If you want to deprive a people of their national identity, a good way to start is by taking away their language and replacing it with your own. The rest — the economic, political and cultural changes — will then fall into place more easily.

Just ask the people of Belarus.

Now in his sixth term as president — despite the highly contested vote of the 2020 election — Lukashenko is an autocrat, a corrupt and devoted sycophant of Vladimir Putin, who is doing everything possible to strip Belarus of its independence and realign it with its Russian neighbor. Barely three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which Belarus was one of the fifteen Soviet republics, the transition is proving fairly simple.

Classes in most Belarusian schools are now being taught in Russian, which has been made the second official language of the country. Belarus’ nationalist symbols have been eliminated. Official business is conducted in Russian, as are most of the media programs. Hundreds of nationalist organizations have been shut down, and popular cultural individuals are being persecuted.

One citizen said, on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution:

“It is obvious that our children are being deliberately deprived of their native language, history and Belarusian identity, but parents have been strongly advised not to ask questions about Russification. We were informed about the synchronization of the curriculum with Russia this year and were shown a propaganda film about how the Ukrainian special services are allegedly recruiting our teenagers and forcing them to commit sabotage in Belarus.” In his son’s school, dozens of teachers were fired in recent years, and the Belarusian-language section of its website shut down. [Yuras Karmanau, Associated Press, September 14, 2024.]

One of the half-million Belarusians who have fled the oppression of their homeland is Svetlana Alexievich, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. Now residing in exile in Germany, she said in an interview:

“I understand that our Belarus is occupied . . . And who is the president there? Not Lukashenko. The president is Putin. The nation has been humiliated and it will be very difficult for Belarusians to recover from this.” [Id.]

Lukashenko himself has ridiculed his own native language, saying that “nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian . . . There are only two great languages in the world: Russian and English.” [Id.]

Anais Marin, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Belarus, has said:

“The Belarusian language is increasingly perceived as a sign of political disloyalty and is being abandoned in favor of Russian in the public administration, education, culture and the mass media, upon orders from the hierarchy or out of fear of discrimination.” [Id.]

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This is not what the people of Belarus want; this is what Vladimir Putin wants. As he fights to achieve dominance in Ukraine, he seeks also to take back Belarus, under the cloak of a Slavic reunification. In Ukraine, he unexpectedly met with the resistance of a populace — and a government — that are fiercely anti-Russian. In Belarus, however, he has a “president” who is not only on his side, but is deeply reliant on Russia for energy, and indebted in terms of existing loans: Putin’s Perfect Puppet.

Sorry, good people of Belarus . . . it’s practically a done deal.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
9/15/24