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AVOID THE CULTURAL GENOCIDE OF THE PLANET
Today, alongside the climatic emergency, there is, perhaps even more serious, the end of the linguistic and cultural biodiversity of the planet for commercial purposes. It is in place, quietly, the world’s cultural genocide, which, in the teaching of and in the English language, has the same effect of CO2 on the environment.
To achieve the highest profits some countries have put in place the economic and commercial exploitation of human beings (Transatlantic Slave Trade) and/or the occupation of territories belonging to other peoples and their enslavement (Colonialism). Of the nations that have most “influenced” other countries, peoples and people to grab their wealth and favors, it is some English and American scholars who provide us with the figures:
- Stuart Laycock: “Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, Britons have invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171”, almost 89% of the countries in the world;
- Christopher Kelly: “Since its creation, the United States has invaded, fought conflicts or exercised control in 190 out of 193 UN member states” almost 99% of the countries on the planet.
In the last 90 years, however, colonialism and forms of enslavement have become more sophisticated and aggressive, so much so as to prefigure a new form of genocide, the linguistic-cultural one, as well as a new form of deportation: that of the minds. The same nations as protagonists of what historians Laycock and Kelly denounced, understood that, with much less risk and use of resources, much greater loot could be obtained through the linguistic and cultural domination of other peoples.
It is above all the United States, rather than Great Britain, that stimulates and structures neoliberal and financial globalization to its own advantage, not counting only on material factors such as military and scientific capabilities, the production of goods and services, the dominance of the internet, the control of energy and monetary flows … but propagating as “internationalization” what is actually a process of assimilation, also and above all incorporating the dominion of minds, therefore of cultural references and signs, and more particularly of linguistic signs. There is a date, a place, exact names and surnames from which we can start this new way of conceiving the colonization and realization of the Empire of Mind, as Churchill defines it: it is September 6, 1943 (who knows when the United Nations they will proclaim the “world day of the decolonization of minds”), we are at Harvard University, and Winston Churchill – in dialogue with Roosevelt – explains in his speech to the students that «The power to control language offers far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the Empires of the Mind ».
The English language thus places itself at the center of a global system, in which it plays an identical role to that of the dollar in the international monetary system. Similarly to the greenback, which allows America, thanks to its dual status of means of payment and dominant international reserve currency, to live behind the rest of the planet, the possession of the hyper-central language gives the United States a formidable income of position: an ideological income, since in large part the “elites” of the world, a true American cross-border party, are induced to align themselves with the language of the masters, with its concepts and with the vision of the world that it expresses and conveys: “America first and only America first”.
Considering that the colonization of the European peoples was more difficult because they already had a certain well being and an ultra-secular cultural and linguistic identity, the United States, starting from 1950, put to work the CIA which in Berlin constitutes the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose task was also to counter the growth of the electoral weight of the left parties. For 17 years the CIA spared neither men nor financial means, starting an imposing occult campaign that made some of the most illustrious exponents of the intellectual freedom of the West merely instruments of the American government. Thanks to declassified documents and exclusive interviews, Frances Stonor Saunders provides evidence of a real “battle for the conquest of minds” engaged by the CIA in order to guide the cultural life of the West through highly ambitious operations and initiatives: conferences, international conferences, music festivals, control of the most prestigious cultural magazines. The political influence, the cultural and linguistic colonization of Italy as well as of Europe, was considered acquired in 1967, and in that year the USA closed the activities of its “ministry” for European cultural colonization, because by now “the subject it operated in the direction requested for reasons it believed to be its own”.
How many individuals, individuals or collectives, private or public, who continue to operate in the direction required by the USA for reasons they believe are their own, today and worldwide? Countless and their frightening coercive forces.
Consider that in the “democratic” European context, despite the Hon. Danuta Hübner had warned on June 27, 2016 that, after Britain had left the EU, English could no longer be an official language, let alone work of the European Union, no European government has talked about it in these almost 4 years and, despite the fact that Great Britain has been definitively out and competitor of the European Union and its members since 31 January, nobody has yet raised the issue.
