Further victories for colonialism
RW Johnson predicts in Prospect magazine that English will eventually exterminate most or even all the other ten languages in South Africa, including Afrikaans.
What a bitter and sad thought.
We are now so defeated that we do the bidding of imperialists without them lifting a finger or saying a word.
I would have liked to counter the article with some reason why our languages will survive, but at the moment I am without inspiration. Even in the future, colonialism seems set to continue defeating us even more.
And to think that Gordon Brown thought it acceptible to say that Britain should be proud of the empire. This is akin to saying a rapist should be proud of his deeds.
There are insights from psychology that seem to apply. There is something in our embrace of English that is akin to an abused woman repeatedly returning to her violent husband, or similar to Bettelheim’s 1943 observation that victims end up identifying with their aggressor.
It seems I am writing about colonialism a lot - I did not expect to do that, but it is what seems to flow..
Below are 2 links I hope to follow up about Britain’s ‘proud history of empire’:
Le Monde on the British Empire and todays apologists for it.
Al Jazeera on the Original Colonial Axis of Evil: The empires of Britain, France, and Belgium
But to end on a more positive note about English - at least it enables me to understand this:
“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
