When I was living in Germany back in the
1990's, I happened to participate in a discussion concerning minorities.
Minorities are one of the most sacrosanct things and a popular discussion topic in Germany.
It rather rubbed me the wrong way how the
German participants were treating all the minorities the same way – as if
ethnic, religious, cultural, lifestyle and whatever minorites had essentially
the same needs and required essentially the same kind and level of protection.
I tried to explain that linguistic minorities were completely different from
any other type of minorities. The Germans argued that it was not the case –
when a person is not allowed to practice his religion, he can feel just as bad
as when he isn't allowed to use his language, they said.
It was perfectly clear to me how that argument
was mistaken, but unfortunately my knowledge of German was nowhere near
sufficient to make it clear to the other participants, which is why I had to
stop arguing, leaving the Germans believing they had convinced me. Which
ironically proves exactly my point.
Religion is not a necessity. Not to deny that many people are ready to kill and die for their
religion, it is an undeniable fact that there are many people in the world who
do survive perfectly well without believing in any supernatural beings
whatsoever.
Language is a necessity. No human being can lead an even remotely normal human being's life
among other human beings without being proficient in at least one human
language. (With the obvious exception of infants whose needs are being taken
care of by adults.)
Discrimination by religion, political views,
sexual orientation, clothing – that is all a matter of choice.
Psychologically hard as it may be to some, every person has the ability to
treat people of different religions, origins, social backgrounds etc. equally
or unequally.
Discrimination by language is something that
occurs automatically. When you are not proficient in the official
language, you lose arguments, you can't defend your rights in government
institutions, you might not understand a disaster warning. The people of the
ruling ethnic group may not intend to discriminate against you. Indeed they may
be enthusiastic supporters of minority rights. When you are feeling ill,
they might be eager to help you. Unfortunately, they just won't know
what you need, because they can't communicate with you, BECAUSE YOU DON'T
UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER'S LANGUAGES.
I don't know if homosexuality is hereditary or
acquired. But even if we assume that one is born homosexual, one still has
the choice to have sex or not, just as heterosexual people do. It may often
require more willpower than one has, but in principle, one has the choice. With
the language, you don't have any choice whatsoever. When you have to fill out
an official form in Urdu and you don't know Urdu, no willpower in the world
will enable you to understand where you have to write what. If the official
doesn't speak anything but Urdu, no love and compassion in the world will
enable him to explain to you where you have to write what – nor give you the
ability to write in Urdu.
Justin McCarthy's extremely interesting book
"The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire" presents the best (I've
seen so far) case against nationalism and the concept of ethnicity-based sovereign states. His
argumentation on this topic is logical and convincing – as well as utterly wrong
because he has clearly no idea what he is talking about.
Indulging himself in theoretizing, Mr.
McCarthy tells us how the claim that the people belonging to one
ethnic group share common ancestors is more often than not a myth, and
thoroughly trashes the idea that people who pray to the same god, wear similar
dresses and celebrate the same holidays must separate themselves by a
barbed-wire fence from the people who pray to a different god, wear different
dresses and celebrate different holidays. An imperialist to the core, Justin
McCarthy insists that the Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians and Greeks were living
more or less happily in the Ottoman Empire, and praises the ethnic nihilism of
the USA, where everyone's right to love their native language is fully
honoured, no matter which one it is.
Justin MacCarthy misses completely the main point – language and its role in the human life. He has clearly no idea what it's like to get a bad grade, not because you don't know the right answer, but
because you are unable to express it in the language of instruction. He has
clearly no idea what it feels like to have to explain your health problem to a
doctor who does not understand your language. He has clearly no idea what it
feels like to have to, day after day, year after year, buy your food at a shop
where all signs are in a language you can't read.
Indeed, love for one's native language
is all that countries like the USA, UK, France or Germany would grant to their
ethnic minorities, as virtually all speaking and writing has to be conducted in
the official language. (That is with the exception of occasional multilingual
signs they put up to show how tolerant and open-minded they are.)
