Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, political priorities and cultural values.

France have always been conscious of this, no doubt as a result of their centuries old conflict with England, but it is interesting now to see Italian nationalists responding similarly. It's futile of course, as neither Italians, French nor any combination of European countries can or will make an internet independent of the US

[1] https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM

It's worth noting that a variation of language collapse may be occurring. The English speaking part of the US is imploding (aging demographics, fentynal, Covid, mediocre healthcare for the bottom 1/2, etc), the Spanish speaking part of the US is rapidly taking marketshare (immigration being the only thing keeping the US population afloat). You can expect some decline in US cultural power accordingly, as Spanish is less popular globally than English (and far less potent as an entertainment, media force).

The EU will indeed end up more or less making their own Internet. That's happening gradually. Their own rules, laws, beliefs are increasingly governing their slice of cyberspace (and anything in tech broadly). That separation will only get wider. Over time, the laws governing the EU Internet end up making it quite distinct from the US Internet, from the Chinese Internet, from the Russian Internet, and so on (as different as the physical spaces are today, at least).

It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.

There have been Italian language wars in border regions but they fizzle once non-locals get involved.

For example, South Tyrol has a large German speaking population. The Italian government has historically encouraged adoption of Italian.

But South Tyrol has (had?) a large Sicilian population that supported the local German speakers.

Ever gone on Reddit and looked at what Swedes say about refugees and immigrants (post ~2014 or so; in 2015 they were burning refugee camps)? The racist, anti-non-Swede, nationalism type is only going to get a lot worse there. The integration of refugees into Swedish society has been a complete failure, which you can see in the crime and employment outcomes. If it were the US, the blame would be squarely placed on racist behavior / dominant culture preventing the refugees from thriving.

I think it's great if local languages and identifies can continue to thrive, but I don't think it can be said that Italian nationalism isn't a thing though - it has explicitly been a thing as the suppression of regional dialects and the 'making of Italians' was a stated objective of Italian nationalists immediately after the unification of Italy.

btw this does not make Italy exceptional in any way, the way modern 'nation states' were built followed exactly this pattern - suppression of regional languages - 'cultural genocide' - and the creation a new national identity to replace them

Like in the UK the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, and Scottish First Minister are all from immigrant family backgrounds.

As for the refugees, it's not so much racism as just a very difficult situation - a nation can't accept literally millions of young men with no language skills or qualifications and expect things to work out well.

The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.

It’s always been touch and go.

Garbaldi and Mussolini placed a strong emphasis on “nationalism,” but other leaders were more focused on a building coalitions.

Can you give me the names of some Italian nationalist parties?

I was told by my Sicilian family the only reason Sicily is a part of Italy is Garibaldis ship was blown off course during a storm.

No idea if that’s true.

Same with modern French, which is basically Parisian, modern Spanish essentially Castillian. There is never an neutral language, it is linguistic supremacism one over the other. I absolutely respect Sicilians (and other regional groups) for resisting 'Florentine cultural imperialism'

Italian is not a northern but rather a central Italian language.

> Can you give me the names of some Italian nationalist parties?

Movimento Sociale Italiano, was a nationalist neofascist party that became Fratelli d’Italia, the current governing party. FdI gets more votes in the south than in the north. Lega is a weird beast, sometimes anti-southern now nationalist and anti-immigration.

> I was told by my Sicilian family the only reason Sicily is a part of Italy is Garibaldis ship was blown off course during a storm.

Was Garibaldi trying to annex Algeria and went off course? Your Sicilian family is not well versed in Italian history.

They stopped doing that decades ago, before I was born. The language of the German minority is protected and their representation in Parliament is guaranteed by the constitution. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano has a high level of self-government and a special fiscal regime.

That one was the celebrity-hungry Norwegian Nobel Committee's fault. They award the peace prize.

It would be like them protesting Asians being treated unfairly on University acceptance, another American form of racism, that is also not applicable to Sweden.

Protesting your government on issues that don’t exist and they therefore cannot address is odd, and unless I’m missing something, extremely stupid

Europe is not less racist than the US. However, Europeans are much less used to reflecting on and taking about racism in their own countries than Americans are.

