My great grandfather was the vice rector of the university at the time, as an historian he took the initiative to covertly collect evidence of all the nazi crimes, evidence which was used in the nuremberg trials.
But more interestingly, there was a nationalist movement in Belgium at the the time, and a debate on which language to use at the university. The international language (french) or the local language (flemish). He was of the opinion that both had their place, which put him in opposition to the nationalists. Since he was one of the founders of the flemish literature movement, and the prime expert on flemish history he was hard to attack directly by the nationalists. So they denounced him to the gestapo, hoping they would get rid of him while keeping their hands clean. Fortunately for me it didn’t work, as the nazis were also reliant on his academic work for their pan-germanic narrative and refused to attack him directly as well.
Nowadays we see as well western nationalist movements with ambivalent support for murderous regimes such as Russia, and I think this support comes in no small part from the idea that those regimes can be used to do the dirty work that they are too cowardly to do themselves
To do — how? by invading their countries and establishing a police state? That’s a little too much even for so called “nationalists”. I think it’s just plain old bribery and propaganda.
As a Russian who emigrated a long time ago for political reasons, signed countless anti-Kremlin petitions, and sent money to support Ukraine and her people, I am scared how many people support this regime for reasons unknown. I don’t know any other possible reason except selling one’s soul for money.
Look up tankies[0] —- people who support these atrocities by imperialists and other problematic regimes because they’re so conditioned against the US / Western nations that they assume anyone acting against the west’s interests must be doing good.
Those people are idiots on the Internet, but they have no actual political power. The pro-Russia right is more of a concern, especially when they make common cause out of "anti woke".
I am aware of the phenomenon; the interesting part is the word “conditioned”. By whom? And, eventually, who paid for the conditioning? (I think it mostly ends with the usual suspects, Russia, China and Iran).
Possibly at least somewhat. I think it also comes from getting disillusioned by legitimately terrible things done by the US in the name of “democracy” e.g. Latin American death squads in the 70s/80s, Iraq war and war on terror, etc.
People can’t seem to hold the idea of multiple countries being problematic and doing objectionable things. Certainly information ops from your usual suspects feed into this.
Yes. It's really weird that posters here find it so hard to believe in people looking at their situation and making their own opinions without external influence. I don't need Russians or anyone else to see that my state is stealing half of my salary in exchange for insecurity (including terrorism and a friend gunned by it), failing healthcare, disfunctional administration, public media shitting on me daily on the basis of my sex, race and sexual orientation, supporting wars and war crimes abroad, canceling the ideas of 40% of the voters, etc.
Conditioning doesn't need to be something one does to another. You can condition yourself by just dabbling in something and then going down the rabbit hole.
North Korea also has large scale, effective info-operations, though aimed mostly at US/SK/Japan. also more ideological overlap with the "tanky" world view than anyone else
Some people just have temperaments of fanatics, ready to become obsessed by any political idea and take it to the extreme. And if the idea happens to be a messianic religion which gives a great excuse to relish in hate and glorify violence, it's even better.
The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded. I don’t think Russia will invade the USA any time soon, but it can invade other countries and throw liberals out of windows over there, normalizing the practice and diminishing the power of liberalism worldwide
> To do — how? by invading their countries and establishing a police state? That’s a little too much even for so called “nationalists”. I think it’s just plain old bribery and propaganda.
Plenty of right-wing extremists seemed happy to help the Nazis run their country (most definitely in a police-state spirit) after it was conquered in WW2. I think you underestimate the importance of ideology.
Let me assume your question is not rhetorical, and I will try to give you at least what I understand to be part of the answer. This will run a bit long, and, most likely, not be well received by the audience on this website, but I promise, I am not a bot, not "paid by the Kremlin", and, if I sold my soul for my beliefs, the courier is desperately late with the check.
The most common narrative, supported by endless social media personalities on the Russian "liberal left" is that the Soviet Union was Double-Plus-Ungood, (for the American audience, the joke is that "the younger the blogger, the more he suffered under Stalin"), the 90s were a time of flowering possibility for Democracy and Freedom, and then Evil Pootin the Horrible showed up, and ruined things for everyone. In the interest of space, I won't get into the Soviet era, let's just leave it at "it's not as simple as you think", and when many, many people who actually live in Russia today look back on that era, they see much more of a mixed bag than just the "Gulag And Repressions" narrative, and the more the left pushes this fiction, the less relevant their voices become. If you struggle to understand "how can anyone support HIM?!", we need a bit of background.
Psychologically, modern Russia is heavily shaped by the 90s. The flowering of "Democracy" was chiefly embodied by incredibly flawed elections that brough Boris Yeltzin to power. And as Russian citizens watched in disbelief while Yeltzin stumbled around the world stage in a perennially drunken stupor, various economic "reformers" were taking the fullest possible advantage of the "Freedom" they were suddenly afforded. For an informed non-partisan's view of the economic pillaging, I refer you to the many speeches made by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the main economic advisors to the Russian "reformers" of the time - chiefly Anatoly Chubais and Egor Gaidar. See also some of their remarks to get a measure of just how much contempt they had for the very people they would leave destitute. For those readers who did not follow those events - all valuable production "actives" (assets in English) were thought to be collectively owned by Soviet citizens. To transition the country to a capitalist economy, a "privitization" scheme was devised. In what should come as a surprise to literally no one, it was, of course, a completely fraudulent process and led to the rapid accumulation of wealth creating the very oligarchs whose influence the left will come to decry (after, of course, being hired by those very oligarchs to promote their rule). The new owners were only interested in rapid profit, which meant that factories were shuttered, cut up and sold for scrap, and the profits offshored into tax havens. Workers formerly employed were fired, and the entire country slid further and further into becoming a rust belt.
For most regular people in Russia, the 90s in post-Soviet Russia became a lost decade. Loss of identity and purpose, combined with economic stagnation, widespread unemployment, devaluation of the currency thrust millions of people into poverty. The excess mortality of the 90s from early death, suicide, and emigration is estimated at roughly 10 million - a third of the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during WWII. And this is "peacetime". The other delightful aspect of this situation was the rise of various organized crime groups, strengthened by military veterans and former members of various special agencies who found themselves out of a job, and hired out to the very oligarchs above. Assassinations of business competitors took place in broad daylight. Street violence, kidnappings, looting and murder were commonplace. The government was too busy getting bribed by the oligarchs to look the other way, or too busy "getting while the getting was good". I could go on, but I hope you get the point.
On the international scene, Russia obviously stopped being a relevant factor. This is the beginning of American's "Unipolar Moment", and Rusian citizens watched as the US took full advantage of this fact. They also watched as the US lavished Russia's corrupt government and its oligarchs with blandishments of how "democratic" Russia was becoming, and how "democracy" was going to make life better. Various NGOs sprung up, quietly paid for by outfits like USAID, NED, Open Society Foundation, and hired Russian liberal left personalities and had them promote the idea that "old Russia" was bad, and that "new Russia" was on its way to becoming a part of the civilized, collective West. The more effort such groups spent, the worse life seemed to get and the more firmly the idea that democracy and Western-directed reforms were inimical to Russia's collective interests took hold in the minds of many people living in Russia. And let's be honest, various Russian politicians were certainly busy helping that narrative along in the interests of their own political advancement, including a hard-right member of the already right-wing Yabloko party who started off promoting himself on a die-hard patriotic and xenophobic platform. He was so radical, Yabloko kicked him out. He reinvented himself, went to Yale, and would eventually return to Russia to feature prominently as a "fighter against corruption". (That joke's for my Russian-politics aware liberal left homies.)
