What Did You Say?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Tower of Babel"

2,512 words

The ancestral Proto-Indo-European language was spoken around 5,000 BC by a people who, according to scholarly consensus, lived somewhere north of the Black Sea in an extensive area coinciding roughly with the land of the ancient Scythians.

As the ancestral tribe grew larger and spread east, west, north, and south, dialects arose which, over time, became more and more mutually incomprehensible. When dialects become mutually incomprehensible they are different languages. Proto-Indo-European itself died out before it could ever be written down.

The mutually incomprehensible daughter languages to which it gave birth in turn splintered and gave rise to still more daughter languages and dialects. Over time, the Indo-European tribes (now plural) prospered and expanded until a tree of related languages and dialects flowered into the many IE languages now spoken throughout Europe and Asia.

However, linguistic fragmentation is now the bane of transnational white unity. Trapped and isolated in numerous language ghettos, whites worldwide cannot communicate effectively with one another. Collectively, we literally do not comprehend what we say or experience. Our horizons and worldviews are painfully parochial, narrow, and compartmentalized.

Fractured Identity

In the first stage of the process, when tribes, kingdoms, empires, and nations were still predominantly white, language differences splintered white identity, setting group against group; shared language and membership or residence within a tribe or state became the salient features of group identity instead of race. Numerous competitive and mutually antagonistic white “tribes” (nations) with little or no overall sense of unity were the result.

In the second stage, following the Ashkenazi population explosion and the staggering influx of non-white populations dictated by replacement migration policy, a massive reservoir of racial aliens was created who now speak Indo-European tongues and are falsely perceived and treated as members of the national/linguistic in-group rather than as foreigners.

Many of these non-whites have been in European countries for generations; their members can read and speak the local languages. Ex-white countries everywhere tax indigenous populations to provide speech instruction for the never-ending stream of non-white importees who keep pouring in.

Whites have objectively existed as a race and culture for millennia, but never with a tight-knit, shared identity. Instead, they self-conceptualized as ad hoc subgroups, viewing other white subgroups as “foreigners” in virtually the same way they did non-whites.

This continues to be the case today, despite the fact that conditions demand recognition of a common (non-demonized) identity. Linguistic balkanization prevents the effective formation of a new unitary white identity.

Two Examples

Language barriers create problems of the most fundamental sort.

Front National v. Freedom Party

At one point, probably in the 1990s, a short-lived, inconsequential public dispute arose between Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (Front national, FN) and Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). The two sides exchanged barbs in the international press, each proclaiming itself superior to the other because it was not “anti-Semitic.”

I formed the powerful impression at the time that neither party knew much more about the other than what they’d imbibed from their respective nations’ newspapers and television screens.

The Takeover of South Africa

White racial resistance in South Africa was rooted primarily in Afrikaner rather than white identity. (The same is true of WWII Germany, where Germanness, not whiteness, supplied the motive force. Of course, Germany was also a clear harbinger of Aryanism, a transcendent form of whiteness.) In both instances, language—Afrikaans and German—powerfully reinforced cultural core identity against the anti-white enemy, strengthening resistance and resolve. But at the same time it contributed to cultural and political ghettoization, fostering a sense of intra-white “foreignness.” A linguistic curtain shut resisters off from the larger white community internationally and within continental Europe and South Africa respectively.

During the era of South African resistance I maintained subscriptions to the newsletters and publications of dissident groups in that country. The language barrier was a real problem. In particular, Eugène Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Resistance movement (AWB) and Jaap Marais’ Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP, Reconstituted National Party), the two groups in which I was the most interested, offered no material in English despite the fact that South African English speakers should have been a major target audience.

Even today the AWB and HNP websites are published strictly in Afrikaans, limiting access to a larger global audience that two decades ago could be reached only by expensive air mail or time-consuming surface (sea) shipping. The Internet reduces the shipping problem somewhat—I frequently received items several months after they had been postmarked—but the language barrier remains as high as ever. Looking at the AWB and HNP websites today reminds me of the frustration I felt fruitlessly poring over their old publications prior to the takeover. The language barrier prevented me from accessing information about the plight of South African whites unmediated by the bias of the international press.