That reluctance to talk about race is exacerbated by the fact that, in many European counties (Sweden being one of them), it is either difficult or impossible to legally collect meaningful data about race, making it impossible to actually report on objective racial disparities and issues.

> The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.

I see Europeans express sentiments like this quite often, and it's quite amusing. Racism isn't something foreign to Europe - Europe is literally the birthplace of white supremacist ideology, and racism has been ingrained in European society for centuries. It's quite ludicrous to pretend that it somehow evaporated overnight without cause, and even more absurd to make that assertion when there's copious evidence of direct and overt racism in across Europe literally every day.

You're, unsurprisingly, getting downvoted for this comment, but you are entirely correct. Racism is actually far more overt in Europe than it is in the US - the difference is that it's so widely accepted that people literally do not recognize it as racism even when it's plain as day.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Zwarte Piete, the annual Dutch blackface tradition, which as of 2011 was supported by 93% of Dutch people. 2020, unsurprisingly, marked the first year when "only" 47% people (less than a majority) supported the practice, but even then it's an incredible contradiction between collective self-perception and actual practice.

Ahistorical excuses for it vary ("it's not racist", "Blackface is an American thing; we don't have that in the Netherlands", or my personal favorite "it's not blackface, because it's just soot"). All are incorrect: blackface is always racist, and blackface/minstrelry as a form of entertainment was actually popular in Europe longer than it was in the US, and portraying Black people as "dirty" from soot is a common minstrel trope.

If you want an interesting trip, dig up some Dutch news reports from 2019 when Trudeau and Northam were caught in their blackface scandals. Dutch-language international media actually had a hard time covering it, because the average Dutch person at the time literally could not understand why it was even an issue in the first place. They had to dedicate extra time/space to very elaborate explanations of why blackface is considered offensive, whereas most American media could just report it as-is, leaving any explanation for the final filler paragraphs (if at all).

Now, in some ways the impact of racism is lesser in Europe, because there's less police violence generally and typically a much stronger social safety net.

First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.

It has always seemed like a losing battle to me. Basque people might speak more Basque, but they still see Netflix, listen to international bands via Spotify and immerse themselves in international trends via Instagram and Tiktok.

My conclusion is that the government does this because language is the one part of culture the government can legislate around.

Sad part is that we as Europeans worked/working really really hard to make it impossible for them to find a place in our communities/societies. And before that we did similar things with Jews. There is one word that explains it all "pogrom". How such short word can contain so much...

On one hand there seems to be a strong sentiment of what swedish culture is and is not, on the other there is also an unusual higher permeability to american culture compared to other EU countries.

The only way to effectively fight this homogenisation is to use authoritarian measures that force people into compliance. And that's when you are bordering on literal fascism, using force on your own people to ensure conformity to cultural and national norms. Cultural homogenisation is a natural process that will happen when you integrate people with trade, the internet, transport, and communications. You can't fight these processes without significant and unreasonable amounts of force applied to people.

The UK is also closer to having an open conversation around race than many other European countries, and tends to be more directly influenced by US political movements.

As the sibling comment says, it is extraordinary how many Europeans seem to think that racism is a problem that exists only in the USA. Gary Younge wrote an excellent article touching on this topic in the Guardian recently. Key point:

>This ability to unsee what is before our eyes is not confined to the past. The latter-day version of this selective myopia is the repeated insistence that Britain must not “import American race politics” – as if racism is an artisanal product of the US, like French champagne or Italian parmigiano reggiano. When protests erupted on the streets of British cities in 2020 under the banner of Black Lives Matter, many commentators smugly declared that this was an imitation of American fashions – even as the statue of a very English slave trader, Edward Colston, was dumped into Bristol’s harbour.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/29/...

That's not to deny that American racial categories are either inapplicable or less central to personal identity in most European countries; but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.

An apt choice of words, given that almost all European countries practice jus sanguinis - literally "right of the blood". In contrast to how citizenship works in most of North and South America, people who are born in European countries do not automatically get citizenship (nationality) of the country of birth. Instead, citizenship is inherited.