And then came 1999, and the invasion of Yugoslavia. Again the outlooks diverged: for the West, it's an open-and-shut "we went in to stop a genocide" case. For Russians, this is the West coming in yet again to destroy a Slavic country. Irrespective of the facts, what will come to matter is the feeling that "invasion based on duty-to-protect" is legit, that starting a war in Europe without a UN mandate is ok, and the affirmation of the fact that the West (collectively) feels entitled to ignore warnings from Russian politicians. Particularly those of one rising politician from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) who will, one year later, come to supreme power in Russia in a completely fraudulent and bought election that the West will, of course, praise as being "progress towards Democracy". No, seriously, the US hailed it as such. US foreign policy establishment felt that as this politician came from Yeltzin's retinue, he would, naturally, continue Yeltzin's laissez-faire approach to, well, everything. They were, of course, wrong. For my own part, let me just add that when I learned that German warplanes painted with the balkenkreuz were once again bombing Europe, I felt an incredible sense of anger and betrayal. That Germany once again was bombing Yugoslavia, after everything that had happened in WWII, and that Europe's elites were standing by and cheering while this went on made it clear that we no longer share the same comprehension of history.
Still with me? Awesome. I hope this background gives some idea as to the challenges Putin faces when he comes to power. Putin choses the Lord Vetinary approach - he cannot eliminate corruption so he makes it manageable. Most oligarchs go along, retain their looted wealth, but their political power is curtailed. Those who do not go along are eliminated by their competitors, or are banished and suddenly join the liberal left opposition to Putin (shoutout to Khodorkovsky). Putin stabilizes enough of the economy so that people have jobs. Maybe not great ones, but there is an emergent sense of purpose. And he stops the street violence and the chaos. It is probably impossible for people that didn't live through the 90s to understand, but for many, the position is literally "anything is better than that". In this case, "anything" is Putin, and there is genuine, real support for him because of that. We really don't have the space to get into the international questions, it's a huge area, but again, let me just hint that the Western narrative of what is going on is widely rejected by regular people living in Russia in no small part because the ever-chittering horde of liberal-left commentators does their best to rebroadcast the Western narrative in the Russian language. Quite a few folks will automatically take a position opposite whatever a liberal-left commentator says, based on prior experience. The Western narrative is aimed at a Western audience and crafted to omit history and facts that are relevant to a Russian audience, which is why it doesn't work there.
So, to return to your original question, when you say that you signed "anti-Kremlin" petitions, most regular people interpret that as "so, you want to go back to the 90's 'democracy', do you? No thank you". When you say "you sent money to Ukraine and her people", many people in Russia will say: "so, you support a government whose national hero was a Nazi collaborator who committed ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians and Jews."
Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse.
No one sold their soul for money - we just have a different value function, and are using a different set of inputs.
Everything you said had some sense until 2014 and even until 2022, but then suddenly your house of cards fell apart in the eyes of the world, and it became clear that Russia is once again a country run by a senile tyrant. Just like Soviet Union under late Stalin, Germany under late Hitler, China under late Mao... similarities abound.
Many people in Russia will say: "so, you support a government whose national hero was a Nazi collaborator who committed ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians and Jews."
Then they're under the influence of some serious propaganda.
Being as (1) the collaborator you are referring to is not "a national hero of the government", (2) he wasn't involved in the events you are referring to, and (3) none of that history is in any way relevant to the current conflict.
> Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse.
No, it's not a fact - it's a lie that forms the cornerstone of Putinism ("no alternative to Putin"). The struggles you describe were not unique to Russia, but to the entire former USSR and its satellites. The entire Eastern Bloc stood in the same starting position in 1991 and went through the same transformations. Countries like Poland or Estonia succeeded and are now proper first world contries, whereas Russia failed and is rapidly regressing into a stereotypical third world banana republic.
A key in Russia's failure is unwillingness to face its history. The USSR was not a beacon of human achievement, but a prison of nations held together only through violence. It disintegrated not because of malicious external scheming, but because of utter internal mismanagement and rotting that led to it being unable to feed its people. Despite immense oil and gas reserves, it suffered fuel shortages and apartment buildings went entire winters unheated in the end.
The 1990s were the endgame of stagnation that had set in decades prior. It was a disaster of your own making.
And as much as Putin is obsessed with complaining how Gorbachev destroyed the USSR, it's a great irony that with international isolation, sanctions, broken economy and pointless wars (then Afghanistan, now Ukraine), Putin has recreated the conditions that led to the 1990s. Gorbachev inherited the mess and tried to fix it, while Putin created it again from scratch. If you wanted Russia to squander its potential and get stuck in a self-destructive loop as rest of the world steams ahead, you could not have made a better pick than Putin.
Imagine where Germany would be if instead of focusing on economic development (Wirtschaftswunder) and cooperation (European Union and its predecessors), they had picked some Gestapo middle manager as their leader by 1960, began justifying suppression of freedoms with disillusionment from the difficulties of post-war years, and launched a massive war against France in a futile attempt to turn back time and restore the Third Reich at its widest extent and get back submarine bases on the Atlantic coast while yelling about the French having some communist resistance figure as their national hero. Certainly not a top economy in the world and a respected partner in international relations with a large circle of influential allies.
There is indeed a difference in inputs. For some obscure reason, Russians cannot even imagine their country developing on a normal path like Germany, the Eastern Bloc, and so many others.
I think the source of confusion is the use of “at the time” in your previous comment, which is talking about events in WW2, when the article discusses events in 1914 with no reference to 1940.
The cause in 1940 was apparently an artillery duel between German and British troops, which is on a different level from purposefully setting fire to a library within an occupied city, even if the result is equally terrible.
Now we need an article about KULouvian splitting with UCLouvain and building a new town and university from scratch in less than 3 years, a true engineering marvel.
You also need to learn that the Flemish wanted so much to get rid of the French only classes that in 1916 they created a Dutch speaking university... with the help of the German that destroyed Leuven the year before.
What do you call the capital of China, The People's Republic of China? What do you call the city divided by the Bosphorus? What do you call the country of which that city is the largest? What do you call the country of which Prague is the capital?
Any country can rename cities however they want, they can't erase the fact that they were called something else in the past, and that people remember the previous name.
Saint Petersburg was renamed to Petrograd, then Leningrad and then Saint Petersburg again but when Germans sieged the town in 1941, it was Leningrad.
But if your point is more about how people call them, well you're going down another rabbit hole with me.
Just for Belgium, all the major international cities have a name in the 3 official languages. (Dutch, French and German) : Cairo in Egypt is called Caïro (D), Le Caire (F) and Kairo(G).
