My Problem with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles

As a Belarusaphile and a non-native Belarusian speaker, I often find myself extremely annoyed by the arrogance I have to experience at the hands of Russians, Ukrainians, and (to a much lesser extent) Poles.  These peoples often have the gall to presume I speak or understand their languages just because I know Belarusian or assume I'm friendly to their national interests just because I'm a Belarusaphile.  This is utterly ridiculous, especially because I'm not even 100% fluent in Belarusian (despite what several of my Belarusian friends would claim).  Moreover, Belarus is the only Slavic nation I truly love and Belarusian the only Slavic language I truly want to master.  I don't even want to consider learning another Slavic language until I have completely mastered Belarusian, both for practical reasons (not getting things mixed up between multiple Slavic languages) and sentimental ones (as mentioned above, Belarusians are the only Slavs I love).  And even then, the Slavic languages I have any interest in learning after Belarusian are Bosnian (due to my interest in Arebica and to examine loanwords from Ottoman Turkish and because Bosniaks as a nation and culture are my second favorite Slavs), Czech (I have a deep interest in Czech culture and history I love Kde domov můj as a song in and of itself), Slovak (I have always had an interest in Slovakia due to several Slovak friends), Bulgarian (as I find Bulgarian history and Oghur heritage fascinating), and Rusyn (due to massive Hungarian influence), ergo the arrogance of Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles thinking that I can understand their languages is extremely annoying.

Throughout my life, I have encountered many Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles both in real life and online and I've had a multitude of experiences with them both positive and negative. Although I started learning Belarusian in 2012, I am certain that until 2019 (when I finally visited Belarus to practice my Belarusian), I had FAR more interactions with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles both in real life and online than I did with Belarusians. My opinion on the Belarusian nation has never strayed much from outright love as I first started learning the language because I had a crush on a Belarusian girl in my middle/high school in Japan (though when I met her in 2018 for the first time since I graduated, she claimed I spoke better Belarusian than she did and that she spoke better Japanese than Belarusian). And this is the reason I have a preference for Belarusian girls in general. One may argue that Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish girls are appearance-wise no different from Belarusians, but in my experience I vastly prefer the latter as I've had many problems with the former three. And outside of my attempts at romance, I've had a disproportionate number of issues with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, especially on the personal level, though historical, societal, and political issues are also a major reason for me having an aversion to these peoples and their languages that I don't possess towards Belarusian.

Many of my Belarusian friends may be shocked to learn that I actually DID attempt to learn Russian in the past and at one point actually spoke it almost as well as I now speak Belarusian. I started learning Russian in 2014, because at the time I was a Stalinist; I had worshipped Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin from 2007 to 2014 as if he were my god and for this reason I wanted to learn Russian to understand his speeches and even now I can still quote Stalin in Russian, particularly from his speech on November 7th, 1941. Nonetheless, Stalin wasn't the only reason I wanted to learn Russian. Around the time I started, I was already interested in Kalmykia, the Crimean Tatars, and Uralic ethnic minorities in Russia (and later on the Circassians) and thus wanted access to language materials and textbooks for learning their languages, and these tend to be written exclusively in Russian. Nowadays I get around this hurdle by asking my Kalmyk friends directly for help or by taking advantage of Kalmyk's grammatical similarities to Japanese; for Crimean Tatar I took a Kazan Tatar course in my university last year to take advantage of grammatical similarities to consolidate my understanding of the language; for minor Uralic languages I depend on my Estonian skills, as Estonia publishes surprisingly many materials for learning them, and I even studied Komi last year in my university here in Estonia (though my Komi teacher primarily used Hungarian with me); if I were to ever start learning Circassian I would go to Israel where the language is given official support in a city known as Kfar Kama, almost exclusively inhabited by Circassians. Apart from Stalinism and interest in minority languages, another reason I wanted to learn Russian was due to an interest in Russian history and politics, and back then I also held a lot of respect for Vladimir Putin. I also had an interest in the supposedly massive Uralic and Turkic influence on Russian vocabulary (though this turned out to be disappointingly small). Because of these factors, I was at the very least a Russophile in that I favored Russian over most languages with over 100 million speakers; during my BA studies I was passionate about learning Russian as it was the only language offered by Sophia University/上智大学, my BA alma mater, that I was truly interested in. I even decided not to study at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University even though I passed their entrance exam because I was outraged by them offering Spanish among their options for mandatory foreign language lessons (alongside Korean, Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese, and Malay-Indonesian) but not Russian despite the name of the university and their stated mission of increasing Japan's interactions with the Asia-Pacific region (which logically should have included the Russian Far East and doesn't include any Hispanophone state). I was so passionate about the Russian language that I had a private tutor, Takahito Nishimura, who taught me Russian every Saturday and with whom I regularly attended a Russian-language club in Saitama City, north of my hometown Toda. I even participated in the All Japan Russian Language Speech Contest twice, in 2016 and 2017, and for the first time I was told that I had attained 7th place. Though both of my speeches were made with the goal of promoting Kalmyk and Erzya-Moksha nationalism, respectively, and I used gratuitous Kalmyk, Erzya, and Moksha in these speeches.

