From what I remember from school, both Slovak and Serbo-Croatian (maybe all Slavic languages?) have this thing where "R" is behaving kinda like a vowel but it's not a vowel. Can't remember what it is called though.
This is so false that I don't know where to begin. Maybe it's best at the end, when in 2004 after all the wars, when UN and NATO troops were actually stationed there, a pogrom of a minority happened just because the majority heard a rumour that they killed some children somewhere bin the country.
>I think you’re still oversimplifying. NATO countries may have been involved in bloody wars, wars which were varying degrees of bad idea, but at least those wars were fought against regimes which were terrible - brutal and repressive towards their own population. Ukraine is a mostly liberal democracy, which makes invading it even harder to justify.
And the point is that you got this information from the ruling class who were for those wars. Or their allies abroad.
And as for Ukrainan democracy, from the Freedom house report in 2019 it sits between Burkina Faso and the Philippines.
>By far the biggest difference here, I think, is that by being a European war and through the potential for further conflict and nuclear conflict, this war has far larger international ramifications and strategic risks attached to it. To see European cities bombed is to be reminded of what has happened in the past and that it can happen again. That is why it is receiving so much attention.
Bombing of Serbia was a bombing of European cities, specifically bombing of civilian population centers far from the front to terrorize the population. Also without UN approval.
It did not, if you have any international court verdict that says that Serbia conducted a genocide, I would like to see it. Also Serbia was not at war with Slovenia. Those are the basic facts.
Now, even if those things were true, they are claimed by the proponents of bombing, enemies if you will, the same way that Putin is claiming there is a genocide of million Ukrainians in Ukraine. Do you believe your enemies?
Yeah, technically it was the head of Yugoslavia that started a war with Slovenia the moment it left the federation (after Croatia left too). Luckily, war lasted 10 days. Not Serbia, I guess.
NATO bombing was not out of the blue. The head of Yugoslavia was a similar mad man (to Putin), just warring out of desperation. The best proof one has of his lunacy is the fact that Montenegro split from Serbia without any deaths. How did this happen? Due to the mad man dying in 2000. I'm pretty sure he would have enacted order by butchering civilians again, inside "his" borders.
Serbia is also the only country out of these conflicts that does not guarantee seat in the parliament for the exYugoslav minorities. Even though the leadership displayed aggression that was successfully deflected, the defenders made a deal to guarantee inclusion of the Serbian minority in the parliament (Croatia, Kosovo etc.)
Still, we have a country like Germany, that self-flagellates for decades and the sentiment of the majority is quite clear. While the general sentiment of people/press in Serbia is that NATO bombing is equivalent to Putin bombing Ukraine. and yeah, every now and then, the most popular Serbian (Monacoan) tennis player will say things like "Kosovo is Serbia" with complete indifference and still be the Jesus like figure his father makes him out to be.
>NATO bombing was not really out of the blue. The head of Yugoslavia was a similar mad man, just warring out of desperation.
Nobody said it was out of the blue, but it was illegal, wrong and plain terrorist like.
>The best proof one has of his lunacy is the fact that Montenegro split from Serbia without any issues. How did this happen? Lucikly, the mad man died in 2000.
And the best proof of NATO lunacy is that Kosovo declared independence in 2008 because they feared Serbia which at that point wasn't in Kosovo for almost 10 years, during which Kosovar population carried out pogroms of Serbs while the UN forces just watched.
Also Milošević died in 2006, never convicted of any war crimes. Later rulings on other people incriminated him but the same can be said for Tuđman. So, I guess if you die early you are not a war criminal.
>Serbia is also the only country out of these conflicts that does not guarantee seat in the parliament for the exYugoslav minorities.
It guarantees us a seat in the parliament, you just have to pass a laughably low percentage of the general vote. As a minority from Serbia, there's lot of problems in that country but minority representation is not one of them. If I wanted I could go through life without ever using Serbian language, I am not sure the same can be said for a lot of EU countries.
>While the general sentiment of people/press in Serbia is that NATO bombing is equivalent to Putin bombing Ukraine.
Because it is the same, a territory within a country decided it wanted to be independent and it is supported by an outside imperial force.
Yeah, I guess he stopped existing in 2000 and had nothing to do with the peaceful referendum.
> Because it is the same, a territory within a country decided it wanted to be independent and it is supported by an outside imperial force.
How can you believe this? Which part of Ukraine declared independence? What country was supposed to be created out of this independence? Which leaders decided they wanted to create a new independent territory?
> I am not sure the same can be said for a lot of EU countries.