There I've never met anyone using "Beijing" for the capital of China, it's always "Pékin"(F) and "Peking"(D). [1] [2]
And within Belgium itself, many towns have their names in the 3 languages; Liège (F), Luik (D) and Lüttich(G).
(But other have only one like Knokke, Dinant or Eupen).
This can lead to many interesting situations, especially with the peculiar linguistic situation in Belgium :
- Anyone speaking their native language will use the name from that language : Mechelen in Dutch, Malines in French and Mecheln in German.
- Speaking in French with a Dutch native, they usually use the Dutch name.
If they are willing to use the French name, they'll switch to it if you didn't catch it in Dutch, otherwise, they'only use the Dutch name. [3]
- Speaking English with a French or Dutch native, they'll use the English name if it's Brussels and their language's name any other time, wherever it's located.
For cities in the Dutch speaking part, French natives will always use Anvers(F) for Antwerpen (D), Gand(F) for Gent(D) (even though it is Ghent in English).
For cities in the French speaking part, Dutch will always use Namen(D) for Namur(F) or Bergen(D) for Mons(F)
- French native often need to specify which city they are talking about when using "Louvain" because it can refer to Leuven or Louvain-la-Neuve.
- And everyone want that cities only be called with the name from their linguistic region... hence the first post that said that it's now called Leuven.
3. Which brings me to my true story of meeting a guy from France that only knew the town Luik and never heard of Liège. Nobody in Liège call it Luik, just like nobody in Leuven call it Louvain.
I think you missed their point, for instance you call it Constantinople when talking about events before the Ottomans took it over, and Istanbul after.
The French university was re-founded in Louvain-la-Neuve, an atypical and fairly successful planned city. It has some small community character and a whimsical architecture that's more trying to be cozy rather than impressive. Recommended for architecture enthusiasts.
It (Leuven) has always been a Dutch speaking town. Well, the majority of the population that is. The administration (city, university) started using French at some point (19th century - mid 20th century).
clarification: used french in the 19th-century until mid 20th century.
Anyway, the fact that the university was still giving some courses in French in 1968 in what was officially a Flemish University caused the "Leuven Vlaams" student riots.
I live in Leuven and you can clearly see that in the middle ages, they spoke dutch here. The switch to French and back is visible in the street names (because often they carry all 3 names). A funny example: The "grasmusstraat" (now) was "Rue Erasmus" in the 19th century and "grasmusstroike" in the middle ges. Apparently the French civil servants didn't know that a grasmus is a little bird and renamed it after a famous alumnus.
On the flipside. American universities supported a rebuild of the library and today still it is one of the most magnificent libraries you will see anywhere in the world.
These are called exonyms and there's nothing wrong with them. The Italian city of Firenze is anglicized as Florence. The anglicized Jesus Christ is latinized as Iesus Christus, hellenized as Iesous Christos, aramaicized as Yeshua Mshiha. People do this all the time with tons of words and especially with proper nouns. It's completely normal and okay.
There's nothing wrong with exonyms in principle. However using "Florence" instead of "Florencja" in a Polish text would sound weird.
If you add historical conflict to it then it can get much worse. "Warschau" in a non-German text would make many Polish people angry because of memories of forced Germanization.
I love exonyms when they are native. As you note, the English name for the Italian city is Florence (so too the proper English words are Turkey, Kiev and Peking, not Turkiye, Kyiv or Beijing).
I see no reason at all to use the French name for a Flemish city when writing in English. When writing in French, sure.
Out of those, Florence and Turkey are proper exonyms. Kiev and Kyiv are direct romanizations of the Russian and Ukrainian names. Other languages have actual exonyms for the city, such as Kiova in Finnish and Kijow in Polish. Peking is a romanization of an older pronunciation, while Beijing is closer to the modern pronunciation of the same name.
Both. Belgium is multi-lingual (NL,FR,DE), so most cities and bigger towns have 2 or 3 names. In fact, today, most streets in Brussels have 2 names. So do a lot of big local companies
Most local inhabitants would have called it Leuven, as it is a Flemish city. The rich people at that time, both inside and outside the city, heavily promoted French, and pushed only the French names in politics and international communication.
Just some clarification on what Belgium's multi-linguality means exactly:
Flanders is Dutch-speaking.
Wallonia is primarily French-speaking, except for a small part of it which is German-speaking (
The Brussels Capital Region is officially bi-lingual Dutch/French, but in practice it's almost completely French. In restaurants, shops, ... you can be sure to find people who can help you in French, but almost never in Dutch. Police, hospitals, ... are supposed to be bi-lingual, but good luck getting good help if you speak Dutch but not French.
In most places, you'll only encounter one language: your own native language. Only Brussels is supposed to be bi-lingual.
Many cities do have two or three names, but that's not because those two or three languages are actually spoken in that city.
It's normal, but it causes some problems: people using the wrong exonym or failing to find something they're looking for. And it seems to be gradually going out of fashion.
Which places in Belgium have an English Wikipedia page with an exonym as the page title? I can find Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Ostend. Are there others?
I wouldn't be very surprised if a couple of those went out of fashion in English over the coming decades, just like "Brunswick", "Francfort" and "Aix-la-Chapelle" went out of fashion. And "Basle" is on the way out, isn't it?
A bit off topic, but you had me curious: the first exonym that I could think about was Quebec City, which is called in French Ville de Québec. The interesting part though is that the official name of the city in both languages is Québec, lacking the Ville or the City. Is this an exonym though, since its Canadians who have come up with both? Probably depends on who you speak to.
Back then, a large proportion of Flemish intellectuals (including my grandparents) were French-speaking, which is a reason why there were so many French students and professors in Leuven/Louvain. Therefore I think that, in the context of the article, the "wrongness" of calling the city Louvain is not as clear-cut as you suggest.
Total aside: I have been playing Crusader Kings repeatedly using Leuven as the home city for my character's dynasty. I don't know why I zeroed in on the city, but I have done over 30 run-throughs so far. (Yes, that is a little obsessive.)
First starting as Count of Leuven, then building up to become Duke of Brabant, then King of Lotharingia, then the Holy Roman Emperor.
Now, having this historical context, I want to visit.
The library was rebuilt with American aid. If you walk around the building today you will see all the plaques of contributing institutions embedded in the walls.
In August of 1914, during World War I,
Leuven was looted by German troops. In
the night of the 25th to 26th of August,
they set fire to a large part of the city,
effectively destroying about half of
it. The Germans set fire to the 14th
century University Hall and its library
wing. The University library burned,
and with it about 300,000 books, about
1000
incunabula and a huge collection of
manuscripts, including the University’s
founding bull from 1425.
The Germans had aimed to punish
Leuven after alleging the presence of
snipers in the city. They claimed that
the sacking of Leuven was a fair reprisal.
Their ‘punisment’ of Leuven destroyed
more than 1000 buildings and cost more
than 200 lives.
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, soon after the restoration of
Leuven’s new library, Belgium found itself neutral once again.
