Erasing a culture? I feel like there’s a word for that.
Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!
Had to make sure this wasn’t posted on lemmy.ml before commenting
Think that says enough.
I assume they feel this is justified because communism is about equality and you can’t have equality if you have multiple cultures, am I right?
I’m not sure I could fairly attribute the current actions of this instance with a political system per se.
Lots of places try to hide behind surface level groups, but don’t actually employ the dogmas or beliefs in practice.
A good local example would be the Christo-fascist republicans in the US - largely just sycophants
This never happened in America with the native population! Capitalism and Democracy! (for the white male landowners)
Like fascist Italy with South Tyrol… Can we please stop repeating fascist things?
What did they do to south tyrol?
At the time it was annexed (after ww1) it was about 99% German, 1% Ladinian and 0% Italian (obviously, since it never was affiliated with Italy), so they had to try really hard to change that. To do that, they created Italian names for all places (ironically English-speaking people typically use the Italian names nowadays that haven’t even existed before), made the native language illegal, made the native culture partly illegal, taught alternative history in school (saying it always was that way and it just was a missing part of Italy despite having been Tyrol for over a thousand years), deporting the native population to Germany, etc. Fascism doing fascism things.
After Italian fascism ended in 1945 it got better, but it took until the 70s for South Tyrol to gain autonomy in most regards and for the native population to gain back their rights. And that also only happened because of a lot of protesting (going as far as blowing things up).
The result of all: Still >70% German, a few % Ladinian, rest Italian. But it would’ve been different if they hadn’t had as much support (from North Tyrol for example) and if it wasn’t mountainous (that really helps with doing things secretly that have been made illegal.
Now that less and less people still are here who have experienced fascist oppression it’s our task to ensure that it isn’t forgotten, forgetting fascism’s crimes is the first step towards the return of fascism. Right-wing populist parties are becoming stronger again all over Europe right now, and a few of them have been downplaying fascist crimes already - which wouldn’t even be possible if everyone was well informed.
(Btw it already was a widely controversial topic back then - on one side the UK had promised Italy that they’d get South Tyrol (among other areas, some that they also got and some that they didn’t get because of mainly USA’s concerns) if they joined their side in the war, on the other the USA for example saw the problems that’d be coming with annexing a culturally and historically 100% different region (and trying to replace the native culture) and was firmly against it)
Ah I see. So kinda similar to what happened to Gorica and the surroundings of Trst hut even worse because there weren’t many Italians in Tyrol in the first place.
Those two were always mixed. Majorly German but still mixed. Most importantly they never were their own culture, just part of a bigger culture. And they weren’t cultural core regions.
North Tyrol and South Tyrol, even when ignoring their well over a thousand year old ties with Austria and going back to a time before Austria existed, have always been one culture, united. I guess you could compare it to taking Latium (the region around Rome), splitting it in two parts, choosing one part and making it let’s say French, forcing everyone there to be French, trying to replace local culture, cuisine, language, clothes, festivities etc. with their French equivalent, telling people that it has always been French, etc. Not sure if North Latium and South Latium are as close culturally as North Tyrol and South Tyrol, but I suppose so and at least they’re an Italian cultural core region and have been for ages so at least in that regard they’re comparable.
(Except the people there would have a harder time resisting since they can’t hide as easily as in the mountains, so chances for success would be higher.)
And that’s not even considering that the cultural gap between Tyrol (typical Alpine culture) and Italy is much bigger than between for example the Provence and Latium (both maritime).
China comments: “nuh-uh, you are rubber I am glue”
China is making the wrong decision:
“These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs.”
In 2022 the Karakax County village of Dutar – named for a Uyghur traditional instrument – was renamed Red Flag village.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the $600 billion water megaproject that IIRC is supposed to route the Red Flag river through that village…
Names come with utility and meaning. If a village has a new utility, it typically takes a new name (New Amsterdam -> New York, Ville-Marie -> Montreal). Guardian at its finest.
This happens on my country all the time of late . I can’t even pronounce the letters in the new name of the hospital where I was born.
They’re gonna name the town the same name, so I wonder whether I’ll get a passport with a home town I can’t say or spell, or a passport with a home town that no longer exists. Either way, I’m getting strip-searched .
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hundreds of Uyghur villages and towns have been renamed by Chinese authorities to remove religious or cultural references, with many replaced by names reflecting Communist party ideology, a report has found.
“This is part of the broader efforts by the Chinese government to conflate Islam with terrorism,” said Elaine Pearson, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
“The names of their villages serve not only as historical records but also embody the community’s ties, distinct town culture, and values.
Since 2017 it has also issued official Chinese names for locations in Arunachal Pradesh, the disputed Himalayan region where China claims territory.
Pearson said: “Part of the reason we know this is happening is that in one case a woman released from a re-education facility tried to get a bus ticket home but found her village didn’t exist any more.”
Since launching its “strike hard” campaign against Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in 2014 in the name of counter-terrorism, the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained millions of people, in re-education camps and jails, criminalising religious acts such as growing beards or reading the Qur’an.
The original article contains 774 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