Nowadays, what I described in the above paragraph would be unthinkable for me. While I would nowadays struggle to actually speak or write in Russian, I can still understand a little bit, primarily because my teacher, whom I still affectionately refer to as Товарищ Нищимура, was extremely competent as a teacher and also treated me as a true friend and thus both taught me well and motivated me. Nevertheless, any love for Russia and the Russian language I had was eroded over the years due to bad personal experiences and historical and political developments I learned about. In December 2014, I renounced Stalinism after realizing how wrong it was and stopped worshipping Joseph Stalin. In retrospect this may have made me start subconsciously distancing myself from the Russian language, as I had associated it with Stalinism. Furthermore, the more I researched Russian history and learned about the horrific genocides committed against Uralic, Tungusic, Turkic, Paelosiberian, Mongolic, Circassian, and other people groups I was passionate about, the less enthusiastic about Russia I became. I had also started a VKontakte account towards the end of high school, primarily to befriend Kalmyks (and later Belarusians, Erzyans, Mokshans, Crimean Tatars, and now Komis and possibly Circassians later), but I also had plenty of unpleasant experiences with ethnic Russians and saw that virtually none of them were willing to learn ethnic minority languages of Russia, even if they lived in a traditionally non-Russian area; many even openly admitted that they believe these languages, which I'm actually interested in, should be wiped out. Russians also often assume, with great arrogance, that I am fluent in Russian just because I speak/study Belarusian, Kalmyk, Erzya, Moksha, Crimean Tatar, and Komi. I've also seen on multiple occasions Russians who call Belarusian a mere "dialect" of Russian. On the more personal level, I had to deal with on Facebook one particular arrogant ethnic Russian in the Polyglot groups who bullied me to such an extent that I contemplated suicide, and this also made me more inclined towards hating Russia, especially as he was the prototypical Russian ethnonationalist with no regard for minority languages of Russia. Other Russians as well as other Russian learners online also insulted me on many occasions or attacked me unprovoked. My failures at romance with ethnic Russian girls on VKontakte also discouraged me, especially because they often expressed an explicit dislike of Asian males. I've also had many Russians falsely refer to me as a "Nazi" for supporting Belarusian nationalism, even though this is both nonsensical and egregiously wrong, as a Nazi would be someone who wants to implement Generalplan Ost, Adolf Hitler's plan to kill 75% of the Belarusian population in order to populate their lands with Germans. Yet, I've had Russians online mischaracterize me as a "Nazi" for waving the White-Red-White Belarusian flag, on grounds that it was used by the Belarusian Central Rada which was a puppet of Nazi Germany during the Occupation of Belarus in World War II, despite this flag predating Nazism as a Belarusian national symbol. Nevertheless, all of this was nothing compared to the year 2019.