After the retreat of the British and
with German forces entering the city, on the 17th of May 1940 the new University
library was set aflame after an artillery barrage. Molten glass from the above
floors flowed into the cellars, past the steel doors, and destroyed the collections.
The entire building was gutted.
Not even twelve years after its opening, the new University library was reduced
to rubble and its collections were ravaged once more. The occupying forces
accused the British of having set the library ablaze on purpose to allow them to
later blame the Germans. No access to the ruin or objective investigations were
allowed. Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, paid the ruined library
a visit to push the German version of events. At the Nuremberg tribunal it was
found that the library burned after German artillery had struck it.
Only 21,000 of the original 900,000 pieces in the library collection were left.
Hundreds of manuscripts (including some that had survived the 1914 fire) and
everything from before 1501 was destroyed.
To be precise (because I was confused initially): the building being shown in pictures is the current “main hall” of KU Leuven in Naamsestraat (second picture), nearby Oudemarkt (first picture), and not the university library in Ladeuzeplein.
Very interesting to note that Oxford wasn't extensively bombed in ww2 despite being a manufacturing hub. I wonder what role this incident had in that choice.
Take that with a huge grain of salt, but I've read recently that Hitler was thinking of making Oxford Britain's capital if the German invasion would have successfully happened, so because of that he didn't bomb it. I cannot remember the exact sources for that.
On firmer ground when it comes to sources, I'm now reading E. H. Carr's Conditions of Peace [1] (written in 1942, so during WW2) and at some point he was also suggesting moving UK's capital from London further to the North, he was thinking somewhere in Midlands, if I remember right. It turns out that even back then some of the British people were fully aware of London's negative pull caused by its oversize.
To this day, the burning of the library in Louvain remains a battle line, which we should be weary [sic] to ever cross again, for as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) so eloquently once stated, “where they burn books, they will also burn people”.
I always assumed it was just a misspelling of "wary" by analogy to "wear". You're telling me that people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"? That's very different from what I thought.
While they do both often express a reticent emotional state, the cause of that state is different: for 'weary', it is exhaustion from past events, while for 'wary', the concern is to avoid undesirable events in the future.
There is arguably some overlap where someone is being wary because they are weary of similar situations turning out badly all too often in the past.
As a non-native speaker, 'to be wary' is not really in my vocabulary, while 'to be weary' seems much more common, and both sound pretty close to each other even if there is a difference even with my accent, so I could see myself making the mistake.
It looks similar to than/then, but than/then is much more jarring to me for some reason.
They are not homophones? I’m not a native speaker and I’ve simply always assumed they are. I lived in London and the US for many years, but these are not common words in speech so I never got corrected.
I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
This vowel digraph remains my eternal nemesis… Ever since I learned as a child that “bear” doesn’t rhyme with “fear” and found myself faced with the overwhelming realization that I will never speak this language 100% correctly, no matter how much effort I put into reading and writing.
> I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
Indeed so! "Wear" and "ware" are homophones, having the same vowel sound as "wary".
"Weary", on the other hand, rhymes with "cheery" or "dreary".
> I will never speak this language 100% correctly
I am a middle-aged native speaker, an avid lifelong reader with a love for the language, and I still occasionally discover that I am mispronouncing words I have known for years.
This is the name of the city today, but this has not always been the case. In the past, Leuven was a bilingual city, and to many of the people who lived there, the city was known as Louvain.
It seems like a lot of primary sources for this article used the French name. Even if it was incorrect, maybe that was how it was commonly referred to outside of Belgium at the time?
Belgium was in an odd state of bilingualism at the time. While the people of the area would speak Flemish (“Dutch”), those in positions of power and education institutions would use French as the Lingua Franca.
I was born in Leuven and lived there for 30 years of my life - it would be pretty odd to see contemporary references as “Louvain” by those local to it.
Because you don't know the place or its history as well as you seem to think you do. Flamingantism is a scourge upon Belgium.
Louvain is fine in English. Much like ruuban is the correct form in Japanese.
There's a whole article full of interesting historical context. Yet you comment on the perceived (and incorrect, thus imagined) slight against your mother tongue. This is a good example of why Belgium is such a hot mess. We'd rather spend time bickering about irrelevant nonsense than in addressing real problems.
From your perspective maybe? From my perspective I don’t understand why they need to make everything half french, especially in an ostensibly Dutch speaking part of the country.
It’s not like we use an alternative french name for Amsterdam.
The situation in 2024 is much more confusing. Because it seems to me that the political side that styles itself to be against the far-right, is also very much in favour of curtailing free speech and reigning in internet platforms where people share news and political opinions. So who is burning the books? Everyone? I'm so confused.
It's pretty simple. Right-wingers want to control what information their minor children are exposed to, especially at school. Left-wingers want to control what information adults are exposed to (e.g., deplatforming wrongthink).
My great grandfather was the vice rector of the university at the time, as an historian he took the initiative to covertly collect evidence of all the nazi crimes, evidence which was used in the nuremberg trials.
But more interestingly, there was a nationalist movement in Belgium at the the time, and a debate on which language to use at the university. The international language (french) or the local language (flemish). He was of the opinion that both had their place, which put him in opposition to the nationalists. Since he was one of the founders of the flemish literature movement, and the prime expert on flemish history he was hard to attack directly by the nationalists. So they denounced him to the gestapo, hoping they would get rid of him while keeping their hands clean. Fortunately for me it didn’t work, as the nazis were also reliant on his academic work for their pan-germanic narrative and refused to attack him directly as well.
Nowadays we see as well western nationalist movements with ambivalent support for murderous regimes such as Russia, and I think this support comes in no small part from the idea that those regimes can be used to do the dirty work that they are too cowardly to do themselves
To do — how? by invading their countries and establishing a police state? That’s a little too much even for so called “nationalists”. I think it’s just plain old bribery and propaganda.
As a Russian who emigrated a long time ago for political reasons, signed countless anti-Kremlin petitions, and sent money to support Ukraine and her people, I am scared how many people support this regime for reasons unknown. I don’t know any other possible reason except selling one’s soul for money.
Look up tankies[0] —- people who support these atrocities by imperialists and other problematic regimes because they’re so conditioned against the US / Western nations that they assume anyone acting against the west’s interests must be doing good.
[0] https://youtu.be/0lcBplljoD8
Those people are idiots on the Internet, but they have no actual political power. The pro-Russia right is more of a concern, especially when they make common cause out of "anti woke".
Tulsi Gabbard may well be the next director of national intelligence...
I am aware of the phenomenon; the interesting part is the word “conditioned”. By whom? And, eventually, who paid for the conditioning? (I think it mostly ends with the usual suspects, Russia, China and Iran).
Possibly at least somewhat. I think it also comes from getting disillusioned by legitimately terrible things done by the US in the name of “democracy” e.g. Latin American death squads in the 70s/80s, Iraq war and war on terror, etc.
People can’t seem to hold the idea of multiple countries being problematic and doing objectionable things. Certainly information ops from your usual suspects feed into this.
