• oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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    1 year ago

    What do you suggest doing when your home is invaded by people who want to erase your culture?

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        If you only care about your own life, there’s indeed no reason to.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            1 year ago

            It’s not just land, land is intimately related to culture. Also millions moving to a neighbor country will generally create a political and humanitarian crisis, it’s not a magical solution with no negative consequences.

              • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                1 year ago

                One of the foundation of culture is transforming the land, starting from agriculture. The way the natural land was shaped by the people living on is a first marker of culture. Then comes the art and the buildings, in Europe we have a very dense network of historical remains spanning thousands of years, from cave paintings to modern art museums. If you have ever seen with your own eyes or touched with your own hands a famous remain of your place, you know the emotion is not quite the same as seeing it on the internet. It creates a feeling of belonging to a line of people who have created things bigger than them, and you reach a better understanding of how everything that allows your life today was progressively developed. It makes you want to protect this inheritance for others to access the same knowledge and emotions, and it may motivate you to produce something that could reach a similar value.

                Land inspire artists and creators in general. The most evident example is how Mount Fuji inspired the creation of an insane quantity of art in Japan, such as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai. The famous Great Wave off Kanagawa from this series, which is actually about the Mount Fuji, had a massive impact on the world culture.

                Similarly, post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne painted multiple views of mount Sainte-Victoire https://drawpaintacademy.com/mont-sainte-victoire/

                The end of 19th century classical guitar piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra written by Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega is an interesting example. It was inspired by the Alhambra palace in Spain, which was built during the 13th century by the Emirates who conquered Spain during the previous centuries. Nonetheless, it became part of the Spanish culture and inspired new art pieces.
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjX-m4LkYk

                To get back to the mountains, but with a historical scientific experiment this time (science is part of culture). Blaise Pascal did a historical experiment in 1648 at the Puy-de-Dôme (volcanic mountain in the middle of France) in order to test the “weight of air” that later led to the understanding of atmospheric pressure (immortalized by the Pascal unit of measurement). This would not have been possible in Holland (because it’s flat). https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/blaise-pascal-florin-p-and-puy-de-d.html

                There are countless examples of how ancient Greece and Rome inspired arts and architecture at different centuries: 16th century St. Peter’s basilica, 17th century Versailles palace or Neoclassicism art in the 18th and 19th centuries.

                There are many other examples about rivers, lakes, seas, cities etc…

                That is to say, the land and how it is transformed and built are major sources of culture. If you take the same people but magically modify their history, so they lived on a different land, you will have a different culture. Probably not worse nor better, but different, because the land inspires the culture.

                If your people are not living on its history soaked land anymore, you lose those major culture nutriments. I’m not saying people cannot carry part of their culture with them, nor that culture cannot reinvent itself and be inspired by different origins, but you have more chances to dilute or lose culturally important works of the past if they are not set in stone. Stones that you can access.

                It may even get physically destroyed and erased, like what ISIL terrorists did of the ancient temples in Iraq and Syria. To be fair, it also happens from “democratic” movements, such as how the French Revolution destroyed many pieces of arts because it represented the Nobility and the Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/04/archives/notre-dame-statuary-lost-in-1793-unearthed-in-paris.html

                https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/12/video-islamic-state-nimrud/25667399/

                Given that Putin negates Ukrainian’s history and culture as a justification to invade it, we can expect that he would continue on his pathway of destruction to erase any reminder of it.
                https://theconversation.com/we-should-all-be-concerned-that-putin-is-trying-to-destroy-ukrainian-culture-179351

                So that’s a couple of elements that came to my mind about why defending your land is important for your culture.

                  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                    1 year ago

                    This comment was specifically about why land is essential to culture.

                    About drafting, In other comments, I explained how I think that you have the responsibility to defend the culture that raised you. It’s like paying taxes in a social-democracy, you may have become self-sufficient and don’t need the social system anymore, but you have the moral responsibility to contribute back (at least through taxes), so the next underprivileged group can benefit from what allowed you to reach this point: public education, medicine, culture, research, other public infrastructure and services, etc.
                    So defending your people/culture/land is an extension of this thought.
                    Of course, I wish people would enlist out of free will, but not everyone has high moral standards (imperfect education perhaps), so you need constrains, that’s also why laws and enforcement are needed.

                    To be honest, I had a pacifist period where I would have preferred to run away from any military conflict. But now, I think we can’t deal in absolute, we have to work with compromises, in this case, supporting the lesser evil that will reduce the amount of deaths and destruction. I think getting drafted people killed to stop Putin’s imperialism is a lesser evil than letting it destroy a democracy and its culture. I believe he will not stop until he has done the same to all the ex-USSR countries, and that stopping him in Ukraine should reduce the amount of destruction.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        Better than the invaders? I agree with the general statement, but when you’re in the line of sight of an automatic rifle, they’re not going to be impressed by your ethics.

        It reminds me of Gandhi, who recommended his Jewish friends who were facing Nazism to just peacefully protest and wrote a nice letter to Hitler in 1939 to politely ask him to reconsider going to war. 6 million Jews were assassinated nonetheless.
        https://apnews.com/general-news-f40d8c2c7d8d4ffeadd576ded89acc0c
        https://time.com/5685122/gandhi-hitler-letter/

        I’m all for giving the good example and building peaceful relations, but when you’re faced with extremists who immediately endanger your life, you have to defend yourself first. It’s like a violent aggression in the street, you have to defend yourself against the immediate aggression first, to protect your body, your life and maybe your relatives’, before you can find a more civilized alternative like deescalating or getting help from the police.

        • zer0@thelemmy.club
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          1 year ago

          You are mixing up bullshit. In order to defend themself one of the best thing ukrainian people can do is to ditch their own government who is drafting them to a meat slaughter over invisible lines on the map. Does this mean they have to stop fighting another authoritarian government trying to impose their laws and drafting on them? Nope, people exists with or without a flag on top of their head and a bunch of politicians ruling on them.

          • pythonoob@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Ah yes, I’m sure the new laissez faire Ukrainian army will be able to stand up to a united Russian military machine!

    • deadcream@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s also the home of people being drafted (even more so than for political elite of the country). If some of them want to get the fuck out (yes, from their home) then those thay have elected shouldn’t have the right to force them to stay and die.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        I think that when you grow up and live in a society, you owe many parts of your life to it, to the people who educated you, taught you, protected you or served you, but also the people who came before and made it possible for all those previous people to be there for you.
        Therefore, you have a moral responsibility to defend that.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        You generally don’t get paid for being a slave, nor recover your freedom after the crisis has passed.

        • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Recover your freedom? So you’re not free and are forced to work? Sounds like textbook slavery, to me. Indentured servitude is still slavery

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            1 year ago

            You are forced to go to school, you are forced to work to earn your life. Are those slavery too?

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        Of course, it would be best if they did it willingly. But if they don’t, you just accept being invaded and erased?