Why not?
You're sidestepping the actual argument here. Look, you may not be saying nations aren't natural, but you implied it by claiming that anything shaped by historical process is unnatural by definition. That’s a false dichotomy. Humans are historical actors—our instincts, patterns, and social behaviours are just as “natural” as the trees we cut down to build borders.
If you’re clinging to the older, pre–Second World War sense of “indoctrination” as just systematic instruction, fine—but that’s not how the word is understood today. After the war and everything that came to light—Nazi youth programmes, fascist propaganda machines, Stalinist re-education—the term took on a far more sinister and coercive tone. That shift in meaning isn’t trivial. Trying to separate “education” and “indoctrination” in the context of fascism is like trying to separate propaganda from messaging. It’s just polishing something that was always designed to control.
Wait ... I know semiotics ... propaganda is not messaging ...
Right, so you’re drawing a neat line between “messaging” as neutral and “propaganda” as loaded. Fair enough. But the point stands: when a regime designs education to produce obedient citizens who think a certain way, the line between education and propaganda gets paper-thin.
The situation with a language is a matter of political factors, rather than linguistic ones. Some languages like Romanian e.g, are supported by states, they have armies, others like Aromanian are not backed by any political structure. In the cases above the minority languages are the tongues with military, they are the official languages of the neighbors of these two countries mentioned in my previous posts. I bet the Romanian, Hungarian and Polish governments are not exactly happy how the minorities are treated in the more recent case.
I lived most of my life in a large city in Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of people spoke Russian. I was surprised to learn that in the Western part, people either had difficulties or refused to speak Russian for some reason, which became clear to me later. In other remote parts of the USSR, I met people who could barely understand Russian. The Soviet education policy was to teach the language of the republic and Russian. It was a convoluted policy. When I was in 9th grade, the study of the Ukrainian language and literature was made optional. Then they backed up and made only the Ukrainian language optional, while literature was mandatory, which was ridiculous; how can you learn literature if you don't know the language? Those were the hoops the multinational empire had to jump through to make it work, even for a short time.
Quite so.
The Soviet's had the Young Pioneers, the Nazis had the Hitler Youth and Moaist China had the Red Guard. At least most authoritarian societies have some sort of compulsory youth organization although not sure if Franco had one in Spain or Pinochet in Chile.
As for I can read around, early Franco's regime controlled the existing youth organizations.
