Commentary: Culture & Language:

 

The Global Village of the Flat World Needs Polygot Leaders

Why Does a True Citizen of the World

Need to Speak both English and French languages?

 

by Jean-François Moreau, M.D., A.I.H.P.

Honorary Fellow of the American College of Radiology

Emeritus Professor & Honorary Chairman

Paris Descartes University and School of Medicine

Paris, France

 

FOREWORD

 

I take a lot of interest in the for a opened by the LinkedIn group entitled UNESCO’S FRIENDS[1] and actively fed by the American John Daly[2], an experienced international officer retired in Washington D.C.  I often react until the beginning of Mali’s War meanwhile the succession process of UNESCO’S Director General[3] is readily opening. I’m pleased to summarize the philosophy I’m developing in order to put a new topic on the track: “UNESCO, UNICEF AND WHO MUST COOPERATE MORE AND BETTER FOR PEACE”.

 

This paper is an opportunity to thank John Pellam[4] and the B.W.W. SOCIETY for their positive support to the victorious Association des Amis du Musée de l’Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (ADAMAP). The trilingual petition opened in July 2010 has got 5555 signatures from all over the world. Hôtel de Miramion was sold and the Museum was closed in September 2012. But, the inestimable value of the millenary material and immaterial patrimonium owned by the hospitals of Paris since the VIII Century is supposed be recollected and stocked and exhibited in a new Museum of Human Health to be built in the prestigious Hôtel-Dieu of Paris near 2016. Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris and Hôtel-Dieu were conceived and built in the mean time of the 1160ies just close to each other in the core of Paris, in the island of Cité. Hôtel-Dieu of Paris has become the oldest hospital of the world still existing on place. Its 850th anniversary[5] will be celebrated in 2014. In order to train excellent professionals able to conceive and to achieve such a colossal project, I’m founding the Chair of Hospital Museology[6] with a group of academic colleagues of the Sorbonne Universities of Paris and Toulouse.

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The global village of the flat world is going into severely violent turmoil. Veterans like me are starting to think on the actual risk of Third World War. Battlefields in the area from Pakistan to Former Yugoslavia have become more and more numerous since the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Gulf War in 1990. All Middle-East nations nowadays are actually conflicting militarily from Afghanistan to Syria. Northern Africa up to the Ecuador Line is starting to burn since the so-called “Arabic Spring” developed in 2011 from Tunisia to Egypt through Libya.

 

France now is involved in a new conflict starting in Mali but poisoning the desert geographic zone of Sahel that is located in between Arabic Africa in the North and Black Africa in the South. Emphases are put on the varied cultural backgrounds of the antagonist warriors. Islamic terrorism by jihadists emigrated from Southern Libya is accused to be the primary responsible actor of a “metaphysical” conflict. Are they inspired by wahhabist and/or salafist Muslim spiritualities first or are they barbarian ruffian Mafiosi only? The terrorists acting in Mali have been behaving by promoting integrist Charia and destroying the Sufi material heritage of the anciently prosperous Kingdom of Timbuktu. Then, is the French government performing a newly colonial politics prolonging the denigrated “Françafrique”? Is francophobia emerging again in the Anglo-Saxony as well as in the Arabs? In fact antagonist economical and financial interests are at the core of the conflicts developing in the African continent, especially in the numerous francophone countries belonging to the vast former French Colonial Empire.

 

Governmental Organizations such as UNESCO and WHO are once again demonstrating their impotence to prevent clashes peacefully. UNESCO is being weakened by the crisis induced by Obama’s refusal to pay the US subsidies apart from 2012. Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) whether they are secular or religious are accused to be either manipulating one camp versus another or manipulated by extra powers.

 

Do the African military forces acting in Mali all understand the orders expressed in the French language? Malians and Chadians yes, but what about Nigerians? Nigeria is a huge and rich Anglophone country but the most peopled African one with 100,000,000 inhabitants as well. Is that the only reason why until now (late February 2013), the French army is the only operator from NATO’s countries acting in the battlefield? And why a few African armies have already joined the allied forces. Actual reason or true excuse?

 

Most of the persisting Caucasian chauvinistic trends result from a long antagonist story between the French and the British starting in the XIV Century with the “War of 100 Years”, the legendary French defeat of Azincourt in 1415 and Joan of Arc’s saga ending in 1432. Before, the French and the British Christianities were allied during the Crusades against Muslims starting in 1099. Curiously the Turkish Empire following the end of the Christian Byzantine Empire in the mid-XV Century and expanding until the Danube River since its defeat of Lepante in 1571 didn’t excite severe racist reactions between Christians and Muslims until WW1. Antagonisms between both religions have been fed with the sequel of WW2 after the anti-Semitic Hitler’s defeat and the creation of Israel in 1947 supported by the Christian Western World under the UN banner.