Yes. It's really weird that posters here find it so hard to believe in people looking at their situation and making their own opinions without external influence. I don't need Russians or anyone else to see that my state is stealing half of my salary in exchange for insecurity (including terrorism and a friend gunned by it), failing healthcare, disfunctional administration, public media shitting on me daily on the basis of my sex, race and sexual orientation, supporting wars and war crimes abroad, canceling the ideas of 40% of the voters, etc.
Conditioning doesn't need to be something one does to another. You can condition yourself by just dabbling in something and then going down the rabbit hole.
Like Elon being conditioned by his own social media website.
I imagine a lot of that happened well before he got involved with Twitter. He was just better at hiding it and likely had a PR team covering for him
North Korea also has large scale, effective info-operations, though aimed mostly at US/SK/Japan. also more ideological overlap with the "tanky" world view than anyone else
Some people just have temperaments of fanatics, ready to become obsessed by any political idea and take it to the extreme. And if the idea happens to be a messianic religion which gives a great excuse to relish in hate and glorify violence, it's even better.
The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded. I don’t think Russia will invade the USA any time soon, but it can invade other countries and throw liberals out of windows over there, normalizing the practice and diminishing the power of liberalism worldwide
> The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded.
s/The/Some/
> To do — how? by invading their countries and establishing a police state? That’s a little too much even for so called “nationalists”. I think it’s just plain old bribery and propaganda.
Plenty of right-wing extremists seemed happy to help the Nazis run their country (most definitely in a police-state spirit) after it was conquered in WW2. I think you underestimate the importance of ideology.
Problem with these nationalists is that they already live in world of ideas neglecting the reality. Ideas can be bent if needed.
Let me assume your question is not rhetorical, and I will try to give you at least what I understand to be part of the answer. This will run a bit long, and, most likely, not be well received by the audience on this website, but I promise, I am not a bot, not "paid by the Kremlin", and, if I sold my soul for my beliefs, the courier is desperately late with the check.
The most common narrative, supported by endless social media personalities on the Russian "liberal left" is that the Soviet Union was Double-Plus-Ungood, (for the American audience, the joke is that "the younger the blogger, the more he suffered under Stalin"), the 90s were a time of flowering possibility for Democracy and Freedom, and then Evil Pootin the Horrible showed up, and ruined things for everyone. In the interest of space, I won't get into the Soviet era, let's just leave it at "it's not as simple as you think", and when many, many people who actually live in Russia today look back on that era, they see much more of a mixed bag than just the "Gulag And Repressions" narrative, and the more the left pushes this fiction, the less relevant their voices become. If you struggle to understand "how can anyone support HIM?!", we need a bit of background.
Psychologically, modern Russia is heavily shaped by the 90s. The flowering of "Democracy" was chiefly embodied by incredibly flawed elections that brough Boris Yeltzin to power. And as Russian citizens watched in disbelief while Yeltzin stumbled around the world stage in a perennially drunken stupor, various economic "reformers" were taking the fullest possible advantage of the "Freedom" they were suddenly afforded. For an informed non-partisan's view of the economic pillaging, I refer you to the many speeches made by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the main economic advisors to the Russian "reformers" of the time - chiefly Anatoly Chubais and Egor Gaidar. See also some of their remarks to get a measure of just how much contempt they had for the very people they would leave destitute. For those readers who did not follow those events - all valuable production "actives" (assets in English) were thought to be collectively owned by Soviet citizens. To transition the country to a capitalist economy, a "privitization" scheme was devised. In what should come as a surprise to literally no one, it was, of course, a completely fraudulent process and led to the rapid accumulation of wealth creating the very oligarchs whose influence the left will come to decry (after, of course, being hired by those very oligarchs to promote their rule). The new owners were only interested in rapid profit, which meant that factories were shuttered, cut up and sold for scrap, and the profits offshored into tax havens. Workers formerly employed were fired, and the entire country slid further and further into becoming a rust belt.
For most regular people in Russia, the 90s in post-Soviet Russia became a lost decade. Loss of identity and purpose, combined with economic stagnation, widespread unemployment, devaluation of the currency thrust millions of people into poverty. The excess mortality of the 90s from early death, suicide, and emigration is estimated at roughly 10 million - a third of the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during WWII. And this is "peacetime". The other delightful aspect of this situation was the rise of various organized crime groups, strengthened by military veterans and former members of various special agencies who found themselves out of a job, and hired out to the very oligarchs above. Assassinations of business competitors took place in broad daylight. Street violence, kidnappings, looting and murder were commonplace. The government was too busy getting bribed by the oligarchs to look the other way, or too busy "getting while the getting was good". I could go on, but I hope you get the point.
On the international scene, Russia obviously stopped being a relevant factor. This is the beginning of American's "Unipolar Moment", and Rusian citizens watched as the US took full advantage of this fact. They also watched as the US lavished Russia's corrupt government and its oligarchs with blandishments of how "democratic" Russia was becoming, and how "democracy" was going to make life better. Various NGOs sprung up, quietly paid for by outfits like USAID, NED, Open Society Foundation, and hired Russian liberal left personalities and had them promote the idea that "old Russia" was bad, and that "new Russia" was on its way to becoming a part of the civilized, collective West. The more effort such groups spent, the worse life seemed to get and the more firmly the idea that democracy and Western-directed reforms were inimical to Russia's collective interests took hold in the minds of many people living in Russia. And let's be honest, various Russian politicians were certainly busy helping that narrative along in the interests of their own political advancement, including a hard-right member of the already right-wing Yabloko party who started off promoting himself on a die-hard patriotic and xenophobic platform. He was so radical, Yabloko kicked him out. He reinvented himself, went to Yale, and would eventually return to Russia to feature prominently as a "fighter against corruption". (That joke's for my Russian-politics aware liberal left homies.)
And then came 1999, and the invasion of Yugoslavia. Again the outlooks diverged: for the West, it's an open-and-shut "we went in to stop a genocide" case. For Russians, this is the West coming in yet again to destroy a Slavic country. Irrespective of the facts, what will come to matter is the feeling that "invasion based on duty-to-protect" is legit, that starting a war in Europe without a UN mandate is ok, and the affirmation of the fact that the West (collectively) feels entitled to ignore warnings from Russian politicians. Particularly those of one rising politician from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) who will, one year later, come to supreme power in Russia in a completely fraudulent and bought election that the West will, of course, praise as being "progress towards Democracy". No, seriously, the US hailed it as such. US foreign policy establishment felt that as this politician came from Yeltzin's retinue, he would, naturally, continue Yeltzin's laissez-faire approach to, well, everything. They were, of course, wrong. For my own part, let me just add that when I learned that German warplanes painted with the balkenkreuz were once again bombing Europe, I felt an incredible sense of anger and betrayal. That Germany once again was bombing Yugoslavia, after everything that had happened in WWII, and that Europe's elites were standing by and cheering while this went on made it clear that we no longer share the same comprehension of history.
