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As time allows I'll come back to this post during the day to add details of language chauvinism and the concept of French Manifest Destiny. We might by the end see a pattern of French triumphalism and exceptionalism, a pattern of thought in the French national mind that begins long before the Revolution, that comes from the forming of France as a nation through the dictionary project of the Academie Francaise. To start, we can look at the current French elitists as inheritors of pre-revolutionary entitlement. The elitists of the Academy are still elitists to this day. The French, no matter that Napoleon is gone, still harbour designs to rule the world. And the Dreyfus Affair is still with us in the anti-Americanism of the French. France is still a feudal "nation."
Below is a first look at the people who would ban Google from Europe and who would control the Internet for chavinistic reasons, for the benefit of the elitist phantasies of the gnostics. If we try to make sense of the anti-Americanism of Europe today we do well to look to the past for some of our clues.
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The Académie française, or French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution, it was restored in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte. It is the oldest of the five académies of the Institut de France.
The Académie consists of forty members, known as immortels (immortals). New members are elected by the members of the Académie itself. Academicians hold office for life, but they may be removed for misconduct. The body has the task of acting as an official authority on the language; it is charged with publishing an official dictionary of the language. Its rulings, however, are only advisory, not binding on either the public or the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki****
We see directly above that the elitists of the French academy are few in number, great in power and status. More, they are nation builders within France. They are the few who determine what is legitimately "French." Their primary concern is French language purity. For those with the time and the interest we suggest looking further into the posts below on Herder and Fichte in the archives to see the reactionary developments of language purity and identity politics that so horribly plague us today. Otherwise, continue on to see how today the French still struggle against nature and history to hold back the free flow of Humanity's development through language strangulation. Prior it was the dictionary; today it is the Internet.
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Google, The French, And World Domination; The Culture War Begins
Jason Lee Miller
Published: 2005-05-13
"[T]he Internet [is] the most recent and the most sinister facet of American cultural imperialism to emerge: the Internet is anchored in the United States; the vast majority of World Wide Web sites are based in the U.S and are in English; most software used to navigate the Internet is in English; and search engines are in English (Kim, 1998)".
A cloud is moving toward Europe. It carries with it the thunderous, electrical, (digitized?) calling card of storm-fronted majesty, raining in streams of zeros and ones, boisterous, anarchical, bellowing the dirges of Europe's heyday, reeking of Yankee imposition, a new brand of manifest destiny wearing a name tag pregnant with the usual oddity of foreign names-a name that gurgles from it foghorn style as it moves across the sea-Gooooooo-gle!
Was that a tad dramatic? Judging from France and the EU, it may be an accurate description of how they feel about it.
When Google announced a 10-year, $200 million plan to digitize the literary world, invoking the assistance of Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan University, and the New York Public Library, France's National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney spun around in his chair and called up President Chirac.
In protest to what the French press soon called "omnigooglization," and what Jeanneney called a decidedly "Anglo-Saxon" affront, the national librarian wrote a scathing letter to Chirac. In the letter, though he didn't condemn the effort, Jeanneney voiced his fear of what that meant for the representation of France and Europe.
Here are some excerpts from the letter published in Le Monde:
"The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world."
"[T]heir criteria for selection will be profoundly marked by the Anglo-Saxon outlook."
"It would have meant The Scarlet Pimpernel triumphing over Ninety-three (Victor Hugo's eulogistic account of the revolution)."
Motivated by the fear that French and other European languages, ideas, and cultural heritages would be lost or obscured in an Anglo-Saxon digitized library, the whole of the EU, except for, of course, Anglo-Saxon Britain, met to begin efforts to create a European online library.
The national libraries of 19 countries committed to the mammoth project of digitizing 4.5 billion pages of text, including Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.
Luxembourg P.M., Jean-Claude Juncker seemed especially incensed, saying, "…Europe must not submit in the face of virulent attacks from others."
As I am writing this, I realize that it is difficult to decide how to react to such claims. Nineteen whole countries mobilized against an American search engine?
At first, it's laughable. And then, angering. And then laughable again.
At the very least, from an American perspective, it is hard to understand. You can barely quiet the giant "so what?" boulder ping-ponging though your skull long enough process it. Could they really be that threatened by a research tool living in some abstract realm of space?
French feelings of insecurity are nothing new. They have feared intrusion of American culture for years. There are a number of laws regarding public use of language-guarding against the use of "Franglais," or English-French mutations. The word "cheeseburger" was vilified, and there is a law that at least 40% of radio content must be in French.
Add that to a famous Internet prank, where a Canadian student googlebombed the "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature of Google to the end that when a user typed in "French military victories," a page turns up finding no examples and asking, "Did you mean 'French military defeats?'"