 

Nowadays, chauvinisms are fed with the human disasters induced by the hard economical and financial war dominated by the American supremacy allied with the international capitalists of the global village of the flat world. The debate on the best mean to favor peace opposes those who trust in an increase in educational programs illuminating the brains and the hearts toward those who believe the vulgumpecus must/should remain ignorant and be manipulated by basic programs .broadcasted by multimedia tools. Modern wars have become cultural and psychological. Thus common languages must be understood by both potential winners and losers. In Asia and especially in China, Caucasian people have to speak English and to recruit the best regional interpreters if they don’t speak the numerous and varied vernacular languages. In the post-colonial African continent the background is different, the cultural forces are represented with francophone and Anglophone and arabophone agents mostly challenged by the Chinese speaking the international languages. At a religious viewpoint, antagonisms emerge between varied protestant churches and Catholics meanwhile Muslims are divided into schismatic interpreters of Koran, the Muslim Holy Book edited by Prophet Muhammad in the VI Century in Arabia from Mecca to Medina. According to their pure respective interests, the ethnic groups are accused to be manipulated/corrupted by the strongest governmental or non governmental lobbies since superpowers are supposed to manipulate their weaker partners or enemies more or less cynically. Wikileaks has recently published some edificatory archives on that topic[7][8].

 

WITH OR WITHER THE FRENCH LANGUAGE?

 

At any level of the processes whether they are legally and ethically correct or they aim to manipulate and/or to corrupt by perverse means, communicating media and mediators should/must use the most adequate language save to be misunderstood then ineffective. Both English and French languages are continentally spoken in the bipartite African Continent. Serious changes toward the democratic spread-out of the English language similar to that was done by the Scandinavians after WW2 - but not yet completed in Latin Europe! -could be achieved successfully through several decades long in Africa. But some people believe that just a signature under a few lines can destroy that strong even hard paradigm at both political and cultural viewpoint.

 

Yes, there's no doubt the French language MUST remain the second international langue of UNO. Let me try to demonstrate that postulate since I'm a humanist citizen of the World who was born in France by chance and isn't racist or sexist or integrist. Let me emphasize as well two major events who structured by infantile character: I was born in 1938; my parents' home was occupied during four years by the German Army and my village was liberated by Patton's army on the 4th of August 1944. In 1986, I introduced myself in an American convention as "An American who was born in France by chance".

 

Neither UNESCO nor Sahel should excite neither Americanophobia nor Francophobia. But, do people understand or even know from what both diseases come from. I've become severely critical since I know how complex the world is. Why do democratic and dictatorial national governments come to term with each others? There're big almost monstrous conflicts of interest even between allied nations practicing so-called democracy. Why?

 

The Nobel Committee for Peace - Norwegians, indeed - awarded both French politicians who featured the constitutions of the prominent international Governmental Institutions (GO) following both World Wars (WW) of the XX Century.

 

Léon Bourgeois was awarded in 1920 for the constitution and the by-laws of the Société des Nations (SDN) located in Geneva, Switzerland. SDN failed to stop Stalin and Hitler's+Mussolini's dictatorships and the involvement of Japan with Axis in WW2 either. It has been evidenced that the pacifist US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, supported Hitler's propaganda even after Anschluss in 1938 because he was more against communism than Nazism if one of these ideologies had to contaminate the USA when the Europeans were obviously giving democracy up definitely.

 

René Cassin was awarded in 1968 because he headed the group of jurists who wrote the Declaration of the Human Rights adopted in 1946 by the new Organization of the United Nations (UNO). It has been evidenced that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was Francophobic; France got a permanent seat and a veto's right at the Security Council because of Churchill's will, supported by Stalin only. Still at that time the French language was an obvious international language, notably because of the victory of the French and allied armies in 1918; let me remember that NATO's SHAPE was located near Paris until Charles de Gaulle in 1966 withdrew the French Republic out of SHAPE whose headquarter was dislocated from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to Brussels, capital of Belgium where the French language is widely majority aside the non diplomatic Flemish one. Meanwhile Geneva has hosted the World Organisation of Health (WHO), Paris has hosted the United Nation for Education, Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO); United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), highly influenced by the Centre international de l'Enfance created by Robert Debré, famous French and international leader of pediatrics, has been headquartered in New York, NY, USA.