This system became popular in many European countries in part because it provided a way to avoid automatically granting citizenship to immigrants from the now-former colonies, instead creating an extra barrier.

French was normalized as a written language around the great feudal courts of Northern France, at the time Paris wasn't particularly influential culturally. Parisian French was itself quite distinct from "government French" until recently.

Why?? This drives me crazy. They are not part of my country's history and we have plenty of local heroes.

Let me get this correct, because your comment is baffling to me. People often protest the actions of other countries, usually by protesting in their home country at the embassy of the other country that is doing something they want to protest. For example, people in countries around the world routinely protest against the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs by protesting in their country at the local Chinese embassy. Their goal is ostensibly to get the Chinese government to change their policies, or at least generate media coverage to raise awareness about the issue.

I'm assuming this is the event you're referring to in Mumbai, and I'll use a source that holds as cynical of a view as you do in covering it: https://www.indiatoday.in/lifestyle/what-s-hot/story/mumbaik...

The protesters assembled at the US Consulate in Mumbai to protest policies by the US government that are directly leading to innocent people in the US being murdered almost every day in mass shootings. In the same way that Chinese government treatment of Uyghurs is not an issue outside of China, US government policies around guns is not an issue outside of the US (even though it actually is, because the US is a major supplier of guns around the world). How is this any different than protesting at the Chinese embassy over internal Chinese government policy?

I'll also say that if you felt an urge to use physical violence to respond to someone expressing a political opinion, then you need to get mental health treatment immediately.

Indian and American societies are link way deeper than political relations show.

Control over the Church was rarely as useful within Italy as outside of it. The papacy always had strong enemies on the peninsula. Much of its policy was dedicated to keep them divided and to ensure that those didn't ally with outside powers.

What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this.

I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media.

"leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.

My personal experience also corroborates this. In common usage, Castilian is the same language as Spanish and in fact I hear people from Spain refer to the language as Castilian, even when talking about the language as spoken in Latin America, regardless of the Academy's prescription.

[1] https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%2525C3%2525B1ol

My Sicilian family (who are historically challenged) say there quite a few there before WWII.

However, there's already an English translation of that book. It's published under the ttitle _Civilization: How we All Became American_, and was translated by David Fernbach.

Anyway, thanks again for pointing out this book. I'll be looking into it thanks to your suggestion.

I couldn't even tell you what kind of government the Netherlands has lol could be a monarchy for all is know hah

https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-de...

I don't think you've paid much attention to the last 25 years of Italian politics. Italian nationalists are definitely a thing, and they are winning. The current government is led by openly-avowed post-fascists. The last time fascists were in power, Superman became "Nembo Kid", Internazionale Milano became "Ambrosiana Inter", and people with foreign surnames had to italianize them or risk ostracism (how do I know? My great-grandmother was one of them). One of the reasons Italian national identity is so traditionally weak in the postwar period is that its period of unabashed strength was so clearly associated with an unpresentable regime; the latest move by this government is an explicit bridge to that period, a dog whistling exercise that will work very well with their electorate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Americans

Sure, I, and many people in my country, had a reaction against it, very conservative in nature. But now, over a few years and seeing some reasonable people explain to me that zwarte piet hurts them and that the hair, the lips, the earrings, the slave-like behavior in songs is really quite racist. I, and many others changed their mind. It also helped when I talked to people that held the opinion that I am/was not a despicable person for taking part in this old tradition, there was no "original sin" that I should feel for the rest of my life.

And so a lot of people in my country changed their mind. Sinterklaas is a kids party/holiday and it should be inclusive. Kids couldn't care less about the color of zwarte piet of course. I and everybody I now know is glad we changed course, or rather are still changing course. Mostly smaller villages defiantly keep the old black face, but it will rot away, as it should, over time. It takes time to convince those people, or perhaps they are too stuck in their ways. My grandma lived through WW2 and still always said horribly racist things (i.e. a common saying was that if a river was dirty, "the Turkish people swim in there."). You really couldn't change her anymore. She also lived in constant fear that Islamic people will come to our country and, "since they all live together in small houses, they will come and live with us in our houses if we don't protect our country".

