Quote (Inviction @ 14 May 2010 23:49)
You are confusing the Slavic Macedonians with the Greek Macedonians. The Macedonian language is official in Macedonia, while the Ancient Macedonian language, the language of Alexander, was a Hellenic language that was eventually replaced by Koine Greek. The two share the same name because they originate from the same region on the northern border of Greece.
I must commend you, though. Using emoticons to give your tenuous arguments an appeal to pathos is a clever trick that works well on the feeble-minded, but honestly, why are you trying to split up nations and rewrite history when you clearly have no background on the subject?
Greek Macedonian culture exists, just as Spartan and Athenian cultures existed and exist. Regardless, they are all Greek. Since the modern nation-state, as opposed to ancient city-states, stresses linguistic and ethnic unity, one would expect Greece to stress the commonalities of being Greek rather than the differences between being Macedonian or Spartan or Athenian or Thracian or Corinthian or Cretan, but this is by no means "cultural genocide" against Macedon or Athens or Sparta or Thrace or Corinth or Crete. To say that Macedon is not Greek is to suggest that Greece break up into separate city-states again.
Is California any less American because its culture has Hispanic elements and many Hispanophones live there while the much of the rest of the United States is Anglophone?
I had honestly forgotten about the FYROM, as it's been a few years since I did research into the subject. Mea culpa, to be certain.
I use emoticons not to bring pathos to an argument, but merely out of habit from a long time of posting on the internet. The vast majority of them are actually meant in a sarcastic fashion, and you are far from the first to attempt to engage my arguments based on the style of using emoticons rather than on their actual merits. Cute, but I actually expected better of you for some reason.
I am not actually arguing that there should be a split for Greek Macedonia, and rather explicitly stated that I don't think that there needs to be such a split for things to be fair. Had I recalled the FYROM, I would have removed 'immediately' from the discussion entirely.
If America passed laws making it illegal to speak Spanish and people were not allowed to name their children "Jose" or "Maria," I would be much much more outraged because it would be happening in my own nation. But those are the abuses that I find outrageous much more than any idea of statehood. I am not saying that Hispanic California - for the sake of your argument - should be split away from America or that it's any less American. Simply that its culture should be respected and there should be no systematic attempts by the state to obliterate it.
There is a difference between "Stressing linguistic and ethnic unity" and completely attempting to obliterate a culture with long-standing historical ties to the land within your borders. You can spin it however you want, but Greece is doing their best to destroy a culture and replace it with what they believe "True Greeks" should be.