This is why our NGO is thinking of turning to the Court of Justice of the European Union: with Great Britain, 67,758,394 of anglophones have left the EU and English today in Europe is a minority language, spoken, even as a second language, 440,372 Maltese + 4,882,495 Irish, while Italian, in terms of democracy, has become the third language with the largest number of speakers in the EU.
We must therefore be aware that the battle for linguistic democracy, for linguistic and cultural human rights against the enslavement of minds, in Europe as in the world, will be much more difficult than that waged and won against the slavery of bodies in the nineteenth century. Even 50 days of hunger strike by our Secretary Giorgio Pagano, in a car in front of the Italian Ministry of Education, to avoid the fact that the Polytechnic of Milan was not forbidden to graduate studying in the language of the Italian Republic rather than only in English, did not achieve the expected results.
It is therefore not desirable that this Report on “the cultural dimension of the right to education” runs the risk of sustaining, more or less directly or perhaps just by not taking care of it, that diversity is obtained by obliging everyone to English and that the lifelong education is easier knowing better and better English: thus contributing, speaking or not speaking, to support the thesis, too often heard, that English is a lingua franca, owned by anyone and that does not destroy other languages. These theses do not hold! And they don’t hold up for the following reasons:
- Citizens of English-speaking countries are granted a significant market in terms of pedagogical material, language courses, translation and interpretation into English, linguistic competence in drafting and revising texts, and so on;
- Anglophones must never invest time and/or money in translating the messages they transmit or wish to understand;
- Anglophones do not have a real need to learn other languages and this translates into huge savings for English speaking countries, starting with education costs. It is estimated that the revenue that derives annually from the United Kingdom is around 18 billion Euros (Grin, ATT.1).
On the other hand, non-English-speaking countries must increasingly invest economic and human resources in learning English; costs that the economist Lukacs (ATT.2) estimated, in 2007, at 350 billion Euros per year and that today with the entry of new countries we estimate, by default, the costs of linguistic inequality for the 445 million European non-native English in 487,408,500,000.00 Euros per year: 526,496,224,657.50 dollars every year to be, always and in any case, eternal seconds compared to an Anglophone from birth. But how high is this “bribe” worldwide? Here this would be a Study, complete with a Final Report to the General Assembly that the United Nations should do, possibly with the direction of our NGO which has been dealing with Linguistics for decades, and as we asked the Secretary General, on the occasion of the 2019 ECOSOC High-Level Segment on the theme “Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality”;
- All financial and temporal resources that are not dedicated to learning foreign languages can be invested in the development, research and teaching/learning of other disciplines. For example, the United States, with the 16 billion dollars saved on the teaching of foreign languages, in 2004 financed a third of their public research;
- Even if non-English speakers make a considerable effort to learn English, they never manage, with exceptions, to have such a degree of mastery that can guarantee them equality in the face of native speakers: a. equality in understanding,
- equality in speaking cases in a public debate,
- equality in negotiations and conflicts,
- discrimination between European and English-speaking citizens from birth, and not, in hiring: there are thousands of classified ads we have collected in recent years that, at European level, offer work only to people of English mother tongue, English native speakers: with the consequence that European citizens with an excellent knowledge of English and perhaps higher professional skills are discriminated against and cannot be hired.
In any case, whether we like it or not, it is the mother tongue English speakers who hold the legitimate monopoly of linguistic correction, as much as the state has the legitimate monopoly of force, only they have the right to establish what is correct or incorrect in their language.
- There is also a further discriminatory phenomenon within non-English-speaking countries deriving from the class of belonging and from the family’s economic capacity: in fact, in non-English-speaking countries, families are increasingly sending their children directly to recognized Anglo-American schools present in their state and, subsequently, directly in Anglo-American schools or universities.