The year 2019 might as well be referred to as "the year I started hating the Russian language." Although I am well aware that to hate a nation or its language isn't rational, simply declaring an end to it by saying "I don't hate Russian anymore" or being told I should stop hating them won't do anything, as the emotional scars I have will still remain, and so far no Russian has attempted to heal them (ethnic minorities of Russia attempting to apologize to me for the incidents I will describe below do not count). After 2019, I stopped using Russian on social media, openly started to deny I had any knowledge of the language, and gradually turned away from it. I also started forcing all Kalmyks and Belarusians I know on social media and real life to stop using Russian with me, and nowadays I insist they speak to me in Kalmyk or Belarusian (and I enforce a similar policy on Erzyans, Mokshans, Komis, and Crimean Tatars as well). I also started consistently saying to Belarusians Я ня ведаю расейскай мовы and to Kalmyks Би орс келн медҗәшхв (both mean "I don't know Russian") as an automatic response because many of them still try to start a conversation with me in Russian. This is all a result of what happened in 2019 that made me start to hate the Russian language so much, and it can all be traced to four factors:

1. My first trip to Belarus

As anyone reading this would know by now, I am a devout Belarusaphile and I speak Belarusian (though I'm still far from fluent). I was in Belarus for 2 weeks for the Belarusian language summer school at Minsk State Linguistic University in July 2019; I had also finally started writing poetry in Belarusian that year and finally became more confident in speaking and writing in it. Because of that, and because getting the documents to travel to Belarus was such a pain in the ass (due to the bureaucracy of the Belarusian Embassy in Tokyo and the requirements for the summer school itself), seeing and hearing so much Russian in Belarus pissed me off. This is because there are already MANY Russians and Russian speakers in Japan and since 2018 Japanese citizens no longer need a visa to go to Vladivostok, Sakhalin, or Kamchatka (or only require an easily obtainable E-visa). Ergo, if I wanted to be in a Russian speaking environment, I would've stayed in Japan or gone to Vladivostok, Sakhalin, or Kamchatka, all three of which are only 2 hours away from Japan by plane at most. I paid for an experience in Belarusian and crossed a continent to get it so I shouldn't have had Russian shoved in my face instead. This at the time seemed to create a subconscious dislike of Russian in me; I clearly remember when I went to the Russian club I frequented in Japan for the first time after returning from Belarus, I legitimately struggled to speak Russian since Belarusian words would come out instead and even in December of 2019, I had trouble speaking Russian without mixing it with Belarusian; on one occasion I kept on screaming out the word ПАМЫЛКА (mistake) and got mad when no one understood, when I was trying to say the Russian word Ошибка (meanwhile my Belarusian is almost never mixed with Russian). And nowadays, one reason I don't want to speak Russian is because it inevitably comes out mixed with Belarusian words or Belarusian influence. An example being how I rarely use the word тоже when I try to speak Russian and instead always say так же because it's closer to Belarusian таксама, which my mind defaults to.

2. The start of my MA program

My MA program, known as the Central and East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CEERES) program, is ostensibly dedicated to geopolitics in the post-USSR and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. Naturally, I chose this program due to my interest in many of the nations in this region (in particular the Uralic nations, Belarus, Kalmykia, and the Crimean Tatars). Those who know me would naturally assume such a program would be a dream come true for me. The reality is quite the opposite, since I was forced by my MA program to take Russian, even though I didn't want to and when I applied for the scholarship in late 2018/early 2019 their site said Hungarian and Estonian are also available as options. When the program started they claimed I was "too fluent" in Hungarian to take it and that they no longer have Estonian due to the Estonian government cutting funds. They also declared they only have beginner level classes for Hungarian while they had multiple levels for Russian and Polish, both of which were undesirable options for me (the last remaining option, Czech, in practice wasn't available at the time of my first semester despite official sources saying otherwise). This double standard enraged me, especially due to their logic that Hungarian is not a "major" language. Being forced to take Russian, especially in light of the next two factors, increased my hatred for the language.