Still with me? Awesome. I hope this background gives some idea as to the challenges Putin faces when he comes to power. Putin choses the Lord Vetinary approach - he cannot eliminate corruption so he makes it manageable. Most oligarchs go along, retain their looted wealth, but their political power is curtailed. Those who do not go along are eliminated by their competitors, or are banished and suddenly join the liberal left opposition to Putin (shoutout to Khodorkovsky). Putin stabilizes enough of the economy so that people have jobs. Maybe not great ones, but there is an emergent sense of purpose. And he stops the street violence and the chaos. It is probably impossible for people that didn't live through the 90s to understand, but for many, the position is literally "anything is better than that". In this case, "anything" is Putin, and there is genuine, real support for him because of that. We really don't have the space to get into the international questions, it's a huge area, but again, let me just hint that the Western narrative of what is going on is widely rejected by regular people living in Russia in no small part because the ever-chittering horde of liberal-left commentators does their best to rebroadcast the Western narrative in the Russian language. Quite a few folks will automatically take a position opposite whatever a liberal-left commentator says, based on prior experience. The Western narrative is aimed at a Western audience and crafted to omit history and facts that are relevant to a Russian audience, which is why it doesn't work there.
So, to return to your original question, when you say that you signed "anti-Kremlin" petitions, most regular people interpret that as "so, you want to go back to the 90's 'democracy', do you? No thank you". When you say "you sent money to Ukraine and her people", many people in Russia will say: "so, you support a government whose national hero was a Nazi collaborator who committed ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians and Jews."
Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse.
No one sold their soul for money - we just have a different value function, and are using a different set of inputs.
Everything you said had some sense until 2014 and even until 2022, but then suddenly your house of cards fell apart in the eyes of the world, and it became clear that Russia is once again a country run by a senile tyrant. Just like Soviet Union under late Stalin, Germany under late Hitler, China under late Mao... similarities abound.
Many people in Russia will say: "so, you support a government whose national hero was a Nazi collaborator who committed ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians and Jews."
Then they're under the influence of some serious propaganda.
Being as (1) the collaborator you are referring to is not "a national hero of the government", (2) he wasn't involved in the events you are referring to, and (3) none of that history is in any way relevant to the current conflict.
> Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse.
No, it's not a fact - it's a lie that forms the cornerstone of Putinism ("no alternative to Putin"). The struggles you describe were not unique to Russia, but to the entire former USSR and its satellites. The entire Eastern Bloc stood in the same starting position in 1991 and went through the same transformations. Countries like Poland or Estonia succeeded and are now proper first world contries, whereas Russia failed and is rapidly regressing into a stereotypical third world banana republic.
A key in Russia's failure is unwillingness to face its history. The USSR was not a beacon of human achievement, but a prison of nations held together only through violence. It disintegrated not because of malicious external scheming, but because of utter internal mismanagement and rotting that led to it being unable to feed its people. Despite immense oil and gas reserves, it suffered fuel shortages and apartment buildings went entire winters unheated in the end.
The 1990s were the endgame of stagnation that had set in decades prior. It was a disaster of your own making.
And as much as Putin is obsessed with complaining how Gorbachev destroyed the USSR, it's a great irony that with international isolation, sanctions, broken economy and pointless wars (then Afghanistan, now Ukraine), Putin has recreated the conditions that led to the 1990s. Gorbachev inherited the mess and tried to fix it, while Putin created it again from scratch. If you wanted Russia to squander its potential and get stuck in a self-destructive loop as rest of the world steams ahead, you could not have made a better pick than Putin.
Imagine where Germany would be if instead of focusing on economic development (Wirtschaftswunder) and cooperation (European Union and its predecessors), they had picked some Gestapo middle manager as their leader by 1960, began justifying suppression of freedoms with disillusionment from the difficulties of post-war years, and launched a massive war against France in a futile attempt to turn back time and restore the Third Reich at its widest extent and get back submarine bases on the Atlantic coast while yelling about the French having some communist resistance figure as their national hero. Certainly not a top economy in the world and a respected partner in international relations with a large circle of influential allies.
There is indeed a difference in inputs. For some obscure reason, Russians cannot even imagine their country developing on a normal path like Germany, the Eastern Bloc, and so many others.
You support Ukrainian nazis (not even nationalists), yet you condemn nationalists. This is a good example of doublethought.
You support Ukrainian nazis
They're doing nothing of the sort.
[dead]
To be sure, the burning of the library happened during the early days of WW1, which had neither nazis, gestapo, nor Nuremberg trials.
It was burned down twice, in 1914 and 1940
I think the source of confusion is the use of “at the time” in your previous comment, which is talking about events in WW2, when the article discusses events in 1914 with no reference to 1940.
The cause in 1940 was apparently an artillery duel between German and British troops, which is on a different level from purposefully setting fire to a library within an occupied city, even if the result is equally terrible.
Now we need an article about KULouvian splitting with UCLouvain and building a new town and university from scratch in less than 3 years, a true engineering marvel.
Related that library was split into 2 because of this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-was-the-leuven-li...
You also need to learn that the Flemish wanted so much to get rid of the French only classes that in 1916 they created a Dutch speaking university... with the help of the German that destroyed Leuven the year before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Bissing_university
Leuven. It's a Dutch speaking town. The university is KU Leuven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KU_Leuven
Yes, it is, but you can't rewrite history.
It was internationaly called Louvain before the international recognition for Leuven only camed after the events of 1968.
That's why the “Louvain shall be our battle cry” became a popular march in Britain. [1]
And why it was called so in Australia. [2].
I guess that's why most of the English articles about Leuven includes the French name.
1. https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/press/ecsi/belgian-culture-and... 2. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15533652.
> Yes, it is, but you can't rewrite history.
Yes you can.
What do you call the capital of China, The People's Republic of China? What do you call the city divided by the Bosphorus? What do you call the country of which that city is the largest? What do you call the country of which Prague is the capital?
Any country can rename cities however they want, they can't erase the fact that they were called something else in the past, and that people remember the previous name.
Saint Petersburg was renamed to Petrograd, then Leningrad and then Saint Petersburg again but when Germans sieged the town in 1941, it was Leningrad.
But if your point is more about how people call them, well you're going down another rabbit hole with me.
Just for Belgium, all the major international cities have a name in the 3 official languages. (Dutch, French and German) : Cairo in Egypt is called Caïro (D), Le Caire (F) and Kairo(G).
There I've never met anyone using "Beijing" for the capital of China, it's always "Pékin"(F) and "Peking"(D). [1] [2]
And within Belgium itself, many towns have their names in the 3 languages; Liège (F), Luik (D) and Lüttich(G). (But other have only one like Knokke, Dinant or Eupen).
This can lead to many interesting situations, especially with the peculiar linguistic situation in Belgium :
- Anyone speaking their native language will use the name from that language : Mechelen in Dutch, Malines in French and Mecheln in German.
