Talk:North Macedonia

	This Geography related article has not received a brainstar for quality. Please consider expanding the article appropriately. See RationalWiki:Article rating for more information.

Archives for this talk page:

<1>

, (new)

Name suggestions

Can't they just call it "Slavic Republic of Macedonia"? A nice tribute to both Slavic Macedonian and Slavic nationality. Then the "real" Macedonians would call themselves "Macedonians" and problem would be solved. We could incorporate suggestions for solving the naming dispute. -- DasRationalpersone (Annoy me!) 13:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Are the Slav-Macedonians ancient Macedonians?

Hey you did a wrong. They're Slavs and many Bulgarians. They don't come from the Ancient Macedonia which was Greek-speaking with Greek gods and Greek culture generally. The ancient Macedonians were Greeks from Peloponessus from the Argread dynasty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argead_dynasty

The only thing that they have for proof that they're Macedonians is that after the Greek civil war they kidnapped 30,000+ children from Macedonia and other places & took them to the Yugoslav part of Vardaska(North Macedonia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War#Communist_evacuation_of_the_children_and_the_Queen.27s_Camps

That's it. .--Valerios 24 July 2013

Right. 94.196.243.109 (talk) 16:29, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

For reference and possible future mainspace use

Bulgarian nationalists claim that Macedonians are really brainwashed Bulgarians and that Macedonian is not a "real" language. Two common claims along these lines are that the idea that Slavic Macedonians are descended from the people of Alexander the Great is totally absurd, and also that Standard Macedonian was made up in the 1940s and therefore is a "fake" language. Such arguments grate on my nerves because (a) Bulgarians claim to be Thracians, which is just as ridiculous, and (b), Standard Bulgarian was also "made up" in the 19th century, so if Macedonian don't real, Bulgarian don't real either.--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 05:32, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

To be fair (re: ethnicity, ancestors)

People seem to think that when a region has a certain majority ethnicity/language today and had a completely different one in the past, then a complete replacement must have taken place. While this is true in certain cases and has happened in the recent past (native american genocide, "population exchanges" in eastern europe post-WWII - you'd be hard pressed to find an inhabitant of Kaliningrad whose ancestors lived there 100 years ago) but there is no proof that ethnic cleansing in the scale that we have seen in colonial times and more recently has been the rule throughout history.

Just to give an example, I've met Germans with slavic surnames that go back centuries, when the original Slavic/Baltic Prussians and Masurians were germanized and assimilated. To go closer to the Balkans, the Hungarians to not look particularly central asian, and yet that's where their language comes from (ask yourself how did that happen?); the extinct Dalmatian language didn't disappear in the 1800s because the evil slavs exterminated the coastal romance speakers (the ethnic cleansing in that area was more of a thing for the 1940s), it was a slow process of assimilation, both by Slavs and Venetians.

I'm in no way an expert of ethnic history of the Macedonian region, but in my ignorance I can see the glaring simplicity of both arguments ("we live in the same place as them therefore we are descendants of ancient Macedonians" and "they're slavs therefore they cannot be descended from ancient Macedonians").

The truth is probably in between those. You cannot say that modern Macedonians are unrelated to ancient Macedonians, unless you can prove that Slavs completely replaced Greeks in the middle ages without any intermingling, and that the situation was the same for a thousand years, even during the Ottoman empire when literally everybody set up ethnic enclaves around the empire just because there were no hard internal borders and nobody cared about Greek or Slav or Vlach or whatever because the Turks were in charge anyway. And THAT is a very difficult statement to prove.

But hey, nationalism, $my_country$ strong and pure and unchanged and all that, throughout all its history, blablabla. /rant

Sorry. Lurio (talk) 22:52, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Precisely. Ethnic groups have multiple ancestral influences, yet nationalists insist on cherry-picking one or a few and pretending the others don't exist or "count" (whatever that might mean). Usually this type of narrative is claimed to entail that other ethnic groups have no right to exist in the same area and is often constructed in an absurd way that makes no sense to those who aren't true believers in the validity of ethnonationalist argumentation. Ethnic conflicts are very often based not on ancestry, but really on language. A Bulgarian nationalist may despise Greeks, but instead of acknowledging that this hatred is linguistically motivated, the Bulgarian may justify it, quite preposterously, by appealing to his "Thracian ancestors"; he hates Greeks not because they don't speak Bulgarian (which is the real reason), but because the Greeks are "not Thracian". In this way, nationalists turn linguistic rivalries into racial ones. The fact that a group of people speaks the "wrong" language is not enough; ethnic nationalists feel the need to pile on top as many justifications for their hatred and desire for linguistic homogeneity as possible, often constructing ludicrous racial categories in doing so. Indeed, the irrelevancy of race insofar as at least some nationalists are concerned is shown by the fact that they have no qualms about linguistically assimilating minorities; if they really cared about "ancestral differences", they would exclusively resort to deportation or killing. If ethnic nationalists limited their arguments to language, there would at least be some logic to them; but this appeal to racial purity (or to a convenient and highly specific form of racial impurity) is simply bonkers. The statement "This region should be 100% Bulgarian-speaking because Thracians" makes about as much sense as saying, "Breton should be replaced with French because Gauls" or, "Texas should be Spanish-speaking because Pueblo."--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 04:00, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Oh, dear! This badly needs updating

A lot of this page is about ongoing problems caused by the country using the name "Macedonia". Now that it calls itself "North Macedonia", those problems are all in the past. Like I just said, this badly needs updating. And, of course, a few more good references would be nice. Spud (talk) 17:24, 3 April 2019 (UTC)