3. The suicide of Albert Razin

Since late 2018, the Russian government has become FAR more draconian towards the non-Russian minorities of Russia and even made the study of indigenous languages "optional" in their native republics, while hypocritically preaching about the rights of ethnic Russians in Latvia when the Latvian government decided to decrease the amount of time devoted to teaching Russian in Russian schools. Such hypocritical Russian politics regarding minority languages infuriated me. Then, on September 10th, 2019, Udmurt philosopher Albert Razin set himself on fire in front of the State Council of Udmurtia to protest the potential implementation of a law that would cut the Udmurt language from Udmurt schools. Although I never interacted with him, I had mutual friends with him, and even if he were completely unknown to me, the fact that he was a native speaker of Udmurt who actively promoted his beautiful Uralic language is worthy of respect from me. He died of his injuries in hours and he held a sign that said "If my native language will die tomorrow, then I'm prepared to die today!" These events made me more averse to the Russian language.

4. The Russian minority of Estonia

Although I love Estonia and currently live here again for the last semester of my MA, the Russian minority of this country has caused me MANY problems. Ironically, when I first visited Estonia in January 2018, I primarily used Russian to get by because my Estonian was limited to a few phrases. Such a scenario is anathema to me nowadays, and I get deeply upset when I see anyone in this country who doesn't speak Estonian, when I'm putting in the effort to learn it. And the Russian minority of Estonia has caused me problems in this regard, and in many other ways. Case in point, when I moved to Tartu in August 2019, hours after I arrived I went to Pirogov Park and a Russian asshat harassed me by saying "Ni hao" to me (a massive insult to Japanese people as we despise being called Chinese). I have also been harassed on the streets by Russians, and ALWAYS Russians, as they never speak to me in Estonian and use only Russian (and I actually do speak Estonian so they should be using it). However, the straw that broke the camel's back was what happened on Friday, October 25th, 2019, when two Russians harassed me when I was doing nothing but minding my own business, walking on Küüni street. I was walking back to my faculty when they started shouting at me in some vaguely Chinese-sounding gibberish, so I said to them "Ma ei ole hiinalane!" (Estonian for "I'm not Chinese!") and they don't understand (even though they're clearly native to Tartu) and continue shouting insults at me, including узкоглазы (Russian for "slant-eye" and an extremely offensive racial slur for all Asiatic peoples) and I shout back Какого чёрта? За что такие оскорбления?! Я не китаец! (Russian for "What the fuck? What's this insult for? I'm not Chinese") and they continue cussing at me so I walk away into an R-Kiosk to cool down. I come out and they get on their bikes and try stalking me all the way to Raekoja Plats. At which point one of them gets up to my face and I say В чём твоя проблема?! (What's your problem?!) and he threatens to get violent with me and also continues saying racist shit (while stupidly assuming I'm Chinese when I told him I'm not in two languages). So the fucker gets off his bike and also blows smoke into my face while insulting me and I say in response Это Эстония! Почему не говоришь по-эстонски? ("This is Estonia! Why aren't you speaking Estonian?") and he cusses me out and rides away. I went into the city information office and called the police immediately. I also took a video of the incident towards the end, which I gave to the Tartu Police Department the following week in my police report to them. Nevertheless, the Russians who assaulted me STILL haven't been apprehended, and I directly confronted the police in person in November 2021 and demanded a status update, to which they responded by telling me the case is still open, but told me they couldn't do anything else. This event was the final nail in the coffin for my motivation for learning Russian; why should I learn the language of these subhumans who have the gall to assault and harass me with racial slurs, when they can't even speak Estonian, the language of the country they live in, which I came to learn? And even if this wasn't in Estonia, why should I learn the language of such savages who show me zero respect?

