this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Russia isnt doing a genocide, they're just Fighting a war over land. You can tell by the fact that Putin speaks about Crimeans as if they're equivalent to Russians, while Israel has made it clear they consider all Palestinians to be animals.
Yeah, them stealing Ukrainian babies and giving them to Russian families definitely doesn't sound like ethnic cleansing.
Also insisting Ukrainians in occupied territory give up their language and culture or face torture and execution.
This is forced assimilation. A bad crime, but not genocide.
If words are used incorrectly they lose meaning. Which is usually fine, but not for a thing we vowed "never again" for.
Forcing people to give up their language and culture can be considered cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is not included in the UN Genocide Convention, so the definition of cultural genocide is not universally agreed upon. But the UN Genocide Convention does include "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" in its definition of genocide, and Russia is not shy about their relocation and adoption programs, so we can pretty definitively say that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.
"Never again" is dead. It's happening again right now and it seems nobody with the power to do anything about it cares in the slightest.
The Gaza genocide is exactly what they vowed "never again" for. Meir Kahane meant the Jews would resort to the most vicious methods to avoid being victimised again. It's was always a pro-ethnic violence slogan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meir_Kahane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Defense_League
Next tell me about how China is commiting genocide on Uighurs. Despite the lack of... evidence. And the endorsement of most major Muslims countries...
You might have a selective memory.
Putin made it clear that he doesn't consider Ukrainian a language
Technically he's right, it's a dialect (:
Even more technically, the line between dialect and language is a blurry one, decided in part by the speakers' intent and identity. British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, and Indian English are dialects, but Scots is its own language? Danish, Swedish, and Norweigan are separate languages, but Française French and Québécois French are dialects?
English speakers tend to have a very binary view of language vs. dialect, because English exists in this weird linguistic zone where its closest living relatives are all.. slightly different English. Sure, it can be a bit difficult to grok some terms from across the pond, but with a short list of vocab words you can generally understand other Englishes just fine, whereas you'll understand other languages pretty much not at all. There's not really any mutually-intelligible other languages that English speakers can more-or-less communicate with. At best, you can pick out a handful of similarities in germanic/scandi languages because of shared heritage.
That's not the case, globally. The Scandinavians (sans Finland) can all talk to each other, (the old running joke of sounds like drunk and/or with a potato in their mouth) but they're "different languages". Germans and the Dutch can generally understand each other, maybe not at full speaking speed, but at very least reading. A lot of African languages are essentially a spectrum of regional variants on each other, and so speakers of one will be able to make themselves understood to varying degrees to speakers of another depending on how far diverged they are; the same is largely true for the Middle East. But then we say Portugal and Brazil both speak Portugese; Spain and Mexico both speak Spanish. Even though there's quite the adjustment period for a person from one visiting the other.
There's no objective standard of what's "dialect" and what's "different language", but a large deciding factor is clearly national identity; people from different countries usually speak different languages (again, English is rather an outlier). The language spoken in Ukraine is not identical to standard Russian. They're at least as different from each other as some separate languages. So if Ukranians say they speak the Ukrainian language, not Ukrainian Russian, that's their call.
It may be for the English language, but, you know, English is not everything. And yes like it or not, ukrainian is a Russian dialect.
Did you somehow miss the majority of the comment, which was not about English at all?
The distinction between a language and a dialect is a matter of opinion and (usually) politics.
Oh my favorite: the political game of whether something is a dialect 🙄
Linguists generally take the position that Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian are partially mutually intelligible languages.
By what definition? Is it really mutual intelligible? I speak neither but from what I know, the pronunciation differs hugely and the vocabulary since Russian is influenced by Old Church Slavonic while Ukrainian has many loan words from Polish (which more often than not originate in Germanic languages).
Also: Someone smart once that a language is a dialect with a navi and an army and Ukraine has both, even though Putin would wish they didn't
Whatever Putin says should obviously be considered of high information value because it bears so much honesty, integrity and insight. Thank you for reminding us all!
True. That's why he never contradicts himself
If Russia plans to genocide Ukraine they would have the war with more force similar to what Israel doing in gaza. In 2 years the death toll in Ukraine vs Russia has been exceeded im 2 months by Israel.
If Russia goal is a genocide then they need to re-evaluate their approach because they are not doing right.
They definitely comitted war crimes but intent of genocide has not been clear compare to what Israel is doing.
You can support Ukraine position but I don't think calling Russia attack as genocidal is accurate.
What Russians are doing might or might not be genocide in the strictest sense. But it definitely is cultural genocide, since their goal is to wipe out the Ukrainian identity, language and culture. Russianization is what Russia has always done to other peoples they have subjugated over the centuries.
I mean, Russia flubbed so hard the whole world saw it.
Israel clearly has the arsenal everyone thought Russia did.