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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Does choosing not to accommodate anglophones count as ethnic cleansing?

My intuition is no, we’re not an ethnicity. The textbook examples of ethnic cleansing involve specific heritage, not a skill which can be learned by anyone. But there are examples of culture specific to Quebecois Anglophones, and children can obviously be born into one or another language. So I can see it counting on those grounds.

The point ought to be moot. Language is specifically called out in the Quebec declaration of human rights, and ought to prevent any “juridical acts” discriminating accordingly. Clearly, that hasn’t held any sway for some time.

It's ethnicity in a cultural sense, not a racial sense.

Which is something I've never quite been comfortable with.

It's easy for me to say rounding up all the, I don't know, Americans would count as ethnic cleansing. Nationality is an obvious cultural cluster in a way which English-speaking...isn't? At least not within America. I can see how that would be different in other countries, especially ones with very different colonial histories, but it's not intuitive in the same way that racial or religious or national clusters form an ethnicity.

Perks of being a lingua franca, I suppose.

If the US decided to remove all Hispanics from the US, that wouldn't be called ethnic cleansing? I don't see how nationality can be culturally more important than language. Language is the single most important aspect of your culture. You speak your language every day, whereas you don't often think about what country you live in. People tend to have more affinity towards foreigners who speak their language than people in their own country who speak a different language. That's why separatism almost always happens on lingustic lines. Quebec even calls itself a separate "nation" within Canada.

It feels more intuitive if your country has a history of persecuting regional patois to create such lingua franca.

When you're rounding up children, sending them to specific schools and beating them if they speak a language, it starts to look a lot more similar to other forms of ethnic persecution.

Of course this isn't what's happening here, but I just want to assert that using language to draw ethnic boundary isn't bizarre. It's a very common group signifier along with religion.

"Ethnic cleansing" generally means that someone actually, concretely is forced out of their home without being permitted to come back. As such, the language policies by Quebec are obviously not ethnic cleansing.

Religion and culture can also change just like language, they just happen to be a bit more sticky than language. It's a difference in magnitude, not of kind.

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