Well, if your country is in EU, the citizens of EU are not forced to learn any language, even if they live outside of their country of origin. Language requirements for non-EU exist due to EU being an extremely lucrative place to live. Moving to Serbia and trying to hop on social benefits will not be as lucrative, so language requirement for citizenship might be unnecessary.
> It guarantees us a seat in the parliament, you just have to pass a laughably low percentage of the general vote.
In Croatia and Kosovo, there is no low percentage threshold. You are automatically in. There's no reason to believe the threshold is achievable, given that people in general do not vote.
>How can you believe this? Which part of Ukraine declared independence?
Didn't those two breakaway republics declare independence?
>Well, if your country is in EU, the citizens of EU are not forced to learn any language, even if they live outside of their country of origin. Language requirements for non-EU exist due to EU being an extremely lucrative place to live. Moving to Serbia and trying to hop on social benefits will not be as lucrative, so language requirement for citizenship might be unnecessary.
I am not talking about EU citizens moving to another country, I am talking about minorities living in Serbia.
I am a part of minority that lived in the now Serbian territory for over 250 years and there's no legal requirement for us to learn Serbian. You can live your perfectly happy life without it. We have our schools, our communities so learning the Serbian language is not a requisite although most people learn it because it offers some benefits.
I found it odd that you thought I was talking about foreigners.
> I found it odd that you thought I was talking about foreigners.
You mentioned that this cannot be said for a lot of EU countries. Turks born in EU do not have to learn German. Immigration within EU is free from language requirement too.
I do not even understand why do you think minorities not learning Serbian is impressive? Croatia and Kosovo both have schools that can use Serbian in their curriculum and no one is forcing Croatian on them. Similar things exist for Czech and Hungarian. No one is forcing these minorities to go to schools to learn Croatian.
> Didn't those two breakaway republics declare independence?
And were immediately annexed by Russia? How independent is that? Who's the new cultural head of these independent republics?
>You mentioned that this cannot be said for a lot of EU countries. Turks born in EU do not have to learn German. Immigration within EU is free from language requirement too.
So Turks in Germany can have schools in Turkish for their children? Do you have a source for this?
>I do not even understand why do you think minorities not learning Serbian is impressive?
Because language rights are central for the survival of minority communities.
>Croatia and Kosovo both have schools that can use Serbian in their curriculum and no one is forcing Croatian on them.
Yeah, when they are not being stoned in Kosovo or have their Cyrillic signs smashed in Croatia.
That's the official lesson plan for non-German lessons in NRW; other German states have similar plans (teaching is devolved to the states in Germany). Notice that this is the plan used in the state-sponsored lessons; private schools are free to use their own plans.
Umm guys, education is about children's rights and it has to be mandatory so that your parents won't be able to override your rights even if they have something against their minority language or against the language majority.
1. The right to mother tongue: wherever in the world, the child must learn the mother tongue(s) of their parents to support the cognitive and psychological development.
2. The right to participate in the society as an equal: the child must learn the official language(s) of the society well enough to be able to understand and participate in the democracy, business, art etc.
On top of that, the bulk of the school curriculum can be in a yet another language, no problem, as long as these rights are ensured as well.
So I read a bit more about Donetsk and Luhansk and while I can see the similarities where
Ukraine = Serbia and NATO = Russia, unfortunately the similarities stop soon when you realize that Kosovo (= Luhansk or Donetsk), establishes a democratic society that includes Serbian minority by default in the government, where Donetsk and Luhansk start banning Ukranian passports, banishing Ukranians, massive antisemitism movements, and basically want to become dictatorships similar to Belarus.
Similarly, Ukranian army is not targeting Russian civilians in these regions and is not banishing them to Russia. There is no displacement of millions of Russians in Ukraine.
If you are trying to say "NATO bombing of Serbia is justified", therefore "Russia war against Ukraine should be too", therefore hypocrites, it does not really work.
Motives matter too. Bombing of Serbia was to stop a bellicose regime and the humanitarian crisis it was creating. It was like bombing Russia right now, which I'd support fully hearted, if it was a possibility.
It was not. Serbia was establishing order within its territory when NATO bombed it without any approval from the UN, basically doing something just because they could. Remind you of anyone?
Saying that Serbia was establishing order within its territory is a bit cynical take. What they did is that they systematically[1] cleansed villages and settlements in order to decrease the percentage of Albanian population in Kosovo.
In a way, they were implementing a century old policy of a guy named Vaso Cubrilovic who argued that Albanians should be expelled[2] from the lands Serbia (precursor of Yugoslavia) took in 1913.