Unlike the AWB and HNP, the too-moderate (given the nature of the anti-white threat) Conservative Party (Konserwatiewe Party), with an identity centered on the Dutch Reformed Church as well as the Afrikaans language, nevertheless made a commendable effort to reach out to English speakers. Its main publication was about 75% Afrikaans and 25% (or less) English.

In a 2003 merger, the CP was dissolved into the current Freedom Front Plus Party (Vryheidsfront Plus, VF+). The CP and VF+ have been involved for decades in the Afrikaner-separatist Orania project. Several relatives of assassinated South African Prime Minister and hero Hendrik Verwoerd are citizens of Orania; his widow lived there until she died. Orania’s founder and Verwoerd’s son-in-law Carel Boshoff died three months ago. Verwoerd’s grandson is the current mayor.

By default, the most consistently useful English-language resistance publication for an American in those days was S. E. D. Brown’s Pretoria-based The South African Observer. Brown, who died prior to the takeover, was half-English and half-Afrikaner.

Beyond Mutual Incomprehensibility

In this context, Counter-Currents is an interesting endeavor. Bi-lingual authors translate material from other European languages into English, and selected articles from Counter-Currents are in turn translated into other languages or reprinted in English on foreign websites.

Anyone on our side who is bi- or multi- lingual and contributes to bridging the huge cross-cultural ethnic gap performs a real service. So do commenters on Counter-Currents and other websites for whom English is a second language or who can speak IE languages other than English. They should be valued and not dealt with too cavalierly due to strongly expressed but ultimately insignificant ideological or religious convictions to which they are at any rate entitled. The mere fact of their presence and engagement is what counts. The vast majority of whites, myself included, find it extremely difficult if not impossible to master any IE language other than our own.

One of the European websites with which Counter-Currents maintains a friendly relationship is Belgian Robert Steuckers‘ Euro-Synergies. Steuckers is a translator educated at the Brussels-based L’Institut libre Marie Haps.

Euro-Synergies regularly publishes articles in six languages, in the process addressing three of the largest white linguistic communities in the world. (English, German, and French.) French, Dutch, and German are all official languages in Belgium. Exclusively Dutch speakers make up 56 percent of the population, French speakers 32 percent, and German speakers 1 percent. Eleven percent of Belgians are bi- or multi-lingual. The low number of multilingual individuals illustrates how significant IE language differences are for most people.

Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans further drive home the fragmented nature of IE languages. One would think that Flemish (the national variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium) and Dutch are so closely related as to be mutually comprehensible—possibly dialect variations of the same language. Yet reportedly the differences between Dutch and Flemish are significant enough so that it is customary for Flemish television shows to be subtitled in Dutch, and vice versa. (“Flemish TV Viewers Do Not Understand Dutch” (2007) [in Dutch].)

A similar issue arises with regard to Dutch and Afrikaans. How similar are they? Afrikaans, a daughter language of Dutch originating in its 17th century dialects, is spoken natively in South Africa and South West Africa (now non-white Namibia). Ninety to 95 percent of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin.

Can the average Dutchman or Afrikaner read the other’s language? Can they converse comfortably? Eight interesting and informative responses to these questions by speakers of the languages suggest that as a practical matter most cannot navigate easily between the two.

In an interview, Robert Steuckers remarked that due to “structural similarities” German is “relatively easy” for Flemish (and Dutch) speakers to learn.  But of course he is multilingual and possesses a talent for languages. The gaps between Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans, and the fact that Dutch speakers must learn German, indicates that the German-Dutch language gulf is a vast one for most people.

In a 2001 interview [also reprinted here] Steuckers’ stated:

Synergies was created in order to bring people together, especially those who publish magazines, in order to spread more quickly the messages our authors had to deliver. But the knowledge of languages is also undergoing a set-back. Being plurilingual, as you certainly know, I have always been puzzled by the repetition of the same arguments at each national level. It’s a pity for instance that the tremendous amount of work performed in Italy is not known in France or in Germany. And vice-versa. My main wish is to see such an exchange of texts realised in a swift manner within the next twenty years.

This interview was a translation into English of the original, which appeared in Spanish.

What Steuckers says with regard to the New Right is characteristic of white Europeans generally. There really hasn’t been a “setback” in knowledge of languages. Whites have always been linguistically and culturally fragmented.