- Discrimination of linguistic disabled people: these are all those people who are refractory to learning foreign languages and, in particular, of English which, for example, is particularly difficult because it has thousands of
exceptions and in order to learn it you must actually learn two languages, one written and the other spoken, a fact that complicates life particularly for those children who have some dyslexia problems.
If we do not take care of the reality and complexity of these aspects, considering that the United Nations despite the approximately 6000 languages in the world has only 6 official languages, of which only English and French structural working languages, the UN not intervening in any way it will become complicit in the death of world linguistic and cultural biodiversity, accelerating the genocidal process taking place in spite of proclaimed human rights and democracy.
Seeing all these factors, it is not so much a question, downstream, of establishing the main principles and lines of action that will allow this diversity of diversities to be understood more clearly”, but rather, upstream, of putting field a universal and democratic instrument that, simultaneously in fact and in law, guarantees the “diversity of diversities”, acting as their natural shield, just as a high cliff protects homes from the continuous assaults of an ocean. We must exercise and an epochal change of cultural paradigm. We must give legs, all together, to an innovative goal for freedom, democracy and human rights in the world, to lead a nonviolent battle of fundamental and, above all, concrete importance for sustainable development, peace, cultural biodiversity on the planet: that for the common language of the human species.
All animal species have a common language, perhaps even plants… The human species does not. Although it has neither wings, nor gills, nor particularly strong legs, today man travels in space, descends into the sea depths, runs fast on earth more than any other living being but, in fact, does not have a common language as a species human and, not having it, compels each people to linguistically undergo the law of the “stronger” who also wants to stand up to “fairer”, perhaps defining with the term “internationalization” what is the predatory linguistic nationalization of other states and peoples, exercising a colonialism of the minds that produces discrimination and devastating socio-economic, political and cultural effects.
To achieve peace, brotherhood, cultural biodiversity and well-being for humanity, the United Nations’ progenitor organization, the League of Nations saw the delegates of Brazil, Belgium, Chile, China at work during the first two General Assemblies, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Haiti, Italy, Japan, India, Persia, Poland, Romania and South Africa carry forward resolutions that suggested the League of Nations to universally recommend the teaching of Esperanto in schools such as International Auxiliary Language. The majority of member countries were in favor of adopting the International Language (called Esperanto) as a working language, however the veto of France (French was the language of diplomacy in those years) prevented the implementation of this project but, however, in the 1922 the League of Nations unanimously approved during its third General Assembly the Report on Esperanto as an International Auxiliary Language which also saw the convinced support of Lord Robert Cecil, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937.
A great world-renowned scholar, Umberto Eco, in his The Search for the Perfect Language (1993) at Esperanto, all a International Auxiliary Language dedicated a lot of space by examining the “Theoretical Objections and Counter-objections” as well as the real “Political Possibilities of an IAL” (ATT.3), from the same period, is a detailed and positive study by the Italian Ministry of Education (ATT.4).
If already since 1922 International Language (called Esperanto) has been considered ready to be adopted in the world as “International Auxiliary Language”, today it is more than ever: it has 133 years of international linguistic experimentation more; it is recognized by the PEN Club International 114th language of literature in the world (1993); 1994-2012 has been one of the 60 languages in which the Pontiff has imparted to his blessing “Urbi et Orbi” to Catholics around the world twice a year; it is Google’s 64th translation language; it is the language of Nobel Laureates for Economics Reinhard Selten; it is the language of a transnational community present in over 120 countries around the world.
We must urgently resume the journey of those “Countries of Hope” of 1922. The common language of humanity, the second auxiliary language of/for all, is a transversal objective which today is a priority for each and everyone, including for the mother tongue English, if I will not go down in history as those who have extinguished any linguistic and cultural diversity of the planet.
This we hope will emerge, Ms. Koumbou Boly Barry, in the Report that you will present to the Human Rights Council.
