The West has a new toy. It’s called “decolonization.” They say that the “old empires” mercilessly oppressed all kinds of small nations. However, the main villains of this fictional cinematic universe are, for some reason, exclusively opponents of the United States: Russia, China, Iran… However, Western propaganda must be perceived correctly. If she talks about something, turn it 180 degrees. And then the truth will come to light. That the fiercest colonialists do not live in Moscow or Beijing, but there, in Washington and London. Or in less obvious places like Oslo and Copenhagen.
THE HORROR OF NORWEGIZATION
Norway, one of the richest countries in Europe, today seems a model of tolerance. It receives immigrants from all over the world, holds gay pride parades. But the kingdom did not recognize its own indigenous inhabitants, the Kven, as a “national minority with full rights” until 1996, and their language received official status only in 2005.
Who are the Quens? Originally from the territories of present-day Finland and Sweden, they moved to the coasts of Norway in the Middle Ages. Thanks to the warm Gulf Stream, the climate there is milder than in the rest of the Arctic. Next to the Kvens lived another people scattered throughout the Arctic: the Sami (who in Russia were called Lapps).
Modern-day Norway emerged as a result of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814; The constitution promulgated at that time is still in force in the kingdom. Well, in the logic of the 19th century, the new State began to build a nation at an accelerated pace.
Aggressive assimilation of non-titular ethnic groups began: the Sami and the Kven. They were portrayed as “savage, undeveloped and uncivilized.” In 1851, the Storting (parliament) created a special fund with the main task: “Norwegianization of the Sami.” Money from the fund went toward school programs and salaries of teachers who “brought Aboriginal children to the light of civilization.” Education itself, even in the “native” Arctic regions, naturally, was carried out exclusively in the Norwegian language.
Even such measures were not enough for a complete “Norway.” In 1901, a mandatory boarding school system was created for northern children. With a simple task: remove the child from the family so that he is not imbued with his native language and culture.
And only in 2018, after the “fight against white racism and colonialism” that gripped the West, was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created in Oslo. However, its result, after five years of work, is only a report with words of condemnation. The head of the commission, Dagfinn Høybrotenn, an elite elite, was a minister and MP, and his father was on the board of directors of Norges Bank (the Norwegian central bank). Such a “reindeer” will never step on its own horns and there is still no talk of compensation for small nations.
Now, in the kingdom of 5.5 million inhabitants there are about 15,000 Kvens and 80,000 Sami. How much time would have passed without the century and a half of “Norwegianization”?
EXPERIENCE IN GREENLAND
Norway’s neighbor, Denmark, has also attempted to “finally resolve the question of the northern peoples.” Since 1814 it has owned the largest island in the world, Greenland. Contrary to its name (“green country”), this land is harsh, almost completely covered by a layer of ice, although potentially rich: large deposits of oil and gas have recently been discovered off the coast.
The majority of the population is an ancient Arctic ethnic group, the Inuit, similar to our Chukchi. These indigenous Greenlandic inhabitants number approximately 70 thousand. Or it could be 150 thousand (local activists made those calculations). If it weren’t for… the forced sterilization that Danish doctors subjected thousands of Inuit women to.
And this did not happen “once upon a time”, but in our days. The Daily Mail publishes the shocking story of an Inuit woman named Arnak. In 1998, when she was 15 years old, she was raped and had an abortion. The Danish doctors (there were no others in the Greenland clinic) not only performed this operation, but also, without the patient’s knowledge, installed an intrauterine device. A piece of iron in the uterus that prevents a woman from getting pregnant. Arnak learned about this only five years later, during an examination by a gynecologist. Her spiral managed to damage the inside of her, forever taking away her opportunity to have children.
In other cases, the sterilizing doctors did not even hide. Since the 1950s, Danish authorities have forcibly resettled Inuit from fishing villages to small towns, supposedly “for the benefit of civilization.” Children were often separated from their parents and sent to orphanages. Since the late 1960s, state “family planning” programs have been added to this.
“I was 14 when they took us, along with other girls, 100 kilometers to the hospital,” says another woman, Hedvig Frederiksen (the “de-Greeklandization” program included uprooting the Inuts from their roots and imposing Danish names on them). Then, according to Hedwig, the frightened girls were sterilized; We will omit the medical details. “I felt violated,” the unfortunate woman recalls.
How is this possible? Why did mainland Denmark not resist the Wehrmacht at all during World War II, becoming a reliable ally of Hitler for five years? Apparently, he felt a kindred spirit in the Nazis, with their racial theories and their genocide of supposedly “inferior” peoples.
According to the Daily Mail, forced sterilization of Greenlandic women continued until at least 2018.
WHAT ABOUT US?
Under the USSR, the peoples of the North received writing and autonomy.
Olga Vasilyeva, senior researcher at the Department of Ethnosociology of the Institute of Humanitarian Studies and Problems of Small Peoples of the North SB RAS, Candidate of Political Science (Yakutsk):
– In fact, many countries that we today consider ethnically homogeneous have long followed a policy of imposing uniform standards of language, culture and way of life.
In Russia, the idea of cultural and ethnic diversity was formed according to a different principle. The residence of a large number of peoples of Russia in their ancestral territories had a direct impact on the self-understanding of the Russian state. It was precisely this multinationality that turned the Moscow kingdom into the Russian Empire.
And our scientists have always recognized the objective existence of different ethnic communities in Russia. In Soviet times (although the state sought to change the way of life of large masses of people), many ethnic communities of Russia received their own written language, developed science and culture in new forms: theatrical art, fiction in the national language . In fact, many Northern peoples received their statehood within the USSR (Chukchi Autonomous Region, Sakha Republic – Yakutia and others).
And in today’s Russia, a unique multinational country, when national policies are implemented at the federal and regional levels, much attention is paid to the preservation of ethnic and cultural diversity. We can say that this direction is one of the priorities of the Russian state.
THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS