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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region would be well-aware of the extremely complicated cultural, linguistic, and political realignments within the patch of territory currently known as “Ukraine”.

Sure, but the masses buy the first narrative someone with a modicum of credibility sells them. Find a friendly historian, find a friendly journalist, have the latter cite the former and voila: Russian was never spoken by more than 5% of the population of Ukraine, citable on wikipedia. Find a friendly linguist and friendly journalist, and you can create the West-East Slavic Languages or add Ukranian to the Western Slavic ones. Again, a single article in an Reliable Source is all that is needed for wikipedia to consider it a fact on par with the Earth being round. And since most people will not delve to discover and possible dissent, a consensus among the masses can be manufactured by a wikipedia editor, skilled in the art of wiki bureaucracy and lacking in appreciation for the truth.

Putin’s casus belli isn’t made any more or less valid by Zelenskyy refusing to conduct an interview in a language which everybody already knows that he speaks.

Records can be destroyed, and lied about. Have a reliable source claim Zelenskyy speaks Russian at such a low-level he is unable to discuss politics live, and it will believed by the masses whos willingness to research the truth ends at wikipedia, if that.

crafting an easily-falsifiable narrative about the proud and independent history of the Ukrainian/Ruthenian-speaking nation.

See above.

But lets ignore the deceivers, and focus on the language nationalism. In many Slavic countries the idea of a Nation (not as a synonym for a country) includes at its heart a language which is a distinct property of the members of a nation and which is meaningfully distinct from other languages. From the Spring of Nations a crucial demand was to be allowed to speak ones native tongue, usually associated with the peasentry, in official everyday business with the state and in parliaments also. This is probably the history, particularly within the context of Austria-Hungary, Zelenskyy is much more familiar with than Americans who never had to think about their native tongue and the wider society and any possible conflicts between them. And it is not like such conflicts do not exist today: A lawmaker just a few months ago protested to make Greenlandic an official language in the Danish parliament by making a speech only in Greenlandic, and ommiting the legally demanded Danish.