[off topic]

Old joke. Cartographers find a village that lies half in Russia and half in Poland. They go to the town hall and ask the Mayor if the town would rather be Polish or Russian. “Polish!” she shouts then goes running down the street telling everyone that they are all Poles now. Everyone is dancing and singing for joy.

The mapmakers ask why everyone is so excited to be Polish.

“No more of those awful Russian winters!”

I’m Italian and can confirm. People even started actually using “standard” Italian(mostly with some remnants of their previous local languages/dialects) in everyday speech only after the inception of TV. The patriot Massimo D’Azeglio said “After making Italy, we need to make Italians”, and the (state controlled) TV did this.

EDIT: It was D’Azeglio, not Garibaldi.

Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

“we live in a society”

" A fuckin what?"

Reminds me of a joke Graeber knows from his mother (written down in the book Debt):

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill.

“So where are we, Russia or Poland?”

“According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.”

The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.

“Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?”

“Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!”

I feel the urge to clearify that this is from before nation states and it’s the Czar Empire and the imaginary town is most certainly in modern day Ukraine.

Not entirely related but the bit about the Ukrainian farmer saying he’s “Greek Orthodox” in response to questions of his nationality reminded me of something. I just started reading nationalism and culture by Rudolf Rocker. In the second chapter, rocker says that religion is the first form of institutionalized power that humans created and that institutional political power is not only structured similarly to religion, that it stems directly from it. Hence the proclivity of these two power structures to resemble, overlap, share ideas and compete with one another throughout human history. Not to say faith in itself is necessarily a form of power (he does say that, and I mostly agree with it) but the clergy around any given religion utilize that power to further their own ends, much like politicians.

I don’t have a fully formed point or thought to any of this at the moment, and it’s a very brief summary, but I figured some may find it interesting/thought provoking

Can confirm: I was doing some genealogy, and it was surprisingly difficult to figure out whether my ancestors were German, Polish or Lithuanian. Not because I didn’t know which town they were from, but because that town changed countries so much!

Nationalism is dumb, exhibit A

Yeah, the territory of modern Ukraine has gone through some wild political whirlwinds. Actually, still going through them

i’m italian, and i can barely understand my own grandmother because she was born 30km from where i live and the dialect is completely different.