BEIJING/TOKYO - When Chinese Uyghur Muslim activists accuse China’s central government of “cultural genocide” against its minority cultures, they usually gets applauded (letting alone financial supported and celebrated as ‘human rights’ heroes) by the entire Western press. After all, any support of China’s dissidents is helpful to undermine Chinese politics and the country’s social stability. But, careful what’s locked up in the dark attic of Western history… the Anglophone world -on all accounts of Imperialism, Colonialism, and Globalization- is by far the worst offender of cultural genocide everywhere on the planet, at least from a prospective of the lovers of cultural pluralism and linguistic diversity; to such an obvious extend, to be true, that several national governments including China, India, Iran, and Japan (but also Germany and France) have recently expressed deep regrets over their vanishing (cultural) significance in the world -naturally to the supreme benefit the vast US-Anglo-Saxon empire stretching from the arts and entertainment, over politics and media, to the sciences and the humanities.
RELATED Dreams of De-Westernization
Most ‘knowledge’ is English now; or else foreign ideas must be expressed in the English language: What is not known in the West, is no knowledge at all. Most linguists such as Wade Davis, the Canadian anthropologist, lament the general decline of cultural diversity and in particular linguistic diversity; although they have a hard time to explain or define what it is exactly what is lost when translation occurs (from the foreign tongue into the English imperial parlance, say). While the Uyghurs in China have ethical reasons to complain against “cultural genocide” by Mandarin speakers, Western English media largely have little to no moral currency against Mandarin speakers whatsoever, it seems, because the West itself precisely is best at destroying minority cultures -one by one in fact, until nothing is left, and all world history is owned by Western writers -all other cultures: forgone and forgotten.
RELATED Language and Empire - Why We Shun Asian Words, For Now
The only way, as I see it, is to allow those cultures and their languages left in the world to freely participate in world history. (So far, national dictionaries and Western editorial language policies are universally discriminating against foreign terms.) But to do that, to free the languages, they need the universal right to express their ideas in their own words -I am referring of course to the most important key words unique to their cultural inventiveness. Until the benign but ultimately culturally ignorant West, because it is the supreme imperialist and colonial master of humanity, allows the world’s vocabularies to freely flow and mix with the English lexicon, no man and woman is truly free from cruel cultural imperialism.
To be precise, it is not enough to liberate the races, the genders, the people from foreign oppression if their words are shunned, censored, and omitted from world history. The liberation of the world’s vocabularies is going to be next revolutionary step toward freedom of expression. And we will not rest nor sleep but an hour too long until we are getting there…
READ MORE A Call for more Diversity - Liberating the World’s Vocabularies
Dr. Pattberg has written and published extensively about Global language,Competition for terminologies, and the End of translation. He is also active in promoting Confucianism, in particular Chinese terminologies, on a global scale. Please also follow him on Big Think, Dragons and Pandas.