 

France had lost its pride and prestige because of its inexplicable defeat in June 1940 followed by the invasion of the German Army. It has been recently evidenced that the former British King Edward VIII, ambiguously Germanophile Duke of Windsor who was under American Wallis Simpson’s influence, his pro-Nazi wife, was actually Hitler's spy! Charles de Gaulle knew that pro-Nazi heritage of a strange Anglo-Saxon politics after WW1 aiming both to weaken Western Europe and to stop communist USSR’s expanding ideology.

 

The Pearl Harbor’s attack by the Japanese air forces followed by the Axis’ invasion of USSR broke the perverse American neutrality face to the German-Soviet Pact signed in August 1939[9]. President Roosevelt had to enter WW2. He ordered in November 1942 the landing of the American Army in Morocco (operation Torch headed by Patton) in order to fire Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of Africa then to reach Italy. By the way, he promised to the nationalists to support the independence of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. To weakening Europe… but not to ruining it because of the risk of communist expanding in Western Europe have kept the earnest duplex component of the international American politics going on.

 

PART 2: FROM 1940 TO NOWADAYS

 

That duplex American European politics has fed and spoiled the Americanophobia expressed on the French walls by the slogan “US go home!”. After WW2, the French Republic lost Indochina after a long and unpopular war; Pierre Mendès-France and Ho-Chi-Minh signed Geneva's Agreements in 1954 (21 July). Unfortunately, the Algerian war started in the same year 1954 on November 1st under the same government. Mendès-France had time to sign the peaceful independence of Tunisia. But, as he had become a symbol of colonial "abandon", later on he lost the elections; then he couldn’t make a comeback in January 1956 at the head of are shaped government starting a smooth process for an independent Algeria discussed with the most moderate leaders, such as Fehrat Abbas. At the contrary, winner socialist Guy Mollet decided to increase the war process and the French army won the so-called “battle of Algiers” in 1957. The American President Dwight Eisenhower – in agreement with Nikita Khrushchev and Molotov of USSR who had to face a revolt in Hungary in the mean time - vetoed the occupation of the canal of Suez by the Franco-British commandos in the fall 1956; even defeated by Israel’s forces in the mean time, Rais Gabal Abdel Nasser of Egypt could prolong an even stronger support to the guerilla in Algeria. Edgar Faure had time to give Morocco a peaceful independence in 1957.

 

In May 1958, Charles de Gaulle after tough riots in Algiers took the power with the support of the activists of "Algérie Française". The French Rightists were thinking of a Great France "From Dunkerque to Tamanrasset" because of the discovery of oil in Sahara and of uranium in Niger. Those minds were paranoid because if the reasoning was attractively conceivable, the fundamentals were wrong: the independence was already decided at the highest levels of the international politics supported by the Americans and the British… and the Soviets! I state that because I was informed of that certitude during a lunch with two French officials on the boat I took in July 1958 in Marseille to Algiers. I spent a trimester in the Algerian bush as a doctor and I soon felt the losing game had to be over as soon as possible. Unfortunately, humans are blind whenever and wherever they live, Caucasians have no lessons of wisdom to provide to the world, their enemies either.

 

The Algerian riots allowed Charles de Gaulle to take the power in Paris but he was trapped in a difficult politics because of the strong and stupid resistance of the Franco-Algerian “Pieds-noirs” and their metropolitan supporters.  For many years France had become schizophrenic and there would be an actual risk of civil war in the early 1960ies. Soon at the contrary, De Gaulle gave the French Black African Colonies their independence peacefully. They remained most often strongly linked with the French Republic at the origin of the famous even controversial "Françafrique". The French interests were saved except in French Guinea headed by a Marxist leader, Sekou Toure, who gave it the name of Mali. After Mobutu fired Lumumba in 1960 and had become the leader of the newly independent former Belgian Congo - for a while termed Zaire, now République démocratique du Congo) - the French presidents have become the godfather of the huge francophone Africa. Till now most of their leaders, often submitted for freemasonry influence,  are almost exclusive French speakers. Although the practice of the English language is booming in the whole Africa, it will take decades before the French has become a dead language.

 

PART 3 – From 1773 to now, conclusions in favor of polyglot education

 

The winner superimposes his/her language to the loser. There were only five/four official languages in the Caucasian world since the so-called Pericles’ Century[10] starting in 500 b.c.: (1) The American language two centuries (2) after the English language succeeded (3) the French language that supplanted (4) Latin under King François 1er after the Romans had digested (5) the Greek language in the early first Millennium after Christ.  France lost the so-called “Guerre de Sept Ans”… Then, the Traité de Versailles in 1763 – 250th anniversary in 2013! – recognized English as the second official international language. France lost its Northern American territories from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi River… Thus, the American official language is the heritage of the English language even in Quebec and Louisiana. The planetary British Empire was transformed into Commonwealth after WW2 but, in 1945, victorious allied Americans and British had put the English language at the imperial rank of the almost monopolistic diplomatic language. English has been becoming the regular language of the whole European Community at the expense of the “Francophonissimes”.