All of this has made me lose any love I had for Russia, the Russian people, and most of all the Russian language. My MA program continued to force me to take Russian in my second semester, wherein I lived in Scotland. I've repeatedly brought up how hypocritical and unfair it is for them to have initially written on their scholarship site years ago that they have Hungarian and Estonian as options when this wasn't true in practice. They claimed they simply "weren't expecting" someone like me whose Hungarian skills are already good (and frankly, I only say I'm fluent because I'm allowed to under Hungarian law since I have a B2 level; I still struggle in many ways with the language, despite it being my favorite). Meanwhile, they let people whose Russians skills are at the same level as my Hungarian take Russian and when I called them out on this they talk about the "economics" of having Russian available at all levels but not Hungarian (which in my opinion is simple Magyarophobia). It's also unfair that the program is called Central and East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CEERES) but only provides 4 choices (Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish) as mandatory foreign languages when the region as a whole has over 240 languages by my count. I literally screamed "WHERE IS BELARUSIAN?! WHERE IS CRIMEAN TATAR?! WHERE IS KALMYK?! WHERE IS ERZYA?!" in response to this as these are languages I ACTUALLY want that are objectively part of the region this program focuses on (and in Tartu, where my first semester took place, I actually DID take an Erzya class under the esteemed prof. Denys Teptyuk). I also wrote in my personal statement in 2018/19 that I fully intended to take Hungarian or Estonian so they KNEW I wanted these languages and yet denied them to me; I seriously contemplated suicide on September 9th, 2019, when my program coordinator told me to take Russian via email and the only reason I didn't do so was because Kaubamaja (the big department store of Tartu) had no rope for sale; my anguish over this resulted in another bout of suicidal ideation in January of 2020, which resulted in the Scottish police raiding my apartment. I got disappointing grades for my obligatory Russian classes in the first two semesters, especially after I lost all motivation after the incident on October 25th, 2019. And although I know very well that it's not right to hate the Russian people or their language, I simply lack the will right now to stop hating it and they haven't given me a reason to stop.

When it comes to Ukraine, my opinion leans negative, and is only slightly more positive than the feelings I have for Russia. Although I like their national anthem Ще не вмерла Україна and the fact that the Ukrainian state supports Crimean Tatars, and have a few individual good friends who are Ukrainian, I have MANY reasons to hate them as well including but not limited to:

- Asshole Ukrainians I have encountered MANY times online, especially in the Polyglot groups on Facebook AND in Belarusian nationalist groups; some Ukrainian assholes on VK harassing me unprovoked also don't help in improving my opinion of their nation.

- Related to the above, they arrogantly use only Ukrainian in Belarusian chat groups and the other Belarusians won't let me kick them out, out of "Ruthenian Brotherhood" and they claim that knowing Belarusian means you can understand Ukrainian (when I can't). Also one of my closest friends is a Ukrainophile from Northumbria. In 2020 we tested whether we could understand each other if I spoke Belarusian and him Ukrainian and it didn't work out that well.

A sign in Ukrainian calling for anti-Hungarian violence:

- Magyarophobia and general anti-Hungarian statements, including the proposed banning of the Hungarian national anthem and the fact that they falsify history to justify stealing Kárpátalja from Hungary. I've also clashed with Ukrainians online on multiple occasions over Hungary's (rightful) claims to Kárpátalja and the rights of ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine. I've also met several Hungarians from Kárpátalja in real life who confirm everything I know.

- They didn't give a shit about Crimean Tatars until 2014 when Russia took Crimea and they suddenly needed an ally to justify taking it back and despite Crimean Tatars and their language now being protected under the Ukrainian constitution and officially encouraged by the government, I've yet to meet a single ethnic Ukrainian who speaks Crimean Tatar or even made an attempt to learn it.

- Ukrainians in real life who've given me nasty experiences, most recently this hag in Vienna in July 2021 who all of a sudden yelled at me and insulted me for talking to a group of Ukrainian girls she was acting as a tour guide to; Belarusian friends of mine know of another Ukrainian hag who was incredibly rude to me on my second day in Belarus.

- Despite their beauty, Ukrainian girls have always rejected me, often in nasty ways (and I've flirted with several dozen on VK since I started using it as a 17 year old).

- Denying the status of the Rusyn language, which I (and from what I've seen, most non-Ukrainians in general) consider a distinct East Slavic language spoken in Kárpátalja and Vojvodina (the latter granting it official status). Ukrainians on the whole deny the existence of Rusyn as a language and derisively refer to it as a dialect. This is both chauvinistic and hypocritical, given what Russian ultranationalists say about the Ukrainian language.