Have you ever tried to buy a train ticket in
China? Visualize a huge hall with a dozen windows, tens of people in the line
at each. Every single sign is written in Chinese. The huge electronic message
board is filled with information from which you can understand only numbers, all the text being written with Chinese characters. Without knowledge
of Chinese, how will you find out which line you need to get into? How will you
explain to the ticket vendor what it is you want? Should she ask something,
what will you answer?
Mr. McCarthy's arguments about common ancestry
and national dresses are convincing, yet completely off the point. It won't
help you any if all the people in the station practiced the same religion as
you, wore the same national dress as you, ate the same tradional foods as you
do, or, for that matter, had the common great-great-grandfather with you. You
may be a woman so pretty that all the men at the station would be ready to die for you, but they won't be able to help you buy a train ticket to
the place you want. But as soon as you'll find one person who can speak
English, your problem will be solved. For that matter, he can be a space alien
or an android. The only thing that matters is that the two of you are able to
communicate in a language you both understand. Race, religion, cultural
traditions or common ancestry haven't got anything to do with it.
That's what the people like Justin McCarthy
who have the fortune to belong to the empire-ruling ethnic groups fail to
understand. It is easy for them to think that ethnicity is meaningless, because
they are used to everyone else having to learn their native language, and never the
other way around.
The imperialist countries cynically refer to
the ban on minority-language schools as "equal rights for everyone", while in reality they divide people
into two castes – those who are allowed to get education in their native language, and those who have to
do it in a foreign language. Obviously, that's the opposite of equality. It's like fish, birds and dogs having
to "equally" live in an aquarium. The reason why imperialist governments twist the meaning of equality in such a
blatantly perverse way is not hard to figure out. The
imperialist nations' historical way of life is to fare war against weaker
nations, to devour other peoples' lands and to assimilate their inhabitants.
The emergence of nation-states reversed that process. (Of course, Germany and
Italy were no nation-states. They were empires that simply emerged later than
the British, Russian or French empires.) The concept of ethnic groups'
self-determination is a deadly threat to the remaining empires. It negates the
very justification for their existence. That is why imperialist nations do
all they can to trivialise ethnicity and indeed obscure the very term.
As an example of the latter, the
German-language Wikipedia consistently refers to Bulgarians living in
Bessarabia as "Bessarabische Bulgaren", as if they were somehow
different from the Bulgarians who live in Bulgaria. Whenever they bring
information about the ethnic composition of one or another location or region
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it's always so-and-so many "Bosnische Serben"
– as if Serbs whose homes happen to be on the Bosnian side of a line
arbitrarily drawn on the map as a result of an Austrian-Turkish war in the past
weren't exactly the same Serbs as the ones who
live 10 or 100 kilometres further on the territory of Serbia.
Back in the 1990's, during the war in Artsah
(Mountain Karabah), I don't think I ever saw German newspapers write just about
"Armenians" or just about "Azerbaijanis". It was always
"Christian Armenians" and "Muslim Azerbaijanis". Similarly,
during the Abhazian war of independence, the word "Georgians" was
always preceded by the word "Christian" and the word
"Abhazians" by the word "Muslim" (which isn't even true,
but that's a different story). The media felt they just had to constantly tell
the people that it was not an ethnic but a religious war. Of course, the
Germans of today need ethnic nihilism for a completely different reason than
the French or English – any suggestion that state borders should correspond to
ethnic borders might bring the peoples' thoughts to the unspeakable idea that
the Germans and Austrians might have something in common.
A yet different reason for ethnic nihilism can
be found in Latin America, where the break-up of the Spanish empire gave birth
to a number of predominantly Spanish-speaking countries that obviously bear no
connection to ethnicity. It is common in their offical statistics to refer to
race as "ethnicity". The government doesn't care how many people are
native Spanish speakers, how many are native Quechuan speakers, and so on. You
can see detailed information on the numbers of Spanish, Quechuan, Aymara etc.
speaking people in Quechuan-language Wikipedia, but the authors of
the corresponding pages in Spanish apparently find that information irrelevant.