 

Even declining nowadays, the French language still has at least a centenary future because of the too recent independence of the collapsed French colonial empire at the end of the II Millenary. According to official statistics there are more than 300,000,000  French-speaking (francophone) humans all over the world. That’s a rather low percentage of the billionaire humanity but that’s enough to justify the French language to be the second international language of the United Nation Organization.  In Europe the French language is spoken by 60,000,000 people in France where UNESCO in Paris and the European Parliament in Strasbourg are located; 4,300,000 people live in Belgium where the European Commission (EC) and NATO’s Headquarter are located in Brussels; 1,400,000 people live in Switzerland where WHO, Red Cross, International Olympic Committee…  are hosted in Geneva or Lausanne; there are 430,000 people in Luxemburg hosting the European Parliament and some EC institutions.

 

Out of Europe, Africa from Maghreb to Congo is the largest reservoir of French-speaking people. Subsidiary consequences of the African events since the end of WW2 encompass waves of emigrants worldwide. There was a large diaspora of French Jews from independent Algeria and Tunisia to Israel in the 60ies. I met many Moroccans in the USA. Dr. Elias Zerhouni, born in Algeria, is one of the most famous American scientists. The French language even declining remains spoken in Western Asia mostly by the Copts and the elite trained in local French school.

 

There are plentiful kinds of English dialects and slangs such as globish. Spaniard languages including Castellano, Spanglish and Portuguese have a more promising future than the Frenglish because of the crowds of Latino-Americans.  Would German, Italian, Japanese languages suffer from their condition to having been the languages of WW2 losers without strong colonial heritages underneath? German is currently spoken in Central Europe. The huge Italian diaspora all over the world remains faithful to their mother language. One might already trust in the glorious future of mandarin and Hindi in the whole world more obvious than the Russian or Arab languages hampered by their native non roman alphabetic scripts.

 

The follow-up of the American language merely evidences the ambivalence of its origin. De Gaulle was supposed to state ironically it is a French patois. Today the semantics is highly influenced by Latinism. A lot of new words and idioms used in cultural and scientific fields look similar to those inherited from Latin rooting directly or through the Old French; Greek roots are less commonly inspiring the Americans who prefer super- than hyper-, astro- than cosmo-… For instance disruptive innovation, immunosuppressive infections, stagflation, maintenance, opportunity, virtual reality… might be translated directly into the French language… not without some risks of mistakes related with obsolescent definitions, such as actually meaning really in English and currently in French. Early Latin studying prepares wisely the young brains to learn quicker and easier French and/or Spanish and/or Italian and/or American languages.

 

To conclude, the brightest future belongs to the brains well-prepared to speak and write fluently three major Western languages  (mandatory English + French + Spanish).  The more languages one speaks the easier pathway to be polyglot. According to their sub-specializations they should add German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic…

 

The risk humanity has have to face when the global village develops in a flat world peopled up to 10 billion inhabitants is to be sooner or later divided into main areas using varied kinds of esoteric alphabet scripts without English subtitles. At the moment, unless they are single adventurers of the extreme, educators and businessmen as well as tourists can travel everywhere because they’re secured by their regular means of guidance.  But, what would it happen if human blocks develop under antagonist tensions? All larynxes aren’t prepared to speak Cantonese even other Asian dialects if infants weren’t educated to pronounce nasal sounds! All eyes and grey matter cells aren’t able to understand ideograms without a long learning of their fundamentals. Even the Arabic script is disruptive for a Westerner because it starts on the left side of the line.

 

UNESCO should prepare the new age to the linguistic education of the planetary populations in order pacific humans may communicate peacefully.  I wonder this would be more proficient than the noisy gun shooting musical art of war provided by the breaking news on TV channels. Let me reproduce the last lines of the recent interview of an applicant of Djibouti to the succession of the Bulgarian Director General of UNESCO in the fall 2013[11]:

 

Question by a journalist to Mr. Rachad Farah, an applicant of Djibouti to the succession of the Bulgarian Director General of UNESCO in the fall 2013: UNESCO is facing a financial crisis because of the withdrawal of US funds over the admittance of Palestine to its membership. Can you resolve this financial problem and raise the funds that are needed?

