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by madia_leva 1835 days ago
I agree with you, in fact.

The issue is that the fact they decided to impose a single language to all the country is another example of the nationalism I was talking about. Deciding to erradicate existing languages and cultures for nationalistic reasons. That is cultural genocide. It's not unlikely of what Chinese are doing.

You can contrast this with the case of Switzerland or India where you see you can have a strong cohesion and feeling of belonging to the cpuntry without needing to erradicate significant parts of your own culture.

1 comments

Understood.

I agree with the cultural genocide part, however I'm not sure if they did it for nationalistic reasons ('my country' s great and better') , or for practical reasons ('it would be much better if we spoke the same language and our soldiers could actually communicate' ,etc) unfortunately driven by the hypercentralism which has permeated throughout French history, and still plagues the country to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_%28politics%29?wprov=s...

Interesting discussion, I'll read a bit more about French history and language politics!