- I remember in 2013 or 14, the Ukrainian ambassador made an appeal on Japanese TV asking for help because of Russian aggression. But this joke of an ambassador spoke ENGLISH, not Japanese. Back then that made me support Russia more because he was so pathetic that he made zero effort to speak Japanese in his appeal to Japan despite being the ambassador to Japan and officially representing Ukraine.

On top of all of this Ukrainians seemingly have an implicit anti-Asian outlook. My first Russian teacher, whom I described in the previous section regarding Russia, studied in the Ukrainian SSR in the 1980s. He told me that he detected a LOT of implicit sentiment against him for being Asian and Ukrainians were extremely rude to him, to the point he gave up learning Ukrainian for this reason (though he also experienced this from ethnic Russians when he lived in Murmansk as a Japanese teacher, his positive experiences with ethnic Russians dwarfs his negative ones). Also, a lot of the anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine seems to be fueled by the idea that Russians are "Asiatic" while Ukrainians are "pure Slav" (implying that being "Asian" corrupted the Slavs that became Russian); a lot of the anti-Hungarian sentiment I see from Ukrainians contains references to the Asian origins of the Hungarians as well. In contrast, Belarusians don't really frame their aversion to Russia and Russian nationalism as "anti-Asian" because while many of them see Russia as an existential threat they don't hate Russia for being "Asiatic" while Ukrainians seem to hate them for being "Asiatic" and this can be seen from a quick look at an anti Russian propaganda poster from Ukraine; the caricature of the Russian in these posters is usually made to look more Asian. Comments by Ukrainian government officials explicitly attacking Russians for being "Asian" and thus insulting all Asian peoples should also be considered.

Moreover, out of the points listed above, the biggest problem I have with Ukrainians is their arrogance in pushing the Ukrainian language onto me. I as a Belarusian speaker DO NOT automatically understand Ukrainian, despite the fanciful claims of these Ukrainians who flood Belarusian language groups and chats, rudely commenting on my posts or replying to me in Ukrainian and audaciously expecting me to understand when I never indicated anywhere that I know the language. Such arrogance is no different from the arrogance of Russians who expect me to reply in Russian because I speak Belarusian, Kalmyk, Erzya, and Crimean Tatar. Ukrainians in my experience also often assert that they and the Belarusians are "one nation" and promote a sense of "Ruthenian Brotherhood" to justify flooding Belarusian language groups and chats with Ukrainian nationalism. I can't understand how this is any different from the arrogance of Russian ultranationalists who claim Belarusian is a mere dialect of Russian and that Belarusians and Russians (and Ukrainians) are one nation, with this logic being used to justify Russian interference in Belarus and Ukraine as well as Russian expansionism.

All that being said, the fact that I have a few good friends who are Ukrainian (and another extremely close friend of mine being an outright Ukrainophile), as well as official support for the Crimean Tatars, prevents me from completely hating Ukraine. Moreover, I do like some Ukrainian historical figures (especially Roxolana) and I do SLIGHTLY favor the nation over Russia, if only because Russians have done MUCH more to piss me off. On top of that Yulia Tymoshenko was my first celebrity crush, when I was 12 or 13 (though nowadays I pay more attention to the fact that she's half Latvian, as I've developed positive feelings for Latvia as of late). For this reason I reluctantly support Ukraine against Russia in most cases (though this can easily change in certain contexts).

In stark contrast to my experiences with Ukrainians and Russians, my opinion on Poland is more related to older experiences, and positive interactions with Poles predominated these experiences. For this reason, I generally have a better view of Poland, Poles, and the Polish language, though my overall opinion of Poland remains very mixed.

