By Tomislav Sunic, on October 24th, 2005 The hybrid “Serbo-Croatian” language was not only an oxymoron — it was primarily a political ploy for bringing two different peoples into a unitary unnatural whole.
Even before a war starts shaking up a new country, fights about national languages abound. The endless debate surrounding the Croatian language may have been the prime motive that turned the former Yugoslavia into a pulverized powder keg. For every nation, language and religion constitute two main pillars of national identity; without its language, the nation melts away into a wider structure of anonymous denizens using often bizarre idioms. Â The hybrid “Serbo-Croatian” language was not only an oxymoron — it was primarily a political ploy for bringing two different peoples into a unitary unnatural whole. Â With the establishment of the new state of Croatia in 1991, there was a public outcry to purify the Croatian language of all Serbian words, and to show the world Croatian distinctiveness — often at the expense of doctoring up new and bizarre words.
The effort regarding the purity of the language is not only symptomatic of Croatia, but is a hallmark of all smaller nations in search of an identity. Every small nation goes through similar birth pangs in an attempt to foster its peculiar linguistic character. Approximately five million people speak the Slovak, Norwegian, Georgian, Albanian, and Danish languages, respectively — and as long as their languages are shielded by strong state bureaucracy, there is no fear that they will die away.  Very different is the story regarding the Chechen, Abkhaz, or Islandic languages, which are spoken by half a million citizens respectively. Many of these peoples do not have solid states in sight, and are still searching for world recognition. Chances are, though, that with no state, their language may well disappear.
The battle of the languages always precedes the battle of the guns. All new governments, once entrenched in power, must first tackle the language issue. It is worth recalling that immediately after the French revolution, in 1792 (probably one of the most fateful political events in European history), early Jacobin revolutionaries, including their rabble-rouser mouthpiece Barrère, adopted a law stipulating that “the German language is the language of counterrevolution, Spanish that of inquisition and the papists, and Italian that of run-away aristocracy.”  Side by side with massive genocides carried out by French revolutionary self-proclaimed world-improvers, all dialects and regional languages in France were wiped away. Yet, despite all of that, until mid-19th century over 50 percent of French citizens spoke different dialects that had nothing in common with the modern Parisian French.  Similarly, after the Passion Play of Bleiburg in 1945, the Yugocommunist commissars enacted decrees that would thoroughly emasculate the linguistic treasure trove of the Croatian language.  The rooted Croatian language was considered “counterrevolutionary.”  Moreover, the usage of some popular regional idioms and expressions from the cakavski or the kaikavski dialects was viewed as provincial, “hickish,” or at best, primitive. Meanwhile the titophile intelligentsia, in search of careers, started to popularize the new hybrid of “Serbo-Croatian language.”
In 1886 one unitary language was also designed for citizens of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Following the annexation of Bosnia-Herecegovina by the Austrian authorities, an attempt was made to create a common language for the three different peoples and cultures. This attempt soon came to a pitiful end. Likewise, there is a tendency today, encouraged also by the international community, to introduce the “Bosnian language.” Most likely, this centralized attempt will also fail.Â
The Balkan peninsula, and particularly its center known as the former Yugoslavia, is not the only case of an attempt at crafting an artificial language. After the peaceful departure of Norwegians, Danes and Swedes into their own separate states, in 1904, the new elites in Norway began to cultivate their own idiom, cleansed of Danish and Swedish verbal residues.  The new political class turned to the Norwegian countryside in order to replenish the Norwegian vocabulary. The Landmal thus became a code word for the Norwegian language, as opposed to the Swedophile Bokmal, the language of the books.Â
The opposite side can best be observed in the former Soviet Union. As early as 1922 the early Bolsheviks adopted the language policy which aimed at forceful russification of all other languages in the newly created multiethnic communist empire.  The cyrillic script was imposed on muslim peoples, who had previously used the Arabic script, such as the Kirghis, the Turkmens, etc. This was also the case in the former constituent Soviet republic of Moldova, which despite its Latin roots and Romanian origins, had to use the cyrillic script.  Naturally, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rebirth of new nation states, the first move on the part of the new elites was to establish their own national languages.
Cases like this abound: Czechoslovakia, in 1920, imposed upon its citizens the Czech language as the only official language, although half of its citizens spoke German, Hungarian, and Slovak as their mother tongues. Nor is the situation different in Western Europe. The Irish language is on the verge of extinction. So is the old Gaelic in Scotland and the Breton language in France. In Croatia, not long ago, the peculiar Veliot language was spoken by a few old islanders (“boduli”) on the island of Krk. Today the Veliot language is gone with the wind.
