Quote Originally Posted by Eric C. View Post
It's been happening all around, just give it a good look. I'd avoid talking about particular cases to maintain political correctness.
Oh, come on! In politics, unless you have a sound case beefed up with some good examples, you would be named a populist or a demagogue, agree? Instilling concerns without proper justification supported by some convincing precedents is essentially obscuring the reality and is called mystification. A very well-known and time-proven technique practiced by Shamanism. And we're talking about a very noticeable slice of Latvian population. So noticeable, that we can't even agree if they are a minority or a majority.

After all, what does it mean 'an official language?' That means that should a citizen request a government service in either of the official languages, the government is obliged by law to provide that service to him or her. That is all to it. It does not mean all schools have to switch to Russian and forget about Latvian. Below please find a partial list of countries which had adopted several official languages. Please, notice that in neither of those countries there's a concern of going back to the Soviet times:

Austria
Belgium
Czech Republic (several municipalities have official bilingualism: Czech and Polish)
Kosovo
Luxembourg (three official languages)
Malta
Cameroon
Chad
Burundi
Kenya
Rwanda

In fact, in my opinion, adoption of Russian as a second official language and subsequently granting a citizenship status to the Russian-speaking community in Latvia has NOTHING TO DO with going back to the Soviet times. Unless, of course, nulle would finally wake up and clearly explain otherwise.

Having said that, I can definitely recognize there are cultural wars going on in Latvia. Not resurrection of the Soviet times, but purely cultural debate. And using political means in a cultural debate, in my opinion, is at the very least a dishonest practice. It's more or less like saying: "Oh, your favourite book is more popular than mine, so I'm going to call the publisher and blackmail him, so he would stop publishing your favourite book." Does it make sense?