministries.
Frisian schools generally teach in German, at least mostly, but have native-level Frisian lessons, our Sinti don’t want their language in schools. Of course neither have their own states so “foreign language” doesn’t really apply, it’s not like our Frisians would be a Dutch fifth column. Recently, we even managed to start teaching our own minority language at the majority schools it’s kind of embarrassing that you hear more Low Saxon spoken in North Frisia than in the rest of the state. Prussians really did a number to us.
Good data, there are some similar cases with remote communities in Northern Italy, but very different situations indeed.
Just had a look at this, the Estonian constitution actually provides for minority schools. All ratified the FCNM, but not the ECRML, which is absolutely understandable they can’t be expected to spend state resources on promoting Russian.
On the flipside: Ukraine did ratify the ECRML. You can point tankies there when they start babbling about Ukraine being run by Nazis.
Interesting, I didn’t look at it. Tbh it sounds ridiculous in general to claim a government is Nazi for trying to make the official language survive (especially in the case of Estonian). It also shows how clueless some people are, as if they actually knew what they were talking about they would know that in Estonia for example Russian is very used in Tallinn, local newspapers are printed in both languages, etc. While in Ukraine you actually needed Russian to study in certain universities even (like in Odesa).
Either way, I doubt any argument would work for tankies, that’s a cult.