My first interactions with Polish people started years before I even knew Belarus existed, as I had moved to America when I was 2 and returned to Japan when I was 13. I spent 7 years in Indiana and 4 years in Michigan, and in these states, especially in Michigan, Polish-Americans are extremely common, to the point that we were even taught in elementary school how to recognize a Polish surname. In Michigan they were so common that Pączki was commonly sold and Pączki Day was celebrated (and I remember Michiganders pronouncing this word properly, unlike their own Polish surnames which they would always butcher in ways that made it so I was shocked when I first heard Poles from Poland pronounce their surnames; Polish-Americans also tend to avoid properly changing their surnames by gender, as I remember many Polish-American women had surnames ending with -ski even though due to their gender it should be -ska). I even remember running into a boy slightly younger than me when I was 13 who spoke no English and only Polish; I was shocked when this boy's brother told me that they had never even been to Poland. Though some may admonish me for counting Polish-Americans as Poles, the fact that so many of them explicitly uttered the words "I'm Polish" in school as well as random Polish phrases like "Co to jesc?" despite not knowing Polish otherwise makes me see it as appropriate to consider them Poles. Though in retrospect I never encountered actual Poles from Poland in real life until perhaps 2017, when I moved to Hungary, and this was 7 years after I left the United States.

Polish-Americans in many ways defined my life in Michigan due to their ubiquity. One of my closest friends was a Polish-American (with the surname Wojciechowski, which he often joked about in how difficult it is to pronounce, though now that I know Polish spelling rules it's easy for me). I also had crushes on several Polish-American girls. But I also had many personal enemies who were Polish-American and my constant enmity with them gave me conflicting views on Poland. Those who knew me at the time may recall my particularly acrimonious conflict with a Polish-American whose surname was Zabinski. Nevertheless, the presence of many close friends who were Polish-American, combined with the sympathetic portrayal Poland gets in the American education system, especially in relation to World War II, left me in a mostly pro-Polish position by the time I left America and returned to Japan in 2010. I even had the desire to learn Polish for several years, and at one point I could sing Mazurek Dąbrowskiego by heart. The historical friendship Poland has with Hungary also helped due to my Magyarophilia. Moreover, unlike Russians and Ukrainians, not a single Pole online nor in real life has ever been arrogant enough to demand I understand Polish. The only time I ever set foot in Poland was during a layover at Warsaw Chopin Airport and even then no one demanded I understand Polish. There are also Polish historical figures I admire such as the Polish-Hungarian general József Bem and the Ainu expert Bronisław Piłsudski. For these reasons one could argue I was even a Polonophile back in the day.

All of this started to change in 2013. I had joined the Polyglot groups on Facebook in 2012 due to my love of languages and in the hopes of finding many like-minded people. In retrospect I often wish I hadn't joined these groups. I have endured a lot of pain from the people in these communities who have misjudged, bullied, ostracized, or betrayed me so often that I've at times contemplated suicide. One of the first people in these groups who drove me to suicidal thoughts, and one of the worst online bullies I ever encountered, was a Pole. In 2013/14 (back when I was 16/17) he was one of the first assholes to bully me in the Polyglot groups. I distinctly remember all the times he made me contemplate suicide because of how he'd directly bully me and laugh at me, intentionally misrepresent my words, gossip about me, and intentionally stalk my comments (and back then I didn't really take screenshots and the fucker even deleted his old profile so I won't be able to get them). And worst of all the coward always used a fake name and images that avoided showing his face; he named himself in ridiculous ways like "De Boskabouter" or "Pau Del Sud" (the latter he currently uses). In 2020, whilst I was perusing this site claiming to be a "Hyperpolyglot Association" I found a profile that I am almost certain is his, and this is the main reason I outright refuse to have anything to do with this organization, even though one of its founders has offered to let me join. This Pole singlehandedly destroyed my interest in the Polish language. And apart from him, I've dealt with other Polish cyberbullies, though they're far less frequent compared to Russian or Ukrainian ones (nevertheless, I've still had some egregiously nasty experiences, particularly with this Polish Russophile flag designer on DeviantArt and this vile and hypocritical Polish group admin on the same site).