 

Answer by Rachad Farah: UNESCO is not a financial institution. If this withdrawal of funds by the United States had happened to the Islamic Bank, the World Bank or the IMF, it would be a catastrophe because these are financial organisations. UNESCO is not. It is promoting projects in education, culture and science. If we have projects within UNESCO, and if we are capable of bringing projects to the donors and to the banks such as the Islamic Bank and the World Bank, then I'm sure we can get the money to finance them. The director-general and the member states must sit down and discuss what will be the next step and request the United States to restore its contribution. It has to be an appeal from member states to the United States: Washington has to understand that the member states are eager to keep the United States on board. I believe that equipped with the vision of the Obama administration, the United States will go along with what we are requesting.

 

I commented that paper on the forum opened by John Daly[12][13]. The crisis has been induced by the vote of a majority of Nations to the admission of a Palestinian representative at the UNESCO. The World Bank is under an American presidency, then it can't act against Obama's politics or so. Moreover the Islamic Bank can't refuse an American diktat superimposed by the Jewish lobby. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)at the moment is under a non-American leadership (French Christine Lagarde).

 

Does the nomination of the next DG of UNESCO means "validation of the hold-up of UNESCO by the USA"?

 

As a citizen of the world as well as French citizen, I can't accept that the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris is strangled by an American boycott any longer. The problem is the incompetence and the corruption of the institution but the disease must be treated on place, in Paris, not in Washington DC or in NYC.

 

We're all poisoned by that never-ending problem of Israel and Palestinian coexistence. That's enough. I visited Israel twice since the beginning of the first intifada and I trained plenty of Middle-East doctors. I know Afghanistan and Iran are the Eastern walls against the future invasive rush of Chinese and/or Indian legions. I know oil fields justify the presence of the US troops in the Middle-East. I know the American support to Islamic integrists and jihadists is based upon both the American desire to manipulate the Europeans in Africa and to secure the Western World against the “Yellow Fever” after the “Red” one.

 

The sooner UNESCO covers the continental and multi-continental conflicting cultural problems publicly in Paris, the better. Djibouti is a French-speaking capital and I've no doubt Rachad Farah has an impressive background of a competent professional. But is he supposed to be a puppet in charge of the conservative management of sick institutions like UNESCO and WHO? Will we be looking forward to developing efficient and intensive educational programs? Or shall we observe the colonization of an organization by a representative of even more cynical and newly pro-slavery ultraliberal sharks?

 

A symptom? Creationism is taking more and more influence in the Islamic populations of Maghreb. Educated people know how stupid that regressive approach is. However, creationists are inflating in the USA too. The history of humanity since its origin provides warnings on an actual risk for the dominating civilizations having risen up to highly sophisticated encyclopedic knowledge. The current so-called Western civilization is reaching an extraordinary capacity to disrupt conventional fundamentals regulating the societies such as the biological sexual discrimination based upon the morganian genetics by a new research based on stem cells manipulations by nanotechnologies applied to the human reproduction to prolonged ageing and inducing new worrisome sociologies. Our elitist societies are vulnerable because their intellectual products are inaccessible to primary conservatisms. Barbarians are wild killers when their crowds are liberated by the excitation of their basic instincts uncontrolled by a well-prepared education respecting the human rights as they were written by René Cassin and his team and adopted by the UNO. Thirst and/or hunger and/or sex when they aren’t satisfied enough to enable a socially livable condition make humans wilder than the wildest animals in the jungle because humans think and react according to the strengths of the speeches and the weapons their chiefs proffer to their desperate motivation to live or die.

 

 



[9]From Pearl Harbor to Stalingrad: Germany and Its Allies in 1942 (pp. 282-292) 

AktenzurdeutschenAuswartigenPolitik 1918-1945.Serie E: 1941-1945. Band I: 12 Dezember 1941 bis 28 Februar 1942.Akten zurdeutschenAuswartigenPolitik 1918-1945. Serie E: 1941-1945. Band II: 1 Marzbis 15 Juni 1942.Akten zurdeutschenAuswartigenPolitik 1918-1945. Serie E: 1941-1945. Band III: 16 Junibis 30 September 1942.Akten zurdeutschenAuswartigenPolitik 1918-1945. Serie E: 1941-1945. Band IV: 1 Oktoberbis 31 Dezember 1942.

Review by: Geoffrey Warner

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2615652

 

[10]Pericles and Hippocrates in Greece, Confucius in China and Buddhah in Indialived durant the Vth Century beforeJesus-Christ.



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