As Belgian law professor and EU bureaucrat Walter van Gerven, an (Establishment) advocate of a unitary European legal system noted, “The literature on [European] Community law now flourishes abundantly in any one Member State, but unfortunately very often in a closed national, or one language, circuit without reference to literature published in other Member States or other languages.”

Clearly, even the largest European institutions, with ample access to multilingual personnel, extensive translations, and continuous cross-border contacts and cooperation remain stymied by deeply entrenched intra-European cultural differences—particularly linguistic balkanization. This is true in every area of life, not just law or right-wing politics.

How EU Governing Structures Cope With Lingusitic Diversity

The EU Parliament in Strasbourg: A Modern Tower of Babel?

The European Union (which does not encompass all European countries) is schizophrenic about the language issue.

On the one hand, it pays rhetorical homage to residual 19th century liberal nationalist ideals of linguistic ultra-particularity and chauvinism. Thus, it promotes “the freedom of its peoples to speak and write their own language.”

On the other hand, it remains committed to political integration and the constant mobility of labor (and hence residence) across Europe, and so strives to widen cross-cultural communication, actively encouraging subjects to learn multiple European languages. It claims these irreconcilable aims are “complementary,” reflecting the EU’s motto of “United in diversity.”

Because the objective of globalist elites is ultimately an Arisch– and Christ- rein Europe (Europe purified of Aryans and Christians), linguistic homogenization in one form or another is inevitable. Indeed, innumerable European languages within a single state will serve no purpose once the native speakers have been eliminated.

But homogenization would result from the borderless labor market alone, even absent the policy of genocide. Genetically, the effects will replicate the blending of European immigrants and their descendants in America, except that miscegenation with tens of millions of non-whites will be added to the mix.

Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine current European Union bureaucratic practice to see how pan-European elites deal with linguistic fragmentation on a daily basis. Whatever one may think of the EU, it makes a sustained effort to systematically and comprehensively dialogue across the highly-fractured IE language divide, more so than any other international institution.

Examination of EU practices therefore highlights the usually-overlooked historical and contemporary complexity of the internal language problem faced by Europeans.

In what follows I focus only on traditional Indo-European languages, ignoring non-Indo-European tongues entirely. The remainder of this subsection is reproduced, with slight rearrangement, editing, and modification, from the European Commission’s Many Tongues, One Family: Languages in the European Union (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2004, pp. 20–21).

Internationalist organizations operating on a purely intergovernmental level use far fewer languages than does the EU. The EU engages directly with every native IE tongue. For example, despite having more than 190 members, the United Nations employs only six languages. The Council of Europe and NATO, each with more members than the EU, publish official documents only in English and French.

Fully one-third of university graduates employed by EU institutions work as either translators or interpreters. Translators work with written texts, interpreters with the spoken word. Each must be able to work into his mother tongue from at least two other European languages.

Prior to 2004 there were 11 “official EU languages” (there are 23 now). (There are more European languages within the EU than the 23 designated as “official.” Also, there are additional languages in the European countries still outside of the EU.) When there were 11 languages, the main EU institutions — the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament — together translated nearly three million pages of text per year.

On a day-to-day basis, the European Commission employs only three working languages — English, French, and German. Draft policy papers and draft legislation are produced in one or more of these languages. Only at the final stages are the texts translated into all 23 official languages.

The European Parliament, which often needs to produce documents rapidly in all official languages, has developed a system of six “pivot” languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. (Recall that Russia is not a member of the EU.) A document presented in, say, Slovak or Swedish will not be translated directly into all other 22 languages. Instead it will be translated into the pivot languages and then retranslated from one of them into the others. If texts were translated directly from all official EU languages into all the others [there were 20 rather than 23 official languages when this was written in 2004], this would give a total of 380 bilateral combinations.

The EU’s efforts in this area are clearly a major undertaking, amounting to something of a science. The time, attention, and money devoted to overcoming language hurdles is analogous to the substantial personal, social, and economic effort expended in northern climes to move snow around as a prerequisite to getting anything else done.

Conclusion

Division of every type—tribal, linguistic, national, religious, and political—has plagued white Europeans throughout our expansionist history. But today, in an era of calamitous global demographic and political collapse and official repression, the negative consequences of these outmoded ways creates fresh urgency for change.

Romantic ideological constructions based upon liberal 19th century linguistic particularisms no longer unite or move us forward. They should be jettisoned.