In books relating to World War II, especially American ones, Poland is portrayed in an unbelievably sympathetic light (Japanese history books relating to World War II rarely even mention Poland for more than a paragraph, if at all). I remember when I purchased my first book about World War II that was directed towards children (incidentally, this book was the first that mentioned the term "Belarus" and thus made me aware of this country), Poland was portrayed as an innocent victim of Nazi Germany that was invaded on September 1st 1939 for refusing to hand over the Free City of Danzig and because of Nazi irredentism and Nazi ideology regarding Poles as untermensch. The truth was far more complicated, and my Belarusaphilia resulted in me learning about it. After World War I, half of what is now Belarus was under Polish control, and the Interwar Polish Republic wasn't even 70% ethnically Polish. Although it was exaggerated by Nazi propaganda, claims that Poland mistreated ethnic minorities weren't entirely a lie. And this was especially true in the way the massive Belarusian minority in Poland was treated. During the Polish-Soviet War, Poland destroyed the nascent Belarusian People's Republic and split its territory between itself and the USSR that it was fighting (the latter establishing the Belarusian SSR). After the war, Ignacy Mościcki, President of Poland from 1926 to 1939 (when Germany invaded Poland), attempted what can essentially be called a cultural genocide on the Belarusian minority. Due to a massive Polonization campaign, Belarusians were subject to an explicit policy of colonization (even called such by the Polish administrator Władysław Studnicki) wherein Polish war veterans were settled on Belarusian lands, the Belarusian language was banned in state institutions and discouraged in schools while Polish was pushed everywhere in traditionally Belarusian lands; the number of Belarusian medium schools also plummeted as there were more than 500 before 1921 yet only 69 in 1928 and none by 1939. Belarusians were often lynched by Polish colonizers and Poland even set up a concentration camp for Belarusian nationalists, known as Bereza Kartuska (the remains of the camp are now located in Belarus). Such treatment of the Belarusian minority made it easy for the Soviets to frame their invasion of Poland in 1939 as "liberation" and even nowadays the Great Patriotic War Museum in Minsk refers to the Soviet Invasion of Poland as a "reunion" with Western Belarus, and due to the attempted cultural genocide by Poland there's an element of truth in this. Nowadays, the only part of Poland where Belarusians can be found is Podlaskie, where the language has official status in certain areas. Nevertheless, I'm told by some Belarusian friends of mine who've been there that even in Podlaskie Belarusian barely has a presence, despite official status and many Poles seem ignorant about this status or even the Belarusian language as a whole. Whenever I see a Pole in real life my first question to them is always "Are you from Podlaskie?" yet the vast majority of these Poles are shocked when I tell them Belarusian has official status there; I remember encountering a Polish man in Inverness in June 2020 and when I asked him if he was from Podlaskie and told him I wanted to know because I speak Belarusian, his response was Здраствуйте, по-русски говоришь?, arrogantly speaking to me in Russian when I was asking for Belarusian. Even without all this, Polish attempts to steal Belarusian historical figures and claim them as solely Polish (such as Jan Chersky, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Adam Mickiewicz) also enrage me.

Despite my sordid views on Polish history and the Kafkaesque torture I had to deal with from that one Polish cyberbully, my overall experience with Poland still remains mixed, as I've had plenty of good experiences to counteract it (though not enough to overshadow the negative ones), and the Poles I've met in real life (including Polish-Americans) have usually been decent people. And frankly, while I do get an arrogant vibe from Poles in relation to Belarus and the Belarusian language, and oftentimes see Poles, especially online, expecting me to be pro-Polish due to both my Belarusiaphilia and Magyarophilia, someone arrogantly expecting me to understand Polish has only happened once, and it happened at the hands of an American in one of the Polyglot groups on Facebook who was evidently not of Polish descent.

Overall, due to my experiences with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, I find it cringeworthy and arrogant when people expect me to understand Russian, Ukrainian, and/or Polish just because I am a Belarusaphile and speak Belarusian. The same applies when Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles expect me to be automatically cordial to their national interests or assume that I'm a Russophile/Ukrainophile/Polonophile, when I've had such nasty experiences with their peoples. Regarding Belarusians, I've very rarely had negative experiences and when they do happen, these Belarusians are rarely speaking to me in Belarusian, even though I make it as obvious as possible that I know it. Consequently, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make me hate Belarus and especially not the Belarusian language. Once again, I am very well aware of the irrationality of hating a nation or its language, but when I am shown such disrespect and malice, that can't be overshadowed by kindness or dignity from representatives of that nation or speakers of that language, I find it difficult not to hate them.