But truthfully, this goes beyond America's love-hate relationship with France. It seems the entire world is forming a love-hate relationship with America.
Take, for example, the musings of Canadian writer, Robin Matthews. Though he recognizes the appeal of US culture, the "dazzle, the variety, the abundance, and the vigor," he goes on to call it an "invading culture" comparable to the Nazis, and those who buy into it, "collaborators."
And this perceived cultural domination is transforming from what one scholar termed as "McDonaldization" to what many are calling "Googlization."
Europe had begun limiting America's technical reach before this fear of Google emerged by slapping Microsoft with antitrust litigation. China's emerging Internet market has caught the ever-expanding hungry eyes of Yahoo, Ebay, and Google.
The appetite seems to go both ways. People worldwide, the general consumer at least, are embracing what American companies have to sell. Understandably, these companies are, in turn, exploiting the markets. This is the nature of a global economy, and along with it comes, perhaps to an extreme, nationalistic outrage and rejection of what is perceived as cultural imperialism.
But realistically, isn't it as simple as America having something to sell, and the world wants to buy it? Is that a conspiracy? Or is it a challenge to the rest of the world to produce?
Those questions aside, it is becoming clear to the Europeans that a presence on the Internet has become extremely important. In the words of Hungarian Culture Minister Andras Bozoki, the concern is "that something not registered on the Net will not be seen as existing."
So the fear is not necessarily economic. It is the fear of losing identity. It is the fear of one global culture dominated by gray-suited American executives.
But the apparent hypocrisy (and racism/culturalism?) has to be noted that what Europe is doing in the name of nationalistic inclusion smacks of extreme exclusivity.
And though Houman Samadi, cultural assistant at the Washington, D.C. chapter of Alliance Fracaise, contends that France and the EU desire "plural worlds with plural points of view," it would appear that the plural world cannot contain anything remotely American.
Google The French and World Domination The Culture War Begins
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French Manifest Destiny and chavinism continue today as usrely as in the age of Richelieu. Today it emerges most clearly as anti-Americanism.
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To continue:
The following details on the origins and actions of the Academie might seem to the causal reader somewhat irrelevant to the questions of fascist Islam and Left dhimmi fascism in our modern times. I argue, however, that these details below will show clearly the roots of French and European anti-Americanism very clearly to the benefit of us all, and that we will see the problems of anti-Americanism and French manifest destinarianism in a look at the Academie Francaise's Dictionary.
Compare the ethos of the Continental nation-builders to that of the English in the making of dictionaries. Formal nations in the modern sense began in 1648 with the making of the Treaty of Westphalia. But what is a nation other than control of restricted and legally recognized land boundaries? What makes a people nationally coherent and valid as a nation? Prior to modern nationality there was the identity of religion, such as we find today in the primitive politics of the caliphate of Islam, the ummah, and the ulema. Below that we find the tribal ties of many primitives, tribes, clans, and family, some of that extending so far as to ethnicity and "race" so-called. but what is a nation? What makes America, for example, a nation? What makes a Black man from New Jersey as American as a Mexican immigrant or a Korean in Los Angeles? According to the Germans Herder and Fichte and others, the commonality is language. Language makes one German regardless of ones place in any other sphere of national life, whether one be a peasant or a lord, whether one is German in Prussia or in Prague. Language is first in identity. (Refer to past posts here if you will on Herder and Fichte or continue here.)
To create a unified national identity one needs a hegemonic language. Latin served that purpose for a thousand years. It was the language of Catholicism. In France as a specific place, Latin gave way to the vernacular Parisian. What good is that to a Norman? None. The source of political power comes from legitimate authority, and that comes from command and obedience. force is not legitimate. Shouting in a foreign language is ineffective. Language hegemony is effective and legitimate authority. Those who communicate in French, for example, share a common and collective mind. To be French is to speak French. To speak a "pure" French is to be more French than those who speak creole or patois. To speak French as a French person is to be French rather that to be other. The less one speaks another language the more one is French. To exclude is to be exclusive and therefore more legitimate and more authentic than the synthetic. The Academie sought purity and Frenchness in a unified language set down for all time in the first Dictionnaire.
Thanks to the catastrophic defeat during the Battle of Hastings of 1066 the English developed a dual language of Germanic and Latinate. English borrowed for the duration and will continue to do so, while the French, victorious in that battle did nothing more than celebrate and gloat. To this day the French fight a rearguard action to keep language purified of borrowed words in a futile attempt akin to keeping rain out of a lake.
