Herzog on killing voices:
" Every two weeks, the world loses a language. Out of approximately 7,000 languages spoken on earth today, at least half will have fallen silent by the end of this century. "
" a mass extinction. By definition, it occurs in silence, since silence is the very form of this extinction."
"I have just used an oblique form and passive voice to avoid naming the culprits, the agencies responsible for this extinction, for I am well trained in the thinking patterns that power structures have always dictated ... Never point at them unless you wish to be punished. "
"if you name the power and those who own it for what they do—you’ll be disappeared, killed, or, more effectively, ridiculed"
"We do their dirty work for them—against each other"
"Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, Frank Luntz, to name just a few, various think tanks, culture wars, and media wars, all bankrolled by the people who own the world’s wealth, have created a massive, highly controlled network of perceptions and trigger points in all of us individually and en masse"
"These networks of messaging and perceptions can be deployed only in the dominant languages of the dominant powers ... The disempowered have always known that there is this linguistic limitation of power, and thus new languages are constantly being born and dying in prisons and ghettos."
"Power ... has obliterated these other languages as much as it could, either by simple genocide or by squeezing other cultures out, absorbing them and vanishing them, sometimes intentionally, mostly, as a by-product of conquest, cultural absorption, or domination ... Nowadays, this is done by a technological spread of communications in dominant languages and a near vacuum in the cultural and media production of minority languages. No room is left in societies for them. No room is left in the minds."
"There’s really no such thing as ‘the voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard."
"minority cultures are not susceptible to the modern means of political control ... they are either soft-armed into adopting those structures or else … they get profoundly marginalized and are allowed to disappear."
"Who is to blame? My answer is simple: it is us. And somewhere, between our obliviousness to others and our own inevitable oblivion, rest the scales of some brutal justice."
Read the whole thing: Really, is worth it
https://www.lenaherzog.com/moma-silencio-talkHere she is with Scheer at scheer intelligence:
"this extinction is no accident. Rather, it is the outcome of a human history in which concentrated hegemonic powers required the erasure of any form of communication that precluded their understanding and, crucially, their control."
"Humanity is losing the knowledge, the variety of worldviews, and the cosmologies that indigenous communities have for centuries encoded in these languages and cultures. Let there be no doubt: This is a mass extinction,”
"if you tune out their language … you’re denying that they had a history. If you deny they had a history, you’re denying their humanity. If you deny their humanity, you can imprison them, you can kill them, you can drown them—it doesn’t matter, because they are not significant."
"in country after country, the dominant culture tries to wipe out the language"
"there’s something inherently subversive or threatening about these different languages, because they define life differently ... it’s not an accident that these languages get crushed"
"you have a cultural imperialism that seems like it’s not engineered and mindless, but has all the power of massive armies to change people, to deny any rebellion they might have, to convince them that they’re happy being dominated"
" even the Old Testament, what’s the first sentence there? “In the beginning was the Word.” But what is the second sentence? “And the Word was with God.” ... a very radical notion that before the world was the Word ... the second sentence is introducing hierarchy. It’s introducing authority, immediately. So empires have always done that, and they’ve always took specific care that they were in charge of stories."
"One of the things that was done to the slave population was to strip it of the protection of language, and strip it of any connection with Africa."
"its essential mechanism of freedom is to be able to define the language you want to use, express yourself in your own language, and state power that wants to control completely has to own language. That was the message of Orwell, of Huxley: the ultimate power requires controlling language"
"what happens when language disappears? You know, what takes its place? And it’s really a scary, solitary world when you can’t communicate "
"Rosetta Stone is a piece of granite with three scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in demotic, and in Greek. What is it? ... what is the monument to? It’s essentially a monument to an extinction of languages, the extinction that is of a profound cultural nature. Because it needed translation. There were very few Egyptian priests that could understand the hieroglyphs anymore, because that was already an extinct language. So they had to be translated into also a language that was demotic, and then the language of power, which was Greek ... if we want to have some kind of record of the variousness, actually, of our human mind ... we are not monolithic. That our human creativity has all these various ways to be."
"I sometimes see this kind of blanking out by people who really would rather not hear anything of what goes on in the places where they go to bomb, where they go to conquer, or of the people that they silence. "
"if we’re not aware of it, the beauty of the language, the complexity, or if we get angry because we can’t immediately understand it, we doom ourselves to ignorance "
"We have become provincial"
" they contain an inconvenient truth. They force us to see the limits of our own culture, our own arrogance."
"we are actually wired to want to know others; as much as we are brainwashed to deny them by power structures, actually, in us, we have also a very profound communal sense. And we want to know what the world is made up of, and other voices"
" it’s a fatally boring construction, actually, the idea of melting us all into one. It’s a denial of what makes life worth living, which is alternatives, and differences, and different perceptions "
"when we’re so narrow, when we block it out. Whether we do it institutionally, we do it through our mega-cultural, massive, you know, cultural enterprises, and commercialized culture. But we become tone-deaf "
Read and listen:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mass-extinction-no-one-is-talking-about/sidd