- Speaking in French with a Dutch native, they usually use the Dutch name. If they are willing to use the French name, they'll switch to it if you didn't catch it in Dutch, otherwise, they'only use the Dutch name. [3]
- Speaking English with a French or Dutch native, they'll use the English name if it's Brussels and their language's name any other time, wherever it's located. For cities in the Dutch speaking part, French natives will always use Anvers(F) for Antwerpen (D), Gand(F) for Gent(D) (even though it is Ghent in English). For cities in the French speaking part, Dutch will always use Namen(D) for Namur(F) or Bergen(D) for Mons(F)
- French native often need to specify which city they are talking about when using "Louvain" because it can refer to Leuven or Louvain-la-Neuve.
- And everyone want that cities only be called with the name from their linguistic region... hence the first post that said that it's now called Leuven.
1. https://www.lesoir.be/635347/article/2024-11-12/attaque-la-v...
2. https://www.hln.be/economie/china-kondigt-weer-tijdelijke-ma...
3. Which brings me to my true story of meeting a guy from France that only knew the town Luik and never heard of Liège. Nobody in Liège call it Luik, just like nobody in Leuven call it Louvain.
I think you missed their point, for instance you call it Constantinople when talking about events before the Ottomans took it over, and Istanbul after.
It was only officially renamed in 1930.
Leuven (Afrikaans, Dutch, Finnish), Louvain (French, Romanian), Lováin (Irish), Lovaina (Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish), Lovaň (Czech), Lovanio (Italian), Löwen (German), Louvéni – Λουβαίνη (Greek), Lovin (Walloon), Léiwen (Luxembourgish), Lovanium (Latin), Lowanium (Polish), 魯汶 (Chinese)
(see wikipedia)
The French university was re-founded in Louvain-la-Neuve, an atypical and fairly successful planned city. It has some small community character and a whimsical architecture that's more trying to be cozy rather than impressive. Recommended for architecture enthusiasts.
It is now. Belgian history is the true definition of insanity. There were Belgians who were quite happy to see this university go up in flames.
It (Leuven) has always been a Dutch speaking town. Well, the majority of the population that is. The administration (city, university) started using French at some point (19th century - mid 20th century).
clarification: used french in the 19th-century until mid 20th century. Anyway, the fact that the university was still giving some courses in French in 1968 in what was officially a Flemish University caused the "Leuven Vlaams" student riots.
I live in Leuven and you can clearly see that in the middle ages, they spoke dutch here. The switch to French and back is visible in the street names (because often they carry all 3 names). A funny example: The "grasmusstraat" (now) was "Rue Erasmus" in the 19th century and "grasmusstroike" in the middle ges. Apparently the French civil servants didn't know that a grasmus is a little bird and renamed it after a famous alumnus.
On the flipside. American universities supported a rebuild of the library and today still it is one of the most magnificent libraries you will see anywhere in the world.
> Louvain (“Leuven”)
The correct name of the city is Leuven: it is a Flemish city, not a Wallonian one. Using French names for Flemish cities is just wrong.
These are called exonyms and there's nothing wrong with them. The Italian city of Firenze is anglicized as Florence. The anglicized Jesus Christ is latinized as Iesus Christus, hellenized as Iesous Christos, aramaicized as Yeshua Mshiha. People do this all the time with tons of words and especially with proper nouns. It's completely normal and okay.
There's nothing wrong with exonyms in principle. However using "Florence" instead of "Florencja" in a Polish text would sound weird.
If you add historical conflict to it then it can get much worse. "Warschau" in a non-German text would make many Polish people angry because of memories of forced Germanization.
The point is that using Florence or Cologne in an English text doesn’t sound weird at all even though they are (were) French names.
I love exonyms when they are native. As you note, the English name for the Italian city is Florence (so too the proper English words are Turkey, Kiev and Peking, not Turkiye, Kyiv or Beijing).
I see no reason at all to use the French name for a Flemish city when writing in English. When writing in French, sure.
But Florence is the French name of that city. Or Rome. I don't really understand the difference with Louvain.
Out of those, Florence and Turkey are proper exonyms. Kiev and Kyiv are direct romanizations of the Russian and Ukrainian names. Other languages have actual exonyms for the city, such as Kiova in Finnish and Kijow in Polish. Peking is a romanization of an older pronunciation, while Beijing is closer to the modern pronunciation of the same name.
What was it called in 1914?
Both. Belgium is multi-lingual (NL,FR,DE), so most cities and bigger towns have 2 or 3 names. In fact, today, most streets in Brussels have 2 names. So do a lot of big local companies
Most local inhabitants would have called it Leuven, as it is a Flemish city. The rich people at that time, both inside and outside the city, heavily promoted French, and pushed only the French names in politics and international communication.
Even today, this is a very touchy subject.
Just some clarification on what Belgium's multi-linguality means exactly:
Flanders is Dutch-speaking.
Wallonia is primarily French-speaking, except for a small part of it which is German-speaking (
The Brussels Capital Region is officially bi-lingual Dutch/French, but in practice it's almost completely French. In restaurants, shops, ... you can be sure to find people who can help you in French, but almost never in Dutch. Police, hospitals, ... are supposed to be bi-lingual, but good luck getting good help if you speak Dutch but not French.
In most places, you'll only encounter one language: your own native language. Only Brussels is supposed to be bi-lingual.
Many cities do have two or three names, but that's not because those two or three languages are actually spoken in that city.
It's normal, but it causes some problems: people using the wrong exonym or failing to find something they're looking for. And it seems to be gradually going out of fashion.
Which places in Belgium have an English Wikipedia page with an exonym as the page title? I can find Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Ostend. Are there others?
I wouldn't be very surprised if a couple of those went out of fashion in English over the coming decades, just like "Brunswick", "Francfort" and "Aix-la-Chapelle" went out of fashion. And "Basle" is on the way out, isn't it?
A bit off topic, but you had me curious: the first exonym that I could think about was Quebec City, which is called in French Ville de Québec. The interesting part though is that the official name of the city in both languages is Québec, lacking the Ville or the City. Is this an exonym though, since its Canadians who have come up with both? Probably depends on who you speak to.
Antwerp.
They are wrong. This is like calling Gdansk, Danzig.
You mean like calling the Netherlands, Holandia?
There's a lot of exonyms in Polish in everyday use.
Back then, a large proportion of Flemish intellectuals (including my grandparents) were French-speaking, which is a reason why there were so many French students and professors in Leuven/Louvain. Therefore I think that, in the context of the article, the "wrongness" of calling the city Louvain is not as clear-cut as you suggest.
Total aside: I have been playing Crusader Kings repeatedly using Leuven as the home city for my character's dynasty. I don't know why I zeroed in on the city, but I have done over 30 run-throughs so far. (Yes, that is a little obsessive.)
First starting as Count of Leuven, then building up to become Duke of Brabant, then King of Lotharingia, then the Holy Roman Emperor.
Now, having this historical context, I want to visit.
My great grandparents had a friend die in this fire.
Then they and their kids had to go through it again 26 years later.
The library was rebuilt with American aid. If you walk around the building today you will see all the plaques of contributing institutions embedded in the walls.
In August of 1914, during World War I, Leuven was looted by German troops. In the night of the 25th to 26th of August, they set fire to a large part of the city, effectively destroying about half of it. The Germans set fire to the 14th century University Hall and its library wing. The University library burned, and with it about 300,000 books, about 1000 incunabula and a huge collection of manuscripts, including the University’s founding bull from 1425.
