you can destroy a word with a fist

My professor, Victor Friedman, was in Athens to help promote the publication of a new Macedonian-Greek dictionary.

The conference was stormed by a group of about twenty Greek nationalists, some wearing masks. They disrupted the proceedings, screamed nationalist slogans, harrassed the presenters, stole promotional material, damaged cameras, and physically threatened my professor. Balkan Insight has an article about the attack.

The attackers appear to have been associated with the Greek organization Golden Dawn, originally a neo-Nazi outfit that has rebranded itself as a defender of Greek national identity and religion and capitalized on a swell of anti-immigrant feelings.

Golden Dawn does not have representation in parliament as far as I’m aware, but they are closely connected with another nationalist, right-wing party called Popular Orthodox Rally that does have representation. A key point shared between these two parties and the current conservative Greek government is that a Macedonian-speaking minority in Greece does not exist, that the Macedonian language has never been spoken on Greek territory, and that any claim to the contrary represents a threat to Greek national security.

Prof. Friedman and his colleagues were promoting a dictionary. A list of corresponding words that allows someone to translate from Greek into Macedonian or vice versa. Merely making translation possible was enough to provoke the violent rage of these nationalists, who insist that not only does no one within Greek borders speak Macedonian, but that the Macedonian language itself does not even exist. The current government itself refuses to even accept that its neighboring state has an official language, instead referring to Macedonian as “a Slavic idiom.”

The attack was a revolting act of violence by a group of self-deluded extremists. But they function within a mainstream that tacitly endorses their provocations.

I expect that the Greek government, if it responds to the attack, the destruction of property, and the threats against my professor and his colleagues at all, will disavow everything and insist that it is not responsible for the misconduct of individual Greeks. This is true, but it also remains true that the position of the Greek government itself concerning the Macedonian language, the rights of its ethnic minority citizens, and the rights of Macedonian citizens to its north is not only unjust, but creates an environment in which nationalist sentiment can boil over into violence.

And they are responsible for that environment.

I want to say that you cannot eradicate a language with violence, because a language is an abstract system, a complex interrelated network of ideas. But individual people are the essential vessel for a language, and people can be intimidated, injured, murdered. Violence can crack the vessel and let the language spill away.

Which is one of many, many reasons why such instances of violence as this, however small, must be protested furiously. We must not allow even a step down that road.