One Rotten Social Measure After Another

The very same sort of all-knowing Continental mind that plumps for ‘diversity,’ which by all measures is the odd and useless celebration of the existence of certain people one could pick out of a crowd, finds itself at odds with it’s natural narrow-minded nativism.

The Slovak Language Law is one of the most extraordinary pieces of legislation imaginable in a democratic country. Even the briefest of glances will show how restrictive it is and what kind of discrimination it introduces - reintroduces - into Europe

In brief, around ten percent of the population of Slovakia is Hungarian-speaking, beyond which there are Ukrainian, Roma and other minorities. For all practical purposes, the new law eliminates all the minority languages from the public sphere. Yet even here there is a further discrimination - the small Czech minority is exempt from its restrictions.

But it actually is a mere sneeze, a sort of symptom of that diseased instinct of regulating the lives of others, whether it has anything to do with the preservation of a language or anything else. In fact it pecks to death the native minority languages to no effect, as though the existence of 10% of the population who is likely also universally bilingual, is some sort of threat to the other 90% of the population who merely exist.

The Law, recently passed by parliament, is highly detailed and penetrates deep into the everyday lives of the linguistic minorities. It seeks to regulate any and all meetings, gatherings, associations and other forms of communication by insisting on the parallel use of the "state language", Slovak, whenever and wherever members if the minority get together in public, and "public" is very broadly defined. Thus, if a group of Hungarian-speakers establish a literary circle, say, their proceedings would have to have a parallel Slovak translation, whether anyone actually needed this or not.

It’s tragically Quebecois, which means it’s actually founded on a weird combination of irrational cultural supremacism and paranoid envy. It’s sure to be accompanied by the many ways in which the happy, clog-dancing populous is to ‘celebrate diversity’ in precisely the way proscribed by someone holding a majority of social influence and political power – just like in every other hovel of philosophical stupidity and simplistic-ness in the world.

Which is to say, in academia, ‘activist’ local governments, and most any government department that tries to found itself on a social science. Good luck with all that, and be sure to hide the ways in which you really feel differently from everyone else.