To be French is to speak French and to be "not non-French." The French, obsessed with dreams of empire, seek language hegemony across the world, find it possible to assimilate French speakers into the empire on the basis of any pretence of French language skills at all, such as inclusion in Francophonie of for example the nation of Roumania, based on a pretentious French speaking royal court in the 18th century. In this mad and idiotic scamble for hegemony and empire any lie will do if it can be spoken in French. And anything is potetially French so long as it's not Anglo, particularly American Anglo. We see as a result the insanity of deliberate ethnocide in the form of Eurabia. The endof France as a nation begins even before the concept of nationhood.
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Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française
« On dit d'un mauvais traducteur, qu'il fait sa traduction à coups de Dictionnaire. »
The Académie française was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 with the primary goal of creating a French dictionary. A total of eight editions have been published in the years since its foundation, from the first edition in 1694 up until the eighth edition in 1935. The ninth edition is currently in progress. The ARTFL Project, in collaboration with the Projet d'informatisation du Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, is pleased to offer electronic versions of the first (1694), 4th (1762), 5th (1798), 6th (1835), and 8th (1932-5) editions.
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/dicos/ ________________________________
The Académie is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, although its recommendations carry no legal power. Sometimes, even governmental authorities disregard the Académie's rulings. The Académie publishes the official dictionary of the French language, known as the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française.
A special Commission composed of several (but not all) of the members of the Académie undertakes the compilation of the work. The Académie has completed eight editions of the dictionary, which have been published in 1694, 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878, and 1935. It continues work on the ninth edition, of which the first volume (A to Enzyme) appeared in 1992, and the second volume (Éocène to Mappemonde) in 2000. In 1778, the Académie attempted to compile a "historical dictionary" of the French language; this idea, however, was later abandoned, the work never progressing past the letter A. As French culture has come under increasing pressure with the widespread availability of English media, the Académie has tried to prevent the anglicisation of the French language. For example, the Académie has replaced loanwords from English (such as walkman and software) with French equivalents (baladeur and logiciel, respectively).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise
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We follow the view that today's West is in a state of reactionary violence against the democracies of the Enlightenment project. When the French, for example, attempt to restrict access to the Internet, they do so in the same way the Medieval Church banned literacy from the laity. When the state attempts to guarantee employment to the working classes we see it as the same social relationship as that between manorial lord and serf, the serf indentured to the land and its holder by feudal obligation of labour in exchange for security of arms and provision in times of famine. The neo-serf is indentured to the state in the same way the serf of old was indentured to the estate manor. In the pseudo-capitalist state socialist economies of Europe the serf now works his allotted days in the service of the state to which the serf, rather than owing labour owes taxes through labour. Analogous to church tithes is the payment made to the media for its communications monopoly, the recasting of reality to the masses. The education system, like the scholastics of the Middle Ages, is governed and perpetuated by the professors of the Academies. The entitled aristocracies of the old days are the new aristocrats of the European Union. We see a flight to the future via the past. This is a return to the Middle Ages. We'll look at feudalism first and then at neo-feudalism.
From wikipedia we pick up some brief history of the term "Feudalism." Regardless of the facts of it, we use the term at least metaphorically here to provide a sense of social relations between members of an economic base. The point is to provide context for our argument that today's Europe is a continuation of Medieval feudalism, today's neo-feudalism in the form of State Socialism.
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The word "feudalism", first coined in the 17th century, is based on the Late Latin feudum, which was borrowed from Germanic * fehu, a commonly used term in the Middle Ages for a fief (land held under certain obligations by feodati).
Even though the word components are from the Middle Ages, the concept of feudalism was not invented until the modern era. Feudalism refers to a general set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility of Europe during the Middle Ages, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs.
The word feudalism was not a medieval term. It was invented by French and English lawyers in the 17th century to describe certain traditional obligations between members of the warrior aristocracy. The term first reached a popular and wide audience in Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) in 1748. Since then it has been redefined and used by many different people in different ways.
French historian Marc Bloch, is arguably the most influential medieval historian of the twentieth century. Bloch approached feudalism not so much from a legal and military point of view but from a sociological one. He developed his ideas in Feudal Society (1961). Bloch conceived of feudalism as a type of society that was not limited solely to the nobility. Like Ganshof, he recognized that there was a hierarchal relationship between lords and vassals, but saw as well a similar relationship obtaining between lords and peasants.
It is this radical notion that peasants were part of the feudal relationship that sets Bloch apart from his peers. While the vassal performed military service in exchange for the fief, the peasant performed physical labour in return for protection. Both are a form of feudal relationship. According to Bloch, other elements of society can be seen in feudal terms; all the aspects of life were centered on "lordship", and so we can speak usefully of a feudal church structure, a feudal courtly (and anti-courtly) literature, a feudal economy. (See Feudal society.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
The vast majority of the population living in feudal Europe was legally bound to provide farming, husbandry and other agricultural services on land held by the nobility either directly or as appanage. In return, the lord offered protection and some measure of localized stability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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