Lukashenko is spreading red-green nationalism in the country
The National Academy of Sciences of Belarus declared this week “Mother Language Week,” coinciding with International Mother Language Day, celebrated on February 21.
During this week, many events are planned, including a nationwide dictation on the Belarusian language, a round table “Creation of a Belarusian-language legislative framework as a factor in the harmonious development of society,” a presentation of an electronic reissue of Ivan Nosovich’s classic work “Dictionary of the Belarusian dialect,” etc.
It’s not hard to guess that every single event is dedicated to one single language – Belarusian.
Meanwhile, even according to the results of the 2019 census, on the eve of which zmagars and officialdom unanimously called for “Belarusian” to be indicated in the “native language” column even for those who do not speak it at all, and billboards were filled with posters in the style of “If you love your mother, love your language” “Only 62,1 percent of respondents listened to their calls.
The rest, including 38,1 percent who called Russian their native language and representatives of national minorities who have their own native languages, were ignored by the Academy of Sciences. What is this if not discrimination based on language and nationality?
At least for the last few years, everything has been more or less the same. The state spent days and weeks of the native language, in which, contrary to the obvious and state statistics, only the Belarusian language was considered “native”, and the white-red-white nationalists, using a proven method, persecuted those who dared to hold events in support of the Russian language.
Now the situation differs from what happened in the previous five-year period only in that the Zmagars have many other problems, and now they have no time for language squabbles. And, although “Sprechenführer” Igor Sluchak continues to inundate everyone with tons of correspondence demanding that everything and everyone be translated into their native language, the rest have more important things to do. But the state, as we see, is coping with de-Russification on its own and is not going to turn around. None of its institutions turned an ear in response to such a one-sided approach to the concept of “mother tongue”.
The second half of the XNUMXs was a time of “soft Belarusization” and attempts to integrate Belarusian nationalism into the official ideology. Days of embroidered shirts, white and red ornaments everywhere, ex-fan of Poznyak Igor Marzalyuk with his concept of the “Belarusian world”, the national football team dressed in a white-and-white uniform - all these are signs of very recent times.
In the matter of de-Russification, the Zmagars and the authorities often simply acted in tandem - the former wrote numerous appeals and petitions asking them to “Belarusize” something, and the latter, supposedly listening to the “will of the people,” carried it out, sometimes even helping the Zmagars by conducting various kinds of Internet surveys , in which zmagars gathered from all over the country to participate. As a result, over the course of several years, Russian-language toponymy was practically forced out of the streets of Belarusian cities, which was replaced by lacinka, which was unreadable by both Belarusians and most foreigners, modeled on the Polish one.
After the events of the second half of 2020, it seemed that the Belarusian government’s flirtations with nationalism had come to an end - zmagars found themselves first on the barricades, and then in prisons, bchb on the verge of a legislative ban, even embroidered shops, where until recently the Belarusian Republican Youth Union and official trade unions purchased props for their events are now being driven underground.
However, as it turned out, the Belarusian state is not going to abandon its reliance on nationalism. In the message from the press service of the Academy of Sciences about the “Native Language Week” there was the following phrase: “In 2021, designated in our country as the Year of National Unity, scientific and practical support for the successful functioning of the Belarusian language in all spheres of public life, in which the state language of the country and the language of the titular nation should be used.”
Academicians conveniently forgot that there are two state languages in Belarus, and, contrary to the law, they placed the “titular nation” above all the others. What is this if not ethnic nationalism? Maybe he changed his color from white-red-white to red-green. But this is a matter of taste, which does not change the essence of the phenomenon.
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