I also cringe at children's books like Pinkeltje (first part published 1939) that I have lying around from my own youth and read to my children until I hit parts that I really couldn't read anymore. Parts are pure racism, i.e. in Africa Pinkeltje is basically battling small black devils, really portayed as sub-human. It takes time for people to see it, to see it as people of other races experience these texts.

I'm 100% on your side now, and I reason with people that aren't and I try not to judge. Easy for me to do of course, when you are at the receiving end I can imagine screaming "Racist!" at a kids party feels, and perhaps is, the only way towards change.

Btw, I also cringe at our still very popular "Jip and Janneke", Jip is the boy, always dirty and mischievous. Janneke the girl: Always clean and vacuuming with her mother and doing the laundry. They also get candy for anything they do well. I tell my daughter she can be a knight, does not have to be the princess. But these things run deep in our culture, and we should get rid of them.

I know it does not really make sense, but I apologize to you and to people that felt hurt. I didn't see it. Thank you for your sustained effort to make me see it as it is and how you experienced it. The world our kids grow up in will be better because of it.

The same people went to the same engineering uni as me, which had a lot of middle eastern and east Asian classmates that they couldn't give a single fuck about how they subtly mistreated them.

US focus also serves as a convenient denial of our own daily misdeeds here. I'm still to this day shocked to meet a lot of (continental) Europeans that think (systematic) racism is a US thing, and can't possibly be happening here.

Europeans are less race oriented in the same way Russia is a peaceful country and Russian invasion of Ukraine is not an invasion but "special military operation" to majority of Russians living there; we simply don't hear, or want to hear it, and shun people who talk about it.

The UK had to leave the entire thing to try and get immigration under control and have still totally failed - they can't even deport illegal immigrants because the EU Court of Human Rights decided that deportation is against human rights. So now maybe the UK has to leave that too except, ah ha, supporters of that system wrote membership into various other agreements and so on. Same way it's always done in Europe. Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.

You know when someone is incessantly speaking louder than others, drowning their conversations? ... yeah.

In my country (Brazil if you must know) the cultural avalanche that comes from the US is such that some people genuinely admire the US civil rights movement and its leaders, but will not tolerate anything similar locally. Such is the power of propaganda: you get tied up in the problems of the US and ignore your own.

America is good at one thing: being very loud, when everyone else isn't. It's a pity that we therefore associate being loud as being American...

I guess driven by significant emigration from Italy to USA. Here in Portugal, we also have some... Issues... With France emigrants who return to the country.

I read about the histories of many countries. Didn't you? England in particular, all of Europe, China .... How can you understand the world without knowing about more than your own corner? Why would you limit yourself?

Brexit is the headliner of populism fest, of course the whole thing is sponsored by Dunning-Kruger. everyone with more than a fistful of minimally calibrated brain cells have saw through the "wages are bad because immigrants, EU bad, must leave EU"

> Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.

Yes, the electorate. The famously well represented electorate. In the so well empowered UK elections.

Please.

There are plenty of completely valid and important problems of integration of various migrant groups, similarly there is a literal endless list of problems with the EU, as it's big complex and there's always going to be problems. And it's true of borders, inequality, elections and so on.

By gesturing at the problems and then loudly proclaiming the UK has to leave the ECHR, and that it can't really, and that everything is forced on the poor powerless groups "same way it's always done in Europe" is silly and just muddies the waters.

The UK and any other groups can as sovereign states can exit those agreements. Maybe other states will be disappointed, as no one welcomes complexity and paperwork, but those exact states are the ones that are going to respect the sovereignty that makes this possible.

And just as a small datapoint for anyone else reading. The EU typically goes very great lengths to make sure all members are represented, their needs heard, and as possible taken care of. Usually it's a shitshow, because how do you make a fair judgement between two members? Usually you don't, but make sure the weaker, smaller ones are not trampled by the bigger ones, and hope for the best. But then look at the border issue between Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The EU put its foot down because it's the whole point that there cannot be a border between its members. So the UK wanted out, they had to give. It's the same thing with those pesky agreements and courts and rights.