Human beings speak Spanish and that's the end of it. Needless to say, the same
nonsense about ethnic groups "White", "Mestizo",
"Mulatto" etc. can be seen in English-language Wikipedia.
Admittedly, language and ethnicity are not
entirely the same thing. There are anomalies such as the Serbs and Croats who
speak the same language but hate each other's guts, and the British Isles where
groups of people speaking the same language have separate ethnic identitites.
Although, mind you, after gaining their independence, Croatians were quick to
declare the Zagreb literary standard a separate Croatian language and indeed to
strive to melt the Čakavian and Kajkavian "dialects" into the
standard (Štakavian) language to build a truly Croatian language as different
from Serbian as possible. Similarly, the Bosniaks and even Montenegrins
declared their regional versions of Serbocroatian into separate languages in
order to strengthen their ethnic identity. And I hardly need to tell you how
desperately the Irish cling to their all-but-dead language, because the water
between two islands and a different religion just don't seem enough to separate
them from the British they hate. (Not that they actually want to speak Irish,
but they so need it for the show.) But I'm digressing. I am not trying to write
a comprehensive treatise on national identity here. I am merely saying that to
suggest that race and ethnicity are the same thing is utterly mistaken, and
although language and ethnicity are not the same thing, they have very much in
common. For the imperialist nations, the insistence that ethnicity is meaningless and nationalism is evil, is a means to force
the members of the subjugated ethnic groups to speak the ruling language, which is the surest and quickest way for them to lose their ethnic identity and to become members of the ruling nation after a few generations.
When the Germans, French, Russians and English insist that all people are equal
regardless of ethnicity, what they really mean is: "You are our beloved brother as long as you speak
our language, because we're not going to learn yours." When everyone in
France is required by law to conduct all their official business in French,
it's easy for the French to embrace their "particularité régionale", and they just don't
understand what the Basques and the Corsicans are not satisfied with. In the
overwhelming majority of cases it's not even hypocrisy. They honestly don't
understand what the problem is, because they have never had to explain to their
children why they have to read schoolbooks in a language they don't understand.
When the members of the ruling ethnic group are stopped by the police, they get
their rights explained in their native language. When they get sick, they are
brought to a doctor who speaks their native language. When they ask something
from the authorities, they can fill out the official forms in their native
language. So they spend their lives never realising what a privilege it is that
you can take care of all your necessities in a language you are able to
understand without any effort. The French or the English can't even begin to
imagine what it's like to live at your home, in the country of your ancestors,
surrounded by people like you, speaking your language, but having to read
street signs in a foreign language, watch television in a foreign language, and
being expected to switch to the language of the ruling ethnic group whenever
one of them happens to be in the earshot.
The Russians don't understand it either. They
keep sneering at Estonians for not "wanting" to speak Russian. I have
the impression that many Russians honestly believe that the Estonians' enmity
towards the Soviet Union was (largely) due to their groundless stubborn
aversion to speaking Russian. Just as the English, French and, to a lesser
extent, Germans, they are used to living their lives without (almost) ever having to
speak a language other than their native one, and are thus incapable of
realising that the failure to truly master a foreign language has much more to
do with inborn talent than with wanting. Which brings me back to the point I
started this article with.
When you have never lived in a
foreign-language environment, it is difficult for you to realise how it is not
just a minor inconvenience, but a major impediment affecting virtually all
areas of life. Having to use a language you are not proficient in at school,
shop, court, hospital etc. is a burden of an entirely different scope than
discrimination based on religion, cultural habits or sexual preferences.
Forcing the ruling language on linguistic minorities, the negation,
trivialization and obscuration of ethnicity practiced in numerous countries, is
really a form of genocide.
