• mlg@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Zionist -> nationalist group

      stan -> place (of)

      Zionistan -> place of Zionists

      What’s the issue?

    • acargitz@lemmy.caOP
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      3 days ago

      I get, and regret, that the gratuitous use of “stan” to hint/signify “backwards place” is a form of racism.

      What are the other 3 levels?

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        European definition of race. Race doesn’t have a language-transcendent meaning. It literally means “arbitrary group that I want to discriminate against”.

        That’s why in the US “race” roughly overlaps with “country of origin”, while in Europe before WW2 the word was used to mean e.g. “the English race”, “the French race” or “the German race”. And sometimes the word was used as in “the human race” to differentiate between humans and animals. It’s a purely meaningless “us-vs-them” term, nothing else. And depending on who the “us” is and who the “them” is, race means something different.

        In Europe the term “race” fell out of fashion after WW2 (for obvious reasons) but the meaning stuck around in derived terms like “racism”. That’s why in Europe if a German person hates all French people, that’s considered racist, while in the USA that wouldn’t be considered racist.


        Bonus fact: In many languages “race” is also used to describe “breeds” (e.g. dog breeds), and also there the term is incredibly vague. To create a new dog “race”/breed, you grab a bunch of animals, go to your kennel club and register it. Now you exclusively inbreed that group of animals. All animals that are descendent from exclusively only that original group of animals are now part of that race/breed.

        That’s not something that happens with humans, thus that kind of terminology doesn’t apply to humans.


        To get back to your question: If you apply the European definition of race/racism, this is racist against Jews and indoiranian people and people speaking Turkic languages.