- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
From January 1, 2026, Latvia is set to prohibit the teaching of Russian as a second foreign language in schools.
Starting the same date, Russian-language TV and radio broadcasting will be banned in state media. Additionally, the VAT on sales of Russian-language books will increase to 21%.
These measures aim to reduce the presence of the Russian language and strengthen the role of the Latvian language in society.
Russian is the native language for 36% of Latvians.[1]
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I’m sure liberals will start calling this out as an act of cultural genocide any day now
This is exactly the stuff they falsely claimed was happening in Xinjiang
Latvia: openly bans Russian language instruction
: omg le epic based!!! destroy the subhuman orc language!!!China: Satellite picture of hotel
: CULTURAL GENOCIDE NINETEEN ATE FOURTY JORJOR WELL ANIMAL AGRICULTURE 
Its excused as anti-colonialism.
We need to put words on the high shelf where liberals can’t reach them
They’ll say that then support Israel in the very next sentence.
Democracy is when you remove peoples citizenship, right to vote, pensions, ban their schooling, ban their language, ban their media, and tax them separately.
It was only bad when the Umayyad Caliphate did it.
Wasn’t the Jizya usually lower than the tax paid by Muslims?
I do remember reading that conversion of non-Arabs wasn’t seen as a universal good by Muslim rulers, at least during the days of the early Muslim empire: the fear being that you could convert your way out of a reliable income source.
Yeah it took a decent amount of time for iran and egypt to become majority muslim.
Yes, muslims paid zakat which was lower, but the harshest tax was land tax, which was at first 10% for muslims (ushr) but usually way higher for non-muslims (kharaj), this was also the source of some hilarious debunking of western antimuslim propaganda because early caliphate not only did not forced people to become muslims under the fire and sword (as wasusually the case for Europeans) but was actively discouraging people from conversion to islam. Later though, Umayyad economy went into trouble and kharaj was also levied on muslims.
Extremely common Baltic Nazi moment
The Baltics have gotten very pretentious ever since NATO elevated them to aryan.
The yapping little lapdogs of the EU
since NATO elevated them to aryan.
As with all honorary aryans, there is a harsh wake up somewhere in the future. Not to mention that everyone disdains slimy lapdogs, even their masters, they will get plundered and kicked out the moment German oligarchs want to eat them.
Irrelevant nazi dog country barking fashy shit as usual.
Latvia and the Baltic were already apartheid states, with the Russian population as subaltern. Not really surprising they went back to the more restrictive laws common in the 90s and early 2000s
“Here’s how Ukraine can win:”
Nazi shithole
Latvia triumphs over Russian disinformation that knowledge is good
social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism
Is it even a social democracy?
Okay they will switch to English as their secondary language then. Now what?
Are you gonna ban that too? lol
The Baltic states are rounding errors, and minor rural cities in China have more than their entire populations. It’s insane we treat them seriosuly.
Let every state in the EU be treated like any other state in a federation. None of them are real countries. They’re provinces.
Maybe if your country embodied some kind of different ideology it wouldn’t need superficial shit like language to stand apart.
Like they do realize that this is them admitting the grand liberal democratic world order as it was is done, right? That they are turning into a kleptocracy like Russia but with more corporate technofascism?
That they are turning into a kleptocracy like Russia but with more corporate technofascism?
But it’s good when they do it because they are proud of how much western boot they lick while doing it.
When their children need to look for work in Russia they’re gonna regret this. I don’t know the culture of Latvia, but I would guess this is more spectacular grandstanding to distract from vast wealth inequality and false scarcity and is probably not a sincere desire of the Latvian working class.
@RedSturgeon@hexbear.net, could you comment?
In 2012 70% voted against including Russian as a 2nd language in the constitution. There’s clearly been some form of dislike towards it within the society, even if it’s not explicitly shown. And the support for Nationalism has only grown since then.
I think a lot of the population has bought into Nationalism, including the lumpenproletariat. They might be okay with people speaking their own language at home or casually, but that’s about it. It’s hard to tell, people probably have noticed I’m quite the paranoid type and local culture has a lot to do with it, a lot of people are stone cold on the inside with a shiny exterior. It’s difficult to judge by appearance.
Perhaps it might be interesting to look at the history of other countries with language disputes. See what sort of methods a discriminated group can use to protect itself. Like surely there must have been feuds over french and english languages in Canada, for instance, right?
Can someone explain me ytf there are three different countries on Baltic area? Their everything would improve objectively if they are united.
I live there and I mean the short explanation is Nationalism. Also Dynasties of wealth. While they might have reasons to cooperate, unification would ultimately be against the interest of each individual dynasty.
But tbh if you look at Yugoslavia it’s not that different of a story than what’s happening here. Should conditions demand war we’d absolutely fight each other. We already have casual racism we do towards each other.
Stalin didn’t oppress Baltics enough ig.
Stalin was given an impossible task. It’s really difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of issues he was dealing with. all while reactionaries, many of which fled to Capitalist safe-havens were working diligently to destroy the USSR- a country which had hardly any time to develop itself.
The fact that they still managed to have such tremendous achievements, despite it all, really shows how effective communism can be.
I was just joking. It’s understandable why he tried to resign four times from general secretary position.
Socialist People’s Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, when?
If Polish People’s Republic didn’t behave the way it did, we would’ve had it.