The Germans had aimed to punish Leuven after alleging the presence of snipers in the city. They claimed that the sacking of Leuven was a fair reprisal. Their ‘punisment’ of Leuven destroyed more than 1000 buildings and cost more than 200 lives.
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, soon after the restoration of Leuven’s new library, Belgium found itself neutral once again.
After the retreat of the British and with German forces entering the city, on the 17th of May 1940 the new University library was set aflame after an artillery barrage. Molten glass from the above floors flowed into the cellars, past the steel doors, and destroyed the collections. The entire building was gutted. Not even twelve years after its opening, the new University library was reduced to rubble and its collections were ravaged once more. The occupying forces accused the British of having set the library ablaze on purpose to allow them to later blame the Germans. No access to the ruin or objective investigations were allowed. Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, paid the ruined library a visit to push the German version of events. At the Nuremberg tribunal it was found that the library burned after German artillery had struck it. Only 21,000 of the original 900,000 pieces in the library collection were left. Hundreds of manuscripts (including some that had survived the 1914 fire) and everything from before 1501 was destroyed.
https://ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/research/america-europefund/aef...
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
Every library in Texas should have this inscribed in granite above it.
To be precise (because I was confused initially): the building being shown in pictures is the current “main hall” of KU Leuven in Naamsestraat (second picture), nearby Oudemarkt (first picture), and not the university library in Ladeuzeplein.
Very interesting to note that Oxford wasn't extensively bombed in ww2 despite being a manufacturing hub. I wonder what role this incident had in that choice.
Kyoto may have been saved from the atom bomb because the US secretary of war had his honeymoon there: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33755182
Take that with a huge grain of salt, but I've read recently that Hitler was thinking of making Oxford Britain's capital if the German invasion would have successfully happened, so because of that he didn't bomb it. I cannot remember the exact sources for that.
On firmer ground when it comes to sources, I'm now reading E. H. Carr's Conditions of Peace [1] (written in 1942, so during WW2) and at some point he was also suggesting moving UK's capital from London further to the North, he was thinking somewhere in Midlands, if I remember right. It turns out that even back then some of the British people were fully aware of London's negative pull caused by its oversize.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_of_Peace
Final sentence:
To this day, the burning of the library in Louvain remains a battle line, which we should be weary [sic] to ever cross again, for as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) so eloquently once stated, “where they burn books, they will also burn people”.
The wary/weary mixup is so strange to me, especially because it seems relatively new (last 5-10 years at most).
My wife started using the word this way about 20 years ago, I also heard it on TV ads at the time.
I always assumed it was a confused fusion of "wary" and "leery".
I always assumed it was just a misspelling of "wary" by analogy to "wear". You're telling me that people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"? That's very different from what I thought.
> people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"?
Yes, that's my experience.
It’s not that strange?
The words are homophones and both express a reticent emotional state.
While they do both often express a reticent emotional state, the cause of that state is different: for 'weary', it is exhaustion from past events, while for 'wary', the concern is to avoid undesirable events in the future.
There is arguably some overlap where someone is being wary because they are weary of similar situations turning out badly all too often in the past.
Where in the world are you that weary and wary are homophones? Genuinely interested, I can’t think of a dialect where that’s the case.
As a non-native speaker, 'to be wary' is not really in my vocabulary, while 'to be weary' seems much more common, and both sound pretty close to each other even if there is a difference even with my accent, so I could see myself making the mistake.
It looks similar to than/then, but than/then is much more jarring to me for some reason.
They are not homophones? I’m not a native speaker and I’ve simply always assumed they are. I lived in London and the US for many years, but these are not common words in speech so I never got corrected.
I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
This vowel digraph remains my eternal nemesis… Ever since I learned as a child that “bear” doesn’t rhyme with “fear” and found myself faced with the overwhelming realization that I will never speak this language 100% correctly, no matter how much effort I put into reading and writing.
> I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
Indeed so! "Wear" and "ware" are homophones, having the same vowel sound as "wary".
"Weary", on the other hand, rhymes with "cheery" or "dreary".
> I will never speak this language 100% correctly
I am a middle-aged native speaker, an avid lifelong reader with a love for the language, and I still occasionally discover that I am mispronouncing words I have known for years.
Native Enlish speaker here (from the UK). I feel so sorry for anyone learning English as a foreign language - it's a mess!
I pronounce weary with a long e sound and wairy with a vowel sound between long and short a (similar to "air").
To me they are very similar and rhyme but not identical.
It’s similar to dominant/dominate and should’ve/should of.
People these days…
[flagged]
[flagged]
But do you lend books?
The correct name of this city is Leuven.
This is the name of the city today, but this has not always been the case. In the past, Leuven was a bilingual city, and to many of the people who lived there, the city was known as Louvain.
The World Health Organization thinks it’s Louvain - or at least it thought so in 2004.
https://eucliduniversity.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/who_...
Tis Leive, sis
It’s really jarring reading about a place I know and having it’s name inexplicably changed to French. Why?
It seems like a lot of primary sources for this article used the French name. Even if it was incorrect, maybe that was how it was commonly referred to outside of Belgium at the time?
- https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1502002700
- https://www.hi.uni-stuttgart.de/wgt/ww-one/Start/Weissbluten...
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25122278.pdf?acceptTC=true
Belgium was in an odd state of bilingualism at the time. While the people of the area would speak Flemish (“Dutch”), those in positions of power and education institutions would use French as the Lingua Franca.
I was born in Leuven and lived there for 30 years of my life - it would be pretty odd to see contemporary references as “Louvain” by those local to it.
Because you don't know the place or its history as well as you seem to think you do. Flamingantism is a scourge upon Belgium.
Louvain is fine in English. Much like ruuban is the correct form in Japanese.
There's a whole article full of interesting historical context. Yet you comment on the perceived (and incorrect, thus imagined) slight against your mother tongue. This is a good example of why Belgium is such a hot mess. We'd rather spend time bickering about irrelevant nonsense than in addressing real problems.
> Flamingantism is a scourge upon Belgium.
From your perspective maybe? From my perspective I don’t understand why they need to make everything half french, especially in an ostensibly Dutch speaking part of the country.
It’s not like we use an alternative french name for Amsterdam.
Because it wasn't always a Dutch speaking part of the country. History happens.
And sure, we don't have a French word for Amsterdam, but we do have a Dutch word for Paris (Parijs), obviously not a Dutch speaking city.
You're taking this as a slight, when in fact it is an irrelevant artifact of history.
If anything, Leuven should be called Leive, as that's how Leiveneirs pronounce it. /s
The situation in 2024 is much more confusing. Because it seems to me that the political side that styles itself to be against the far-right, is also very much in favour of curtailing free speech and reigning in internet platforms where people share news and political opinions. So who is burning the books? Everyone? I'm so confused.
It's pretty simple. Right-wingers want to control what information their minor children are exposed to, especially at school. Left-wingers want to control what information adults are exposed to (e.g., deplatforming wrongthink).