Speak Wars

[Skybird]

No thanks, no re-education

Behind the increasingly violent attempts to disinfect our beautiful language in a politically correct manner and to make it ideologically sterile, there is an attack on the bourgeois way of life. Time to resist.

Unfortunately, there is no other way to describe it, I was far too naive for far too long. What was naive was the attacks on the tried and tested form of the German language, which were becoming more and more visible from day to day, commonly known as "gendering", the quirk of a small but ultimately irrelevant group of underemployed academic ordinary sailors, young journalists camouflaged people educators and managers snitching after the zeitgeist to understand; a folly that will pass just as it came. What a mistake.

There is basically something really amusing to watch how the self-appointed devil exorcizers work their way through language in order to put an end to their sensual diversity and replace it with a sterile, anemic and ultimately unusable stammer, devoid of any beauty and vitality. If, for example, the city of Bonn officially encourages its employees to write “Terrorisierende/terrorising ones” instead of “Terroristen/terrorists”, that is certainly a considerable contribution to human progress; especially from the perspective of the victims of the terrorising ones.

But what so far may have appeared pumping up here and there in the marsh of bad linguistic taste, has taken on a tremendous impact and dynamism in the last few months. Curious individual cases are turning into a tsunami, a mass rape of the German language. That won't turn out well, it seems. Unless we start to fight back against it.

Reconstruction of the language

It's not just about the language itself, but has long been about thinking and attitude. If, for example, an Austrian German airline, which had cultivated the cliché of local charm for decades, now renounces the address "Dear Sir or Madam", apparently in order not to be accused of the reactionary opinion that there are two genders, it is about more than mere "gendering". It is ultimately about trying to control and change our assumptions about what is wrong and what is right. And that's exactly why it was and is so naive to dismiss the forced conversion of the language as mere nonsense.

Whoever rules the language also rules people's lives, at least to a certain extent.

The German writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) recognized exactly what it really is about: “Language is a weapon.” Whoever rules language, also rules people's lives, at least to a certain extent. We are dealing here with nothing less than an attack on the bourgeois way of life and its values, its rules and, of course, its language.

This is an attack that is not only presented on the linguistic level, but parallel to it, albeit completely uncoordinated, in a number of completely different fields. The fact that, since the financial crisis in 2008, savers have been constantly expropriated through a semi-silly policy of printing money, while debtors are rewarded, undermines basic bourgeois values ​​such as thrift, renunciation in favor of future investments and the accumulation of assets in order to achieve freedom and independence. Where the saver is the idiot, the wasteful light footing on credit is the one who wins in the end, the bourgeois values ​​are disposed of like smelly fish scraps that you want to get rid of as quickly as possible.

Attack on bourgeois values

Bourgeois society in Europe is no less corroded by a completely misguided immigration policy since 2015, which has led to the fact that primarily not those come to Europe who we really need urgently here, but in all too many cases those who enrich our societies , but in a way that has not been appreciated by those who have lived here so far.

The fact that bourgeois, enlightenment achievements such as equality between men and women, the principle of the secular state or the acceptance of all sexual preferences are suddenly up for grabs again is an attack on bourgeois values.

Of course, one would have to be a confused conspiracy theorist to see a master plan behind these very different attacks. Such is nonsense. What is striking, however, is that very often actors who are concerned with re-educating people through a new language often also consider a policy of getting into debt and printing money to be more correct - and mostly also see immigration from Africa and the Islamic world as relaxed. What they have in common is the well-intentioned attempt to replace the bourgeois world with all its deficits and inadequacies with a new, much better one.

But history teaches us that few things have brought as much misery to the world as what is well-intentioned. And then there is the small problem that the vast majority of the population sees everything very differently, because they want to "barbecue instead of gender" at the weekend, as the German publicist Gabor Steingart put it in a nutshell.

It is the same majority who appreciate the qualities of a German diesel engine, regard meat eating as a pleasure and also like to travel south by plane. And, as all surveys show, would like to keep the German language in its previous form. It is rather doubtful whether the reorganization desired by the milieu of the well-meaning first of the language and then of society can be democratically legitimized. It is no coincidence that the more radical part of this trend, for example with “Fridays for Future”, is already calling for a “system change”, and one can certainly imagine what that might mean.


Time to act

It is therefore slowly time that all those who do not want to let the bourgeois way of life be deprived of them finally wake up and act. Economically, by figuring out which companies and institutions adapt to the bad zeitgeist and which not, and adapt their purchasing decisions accordingly; and politically based on the positions that politicians take on this issue.

Anything else would be naive. And I know what I'm talking about.

https://www.derpragmaticus.com/r/kolumne-gendern/