On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Keith Hudson wrote:
> For better or for worse, we recreate society much as it was before whenever
> we have passed through technological/economic change. OK, we might well
> lose picturesque customs and metaphors (such as 7 or 70 different names of
> snow -- and it's important for scholarly reasons that records are kept of
> these), but we recreate new ones which are equivalent. In England during
> the last couple of centuries the typical medieval village has entirely
> disappeared and there has been much wailing and nashing of teeth about its
> demise. But in its place today a vigorous and attractive new type of
> village is emerging -- together with modern equivalents of ancient customs.
The above notion that "picturesque customs" come and go, and always did so,
ignores what's fundamentally new in the current process of globalization:
That old local/regional customs are not being replaced by new local/regional
customs, but by GLOBAL "customs" -- by a McDonalds/Coca-Cola mono-"culture"
that is the same everywhere. What is being lost isn't just "old customs",
but the cultural diversity of this planet.
KH continued on 27-Jul:
> There is a lot of historical confusion here because you are repeatedly
> associating merchants and traders with the military. OK, there's collusion
> sometimes (particularly in the defence industries) but the big lesson of
> human history from post-tribal times onwards shows that merchants (who need
> freedom) and governments (who want to establish control over their
> populations) are basically antagonistic.
I think the U$A is a great example that
- merchants and governments are NOT basically antagonistic
(just think of the current U$--EU trade wars on bananas and hormone beef,
or the wars in Iraq, Kosovo etc. etc.)
- merchants do NOT need freedom
(just think of the most successful merchant in history, Bill Gates,
and his coercive monopoly that enabled this success in the first place)
> (REH)
> >Keith, if you want to know what you are losing with the
> >death of the languages then consider the following:
> >it ultimately won't effect the outcome because the
> >battle over this is not scientific or economic,
> >(efficiency is cheaper) but political and cultural imperialism.
>
> Yes, I appreciate this, and, yes, nation-state politicians in all countries
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> have tried to stamp out minority languages for the sake of establishing
> firmer control. But they don't always succeed and whether a language
> survives or not is very much more to do with whether it's in the interests
> of the people within the relevant region.
Please don't confuse "nation-state" with "imperialist state". For the
record: *Not* "all countries [or their "nation-state politicians"] have
tried to stamp out minority languages for the sake of establishing firmer
control" -- for example, Switzerland has 4 official languages (and some 20
dialects) and spends a lot of money and efforts to *maintain* this diversity
instead of stamping out the minority languages. The only thing that will
eventually stamp out this diversity is Globalization, taken to its extreme.
(Example: The newly privatized Swiss Telecom has excluded the "smallest" of
the 4 national languages from all phone-books, because it "couldn't afford"
the additional pages in this language anymore since it was privatized !
The shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank about this decision.)
Chris
_______________________________________________________________________
"FREE TRADE": The systematic destabilization of national and regional
economic arrangements, by means of treaties such as WTO and NAFTA, in
order to take economic decision-making as far as possible from any
democratic process, and centralize global economic control into the
hands of the corporate elite. -- The New World Order Dictionary