What NATO did, is stopping exactly this from happening.
It's not cynical, it's exactly what was happening. It was the police that was cracking down on terrorists, not army. Army only became involved with NATO involment. And before you say that Albanian guerilla organizations were not terrorist, the US state department classified them that way up to less than one year before the bombing happened.
And as for that supposed policy of Albanian expulsion, by how much did the percentage of Albanians diminish during the Serbian rule of Kosovo? And by how much did the number of Serbs diminish during the Albanian rule of Kosovo?
That's not a source that tells Serbia committed a genocide, because such source doesn't exist.
Ethnic Serbs in Bosnia are a different thing, same as ethnic Bosniak in Serbia are a different thing. Also I found it telling that used Serbs in quotation marks.
It's not arguing about nameing, it's about command line of control. Serb Republic ním Bosnia was a completely different entity than the Republic of Serbia. I mean, Serbia even put sanctions on Serb Republic during some period of the war.
Justifying bombing of Serbia because of Bosnia would be like justifying bombing of Belgium because of the Netherlands. Yeah, sure they are kinda allies but that's it.
>Is it fair to sanction them? No. Should we do it if it helps destabilizing Putin? Yes, absolutely, even more than we are doing now.
As someone who was from a country where sanctions were supposed to destabilize our leader, it doesn't work, never did, never will. In the tough times people rally behind their leaders, just look at Zelensky or Boris Johnson right now.
> As someone who was from a country where sanctions were supposed to destabilize our leader, it doesn't work, never did, never will.
Did you rally behind your leader because of sanctions?
More importantly, what would you suggest, given your previous experience? Start an actual war to depose the leader (not always turning out great, and I'm assuming your country wasn't a nuclear superpower)? Leave everything as it is, let the leader invade neighbors with no repercussions?
Maybe not the leader, but around the country itself. Even people that were vehemently against the leader were deeply against "the West".
>Start an actual war to depose the leader (not always turning out great, and I'm assuming your country wasn't a nuclear superpower)? Leave everything as it is, let the leader invade neighbors with no repercussions?
I don't know, I am not a world leader but I know that those sanctions are not going to have the intended consequences, just about the opposite.
If I had to say something, I would recommend to let them battle em out, with substantial military aid to Ukraine. Throwing out common Russian people from universities and jobs across Europe is just going to feed a siege mentality and its plainly speaking, racist.
> Throwing out common Russian people from universities and jobs across Europe is just going to feed a siege mentality and its plainly speaking, racist.
Boris Johnson's popularity has completely and utterly sunk after a series of scandals that have exposed him as a lying, cheating, hypocrite. It's quite likely that he won't be allowed by his party to contest the next election. To say that he's popular and in particular popular as a rallying cry against international condemnation is utterly false. He's deeply disliked by a large chunk of the population.
Tell me, if Google banned you from all their services because you only lived somewhere and you were a "soft liberal", would you support Google in their decision or would you dig in and go the other way? Or in more simpler terms, take football fans, are they hungry at their ultras when they get fined for something or are they angry at UEFA?
All Europe is doing by these discrimination measures is creating a siege mentality among Russian citizens.
The “rally behind your leader” effect is only usually temporary.
These sanctions and moves spread an unambiguous and clear message which can’t be blocked by state news channels which is “no matter what your government says, nobody supports you”.
It's not temporary, or it depends on what time scale do you define "temporary".
>“no matter what your government says, nobody supports you”
Exactly my point, people at this point flock toward their country not against it. They develop this "so fuck 'em" mentality which would just enable wars to go on.
Those of UEFA and Google are silly, symbolic sanctions. What the EU and US are doing is trying to tank Russia's economy and seize/block the oligarchs' properties. Whether that works is left to be seen, but there are already large protests against the war, there might be more protests against the harsh economic conditions, and Putin cannot just arrest everyone.
But in any case, the whole point is that sanctions are unfair, as they will hit plenty of people that are not involved in the war in any way and do not support it. "We" use them because "we" believe that they work (I hope so, but you might be right of course, I'm no expert), not out of spite for a whole population.
I was using a personal anecdote what happens when some foreigners sanction "our" nation, so I used UEFA as an example. It's a similar mentality when it comes to other kinds of sanctions waged against "our" nation.
>not out of spite for a whole population
You may see it that way, but you and average Russian were consuming different media up to this point, and if we admit or not, media has an enormous influence on our worldview.
Ofcourse if the current trends continue.