Lester Golden
1 min readJan 21, 2025

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Then none of these states are democracies either:

Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Faroe Islands, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Turkiye (ask any Kurd or Armenian), Cyprus, Malta, Portugal, Japan, the Koreas, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, every Arab state that's ethnically cleansed Jews and other minorities, Haiti, Republica Dominicana (ask the Haitians), Cuba, Fiji, New Zealand (ask the Maori), Brunei, Malaysia....

Until Germany changed its citizenship by blood nationality law in 2000 Volga Germans from the former USSR could emigrate to Germany, but the children of Turkish immigrants were denied citizenship. Sounds ethnocratic to me. Yet Germany was still a democracy, was it not?

In Latvia my sister in law has a stateless persons passport because she never took the Latvian language exam. She was born in Volgagrad in 1956. Her sister, my wife, was born in Latvia and was therefore a citizen after the USSR's breakup. Sounds ethnocratic to me. But Latvia is still a democracy.

I could cite 50 more cases of democracies with ethnocratic citizenship laws. Yet you exclude Israel alone from the sovereignty and democracy club because it's "ethnocratic". Sounds like double standards anti-semitism according to the definition of the IHRA (https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism):

"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation."

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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