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So it's basically a new version of the "Freedom Fries" mania, but with higher popularity?
by acadapter 3y ago
So it's basically a new version of the "Freedom Fries" mania, but with higher popularity?
- nicbou 3y agoWe had a few instances of that in German supermarkets last year.
- k_bx 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- keiferski 3y agoDon’t think I’d explain it as being that simple. Rusyns today are also descendants of Rus but don’t get much recognition in Ukraine today.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoEven the Ukrainian state’s non-recognition of the Rusyn people isn’t so simple: in Slovakia you can meet minority East Slavic speakers who insist that what they speak is “Ukrainian” (when it’s obviously not), and that “Rusyn” is a weird label outsiders keep trying to pin on them.
- keiferski 3y agoThere is a long history of states denying and repressing the Rusyn identity. I’m sure many modern people aren’t bothered to learn their history and just adopt whatever label has been given to them. It’s not significantly different from any other minority group that has been subsumed into a larger group. There are historical cultural differences between the groups as well. Lemkos, for example, are Greek Catholics, which is a minority group in Ukraine and has a different history (tracing themselves to Croats.) https://case.edu/ech/articles/r/rusyns https://case.edu/ech/articles/r/rusyns
- reportgunner 3y agoI'm of Rusyn descent from Eastern Slovakia and I have never heard of this.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoWhich villages does your family descend from specifically? Although it wouldn’t be surprising if a person of Rusyn descent has never heard of this, since one of the most frequent remarks in histories of the Rusyn people is that the identity has sometimes flourished more in the diaspora than in situ. My experience is from mid 2019 in communities around Medzilaborce where I was collecting microtoponymic data. I was obviously inclined to think of this minority East Slavic material as Rusyn, but my informants insisted that it was “Ukrainian”. Considering that these communities have produced figures who went on to be famous in wider “Ukrainian” movements, it is no surprise that the two ethnonyms have competed in that region. EDIT: So I went searching to read more about this using "Čertižné" (one of the supposedly “Ukrainian” villages) as a search term. In this essay[0] where a writer of Čertižné descent is mostly busy criticizing Timothy Snyder, he briefly sketches the phenomenon I witnessed: "The end of WW2 saw the annexation of Subcarpathian Rus’, renamed Transcarpathia, into the USSR. To legitimize seizure of this territory, Stalin brought the debate over the ethnic identity to a close and deemed all Rusyns Ukrainian. Rusyn became a bourgeoise term placed outside of law and all those who identified as such were now forcefully Ukrainianized. Some Rusyns in Czechoslovakia, given the choice of complete assimilation or at least a partial preservation of their culture, accepted the Ukrainian label. For example, the current director of the Rusyn Museum in Prešov, Ľuba Kráľová, identified as a Ukrainian during the communist regime even though she doesn’t speak Ukrainian. Other Rusyns felt closer to the Slovak ethnic identity than to the Ukrainian one." [0] https://rusynsociety.com/2023/04/03/where-timothy-snyder-falls-pitifully-short/ https://rusynsociety.com/2023/04/03/where-timothy-snyder-fal...
- reportgunner 3y agoI was born in Humenne but my grandparents are from along Cirocha river to the east. There's many flavors to rusyns/ruthenians, they can't even agree on the same language so it's possible that they don't relate to other rusyns or they are afraid to admit they are rusyns because they used to be oppressed for it in the past. If you understand the language I recommend the website rusyn.sk, especially the jokes[0], they are a bit different flavor, sometimes not politically correct and my friends love it. PS: looking for the link to the jokes I found [1] that specifically talks about rusyn vs ukrainian identity - it's in standard Slovak language so google translate should deal with it fine if you can't read Slovak. [0] https://www.rusyn.sk/ujko-vasyl/ https://www.rusyn.sk/ujko-vasyl/ [1] https://www.rusyn.sk/nemozes-rusinom-hovorit-ze-su-ukrajinci/ https://www.rusyn.sk/nemozes-rusinom-hovorit-ze-su-ukrajinci...
- f6v 3y agoOh, now “it’s not so simple”. Come on, Rusyn is a very distinct cultural identity that’s much closer to Magyars than to Ukrainians.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoBoth me and the other poster in this thread have posted links on the overlap between Rusyn and Ukranian identities in Eastern Slovakia. The Magyar identity is centered around the Hungarian language and Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, while any history of the Rusyn people will emphasize how they are East Slavic-speaking Greek Catholics, so why you feel that the Magyars are relevant here is beyond me. Some of the Rusyn-speaking world was under Austrian administration in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so they weren’t even under Hungarians politically.
- f6v 3y agoRusyns in Ukraine do speak Hungarian though.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoNo, not to any significant extent. I speak Hungarian and have very frequently passed through that small part of Transcarpathia where Hungarian is still spoken, and I have rarely encountered an ethnic Slav who learned Hungarian to proficiency. The language of interethnic communication in Transcarpatia was generally Russian during the Soviet era, and even remained such into the post-Soviet era, though Ukrainian has naturally gained ground. And again, most of the Rusyn population in Ukraine is living far enough to the north or northeast that they have no contact whatsoever with the Hungarian language. I don’t think you have any actual knowledge of this part of the world.
- f6v 3y agoYeah my wife’s granddad was stationed in a Ukrainian village as a doctor and had to learn some Hungarian to communicate with locals, so… Let’s fight who anecdotes are better. > they have no contact whatsoever with the Hungarian language. Yet loads of them pass Hungarian nationality test which involves speaking Hungarian.
- acadapter 3y agoStealing? It's their shared East Slavic heritage.
- k_bx 3y agoI don't quite agree here, but what they do then is conflate words "Russian and Rusian" to mean the same thing, claiming for various stuff their population has no relation to. It's a dirty tactics very in-line with their today's propaganda machine.
- acadapter 3y agoI don't understand what's controversial about this. "Rus" is the medieval East Slavic society. Three of the four modern East Slavic cultures retain the word root in the name (Russians, Belarusians, Rusyns). One of them uses the expression "borderlands" for their identity (Ukrainians).
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoIndeed. “Rus” is an ethnonym, of famously Scandinavian origin, used across the entire East Slavic area and was never something limited to people in now-Ukraine that people in now-Russia could “steal”. The Uralic- and Turkic-speaking peoples of the Middle Volga, for example, already called the neighboring Slavic-speaking populations “Rus” in the medieval era.
- genman 3y agoActually no. "Rus" was meant to describe "all" East Slavic people, but Russians took it for themselves "only" and started to call Ukrainians "Little Russians" in sense of "Lesser Russians".
- acadapter 3y agoBelarusians also call themselves a variation of "rus", obviously. And "Little Russia" is an old name of a geographical region (which somewhat corresponds to the traditionally Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine).
- Pet_Ant 3y agoThe Moscovy stealing "Rus" identity. FTFY
- snehk 3y agoAnecdotal, but I'm in Poland for the weekend every other week and I've never seen this.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoIt's different when we do it, you don't understand.