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0 pointsWitCanStain4y ago0 comments

What questions did it raise for you?

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5 comments · 2 top-level

paganel4y ago· 3 in thread

How come in Romania (from where I'm from) it is illegal to have a street named after Antonescu (our Bandera counter-part from WW2) while in neighbouring Ukraine it is not? Why aren't they 100% for eliminating their Nazi past from, well, the present?

WesolyKubeczek4y ago

And yet you do have streets named after Antonescu in Romania:

1) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/WsVVsW13Eb9BjnRm9 2) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/Fe4Ggh3EPZyF7Z6r8 3) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/ANV22wPVDnaoFRVw5 4) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/hhN2jDvsiD9eXnVB6 5) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/a4gjwkDAzD5VrXj77

jhugo4y ago

That law does indeed exist, but nonetheless you still have numerous streets in Romania named after Antonescu. They can be trivially found on Google Maps. For example, Strada Mareșal Ion Antonescu in Constanța [0] — and it was given that name in 2000!

Of course, nobody should judge all Romanians, nor even the political leaders who were not directly involved in the naming decision, for that. Countries are not a homogenous unit.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Strada+Mareșal+Ion+Antones...

paganel4y ago

It's a small street that no-one has heard about, this is a boulevard in the capital city. We had the same thing in Bucharest, when there was a church (built by Antonescu and his wife) that had a bust sculpture [1] of him in the church-yard sometime in the early 2000s. There was of course a huge scandal, with the foreign ambassadors chiming in, the law against naming things after bad people from our history got passed soon after so that we could entry into the EU, so of course that the bust sculpture had to go.

> Countries are not a homogenous unit.

I expect things that stand in your face (like a boulevard in a capital city, a bust sculpture of a genocide perpetrator in a downtown place in another capital city) to not be left to the local authorities. Even Bandera's wiki page mentions the EU and Israeli administrations not being at all happy with Ukraine naming things after Bandera back in ~2011, apparently that has all been forgotten now that Putin has attacked and everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis. And I didn't mention anything about the infamous "Freikorps" now battling the Russians close to Sumy, most definitely their name was not taken from a Heine poem or anything like that.

[1] https://foto.agerpres.ro/foto/detaliu/158701 (if you're Romanian you might recognise one of the characters in that photo)

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SamBam4y ago

Oh, you know, "where there's smoke there's fire" and "many people are saying" and "look into it, is all I'm saying" and "whether it's true or not, it just raises questions."

That's the way these things usually work. A slow erosion of public opinion through insinuation. People like Tucker Carlson aren't going to instantly go back to brown-nosing Putin, but they'll slip in occasional questions about Zelensky here and there, until certain insinuations are taken as ground truth.

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