Research & politics & nationalism [Re: Walachians...]

From: willemvermeer
Message: 35711
Date: 2004-12-29

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote a lot of
enlightening stuff I'm grateful for.


> In Romania, the crackpot part of it has gotten more attention than
> under Ceausescu's regime ... : these people have now had more
access on the markets of printed matter and
> "radio-TV-antenna time" (as it is said in Romania) than ever
before. Of
> course, as anywhere in the world, it is they who have more impact
in
> the masses ... than the
> result of scientific research, which is... dry, complicated, hardly
> comprehensible without a li'l bit of training and which never
enjoys
> the publication of books or booklets in considerable number of
copies
> (and these are expensive at that). This is valid in the West, but
in
> the former commie countries this is amplified (the perpetual lack
of
> funds is far more acute in Eastern Europe).


I emphatically agree that it is universal. If I mumble indistinctly
behind a glass of beer that I have deciphered Linear A and that it is
Dravidian, I can virtually count on being lionized in next Saturday's
NRC-Handelsblad. It's the structural factor the Wiiiiiiik people
thrive on, to mention no others.


> Also: look at the wording, e.g. "cultural genocide".


Yes that's truly horrible. The first time I heard the
notion "cultural genocide" was when a Croat was telling me at some
point in the early seventies that frontier guards along the Austrian-
Yugoslav border in Slovenia used the Serbian word for 'car', or
something incredibly trifling along those lines. His tone was the one
reserved otherwise for reporting mass murder or gang rape. You really
have to be an intellectual to sink that deep. (In the mid eighties
Serbians routinely used the word "genocide" about conditions in
Kosovo. They seriously believed that they were entitled to do so
because it had been said in books written by university professors
that had been published by the Academy of Sciences and Arts.)


> I'm aware that I might reach limits of what's getting off-topic. I
dare
> touch such aspects now and then only based on the part of the
charter
> of this group saying that, to some extend, general culture/history
of
> IE people can also be on-topic. ...


In fact I agree. And as I said in another posting, I feel partly
responsible because I too consort with such people on conferences and
refer to their publications. (Actually I avoid going to conferences
because I don't want to meet those people. But that is not a very
principled or courageous stand...)

----

About ex-Yu:

> But the previous armed conflicts
> were because of the hegemony attitudes of Serbia at loggerheads
with
> the aspirations of their brethren: Croats and Slovenians (to a
lesser
> extend, AFAI can understand, the Macedonian Slavs, but even the
> Montenegrins to a certain extent, given the fact that these have
> traditions of separate statehood, although themselves Serbians).


It is easy to exaggerate the faults of pre-WW2 Yugoslavia. Unless you
were an Albanian or a political extremist (e.g. a communist) it was a
relatively benign dictatorship. And the official linguist Aleksandar
Belic was a very nasty little man who caused a lot of avoidable harm.
Note that our post-WW2 picture of pre-WW2 Yugoslavia is heavily
influenced by the perspective and the political agenda of the very
people who were in prison before the war because they were
communists.

And note also that those "aspirations" and even those "traditions of
statehood" do not exist freely in nature. They are put there by
politicians and academics, in other words by us.


> Yes, but to my amazing in various TV documentaries various big shots
> and common people declared to western reporters, after those
conflicts,
> in which some fought tooth and nail, that in fact they are one
nation
> (even the Moslems are aware of that, in spite of the fact that for
them
> the notion of "nation" is somewhat different from that in Christian
> national groups).


That's natural. The war deprived everybody of the country they had
grown up in. That was a frightening experience. Everybody who grew up
in Yugoslavia after the war willy-nilly was invested with a kind of
Yugoslav identity, not through government coercion (and not in place
of their other identity) but just by growing up in comparable
conditions and watching the same TV-serials and drinking "Alpsko
mleko" and eating "Zdenka sir". Now that all that has vanished there
is an understandable tendency to forget about the unpleasantness that
caused the explosion in the first place and fondly remember the time
that there was not yet a state border between Dubrovnik and Kotor, or
between Osijek and Belgrade. The word is "Jugonostalgija" and a
sufferer from it is a "Jugonostalgic^ar". I suspect the first
manifestations can be documented before the first shots were fired.

------

[On kolegica vs. koleginica.]

> Then what should, e.g., Germans say, incl. Austrians and Swiss
Germans
> (who however sat together for decades and decades in order to get a
> reform of orthography and, in the end, they issued this mess of a
> Rechtschreibung :-))! Or what should say those people who say
either...
> "tomaaahtow or tomeytow" (as L. Armstrong's song goes :o)).


It is a semantic matter. A word like "kolegica" means "female
colleague and I want you to realize that I'm Croatian (or Serbian,
whatever may be the case here)". It pushes the speaker's national
identity down the other guy's throat. That is extremely unpleasant,
particularly when national identity is an explosive issue. And you
can't help doing it because in lots of cases there is no intermediate
possibility. Note that it is not a regional matter.

(That being said I can't avoid mentioning the snide commentary I have
received in Germany about the "norddeutsche Lautung" of my German.
And intolerance about other people's "accent" or choice of words is a
fact of life in the English-speaking world on both sides of the
ocean. We continentals don't notice that because we're foreign
anyhow, so we are excused.)


----

[I'd mentioned the divisivenes of religino in Holland up to appr.
1970.]

>
> Oh, that's amazing; after all, it's been a long time since the "30
y.
> war" (AFAIK, in Germany these differences betw. both communities
aren't
> by far no longer as strong.)


The background is totally different. If I remember correctly religion
was determined in Germany on the basis of the principle of "Cuius
regio, illius religio", so there were a lot of basically
unireligional little states that were thrown together in 1880 or when
was it. In Holland there was a single official religion and several
more or less non-official ones that were tolerated but were subject
to various disabilities. In other words: they were discriminated
against. Of those groups, Roman Catholicism was by far the biggest.
The disabilities were lifted and emancipation was carried through in
the final decades of the nineteenth century and was quite explosive,
particularly (surprise surprise!) because every group refused to
expose their precious kids to the other parties' history books.
During much of the twentieth century all of this was still relatively
recent. But it is almost completely died down now.



Willem