The Croatian language is the hallmark of Croatian national identity; it has to be nurtured at all costs, notably by introducing into its vocabulary idioms and expressions from the local cakavski and kajkavski dialects. This “return to the roots” is certainly much more expedient than resorting to new words, i.e. neologisms which often leave a bad political aftertaste among domestic and foreign listeners and interlocutors. Of course, all Croats, particularly professionals, must work on their fluency in the English language, which has become, so to speak, the obligatory “lingua franca” all over the world. It is beside the point whether the American language is “bad” or “good”, “nice” or “ugly” — or a symbol of cultural imperialism. The American language has become a universal language, and must be learned by anybody who is considering a career or who wishes to understand the modern world. Thus, for example, Swedish professionals, working at large enterprises, when discussing business deals, serious economic or financial issues with their German or Portuguese counterparts, often resort to the American-English language. What the German or the French language was fifty or one hundred years ago, is now the role of the American-English language. This American language is increasingly losing its ties with the classical English language and its normative grammar. New cliches and new idioms are constantly made up, which makes American very graphic and a rapidly evolving language.
The American language has many other advantages, notably phrasal verbs and an abundant colloquial trove, as well as the increasing trend towards phonetic transcriptions. Thus, for instance, even in official correspondence, some cumbersome suffixes and prefixes are dropped and double consonants are shrunk into one. “Thanks” has become “thanx,” cool is “kool,” etc. Of course, from working out hard to making out.. hardly…
Dr. Tomislav (Tom) Sunic is writer, translator, author, and former US professor in political science. His website is here.
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By Elan Journo, on October 24th, 2005 On the United Nations’ 60th anniversary, let us remember that the U.N.’s vaunted neutrality props up evil regimes.Â
The United Nations, according to many, is a crucial institution nobly working to foster peace. Even the UN’s critics, believing that its manifold flaws can be papered over with “reforms,” agree that it is indispensable. But such adulation of the United Nations — which was officially born on Oct. 24 sixty years ago — evades the organization’s essence: its corrupt “ideal” of moral neutrality.
The fundamental feature of the United Nations is its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations — whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This is upheld as the UN’s central virtue and a vital means to peace. Admitting blatantly tyrannical regimes, proponents say, creates opportunities for “dialogue” and rehabilitation. As Kofi Annan explains, the very fact that such “nondemocratic states” sign on “to the UN’s agenda opens an avenue through which other states, as well as civil society around the world, can press them to align their behavior with their commitments.”
But UN membership did not prevent the USSR (a founding member) from herding its citizens into gulags and forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states; nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators and peaceful ideological dissenters; nor Iran and Saudi Arabia from infusing Islamist terrorist groups with abundant financial means and the ideological zeal to wage jihad against the West.
The UN’s policy of neutrality accomplishes precisely the opposite of its putative effect; it actually protects and bolsters vicious regimes.
Participation in the UN confers on them an unearned moral legitimacy. That the leaders of such regimes are routinely invited to speak before the UN rewards them with an undeserved respectability. So it was with Fidel Castro: his self-justifying UN speech after seizing power in Cuba elicited rapturous applause. He was raised to the dignity of statesman — a man who deals in reasoned argument — despite being a totalitarian ruler who brutally silences dissidents. And the unwarranted recognition of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as a statesman arguably began when he first spoke at the United Nations in 1974. Though such men attain and hold power by force, though they preach murderous ideologies, though they devastate the lives of their subjects — the United Nations unfastidiously endorses them and their regimes.
The United Nations thus gives them a means to entrench their power.
Consider, for instance, the beleaguered UN Human Rights Commission, ostensibly responsible for protecting rights across the world. On the principle of neutrality, a country’s brutal practices are no disqualification from joining this commission. Indeed, it has become infested with tyrannies; Syria and Cuba, two blood-soaked dictatorships, have each served as its chairman. And through the commission, notorious violators of individual rights scheme to bury any criticism of themselves. A bloc of Islamic countries, for example, self-righteously defends barbaric practices — stoning to death, crucifixion — carried out in certain states governed by Sharia. When a proposal was drafted to censure North Korea, which arbitrarily executes its enslaved citizens, the motion was soundly defeated thanks to Cuba, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and others all guilty of similar and worse atrocities.
Or consider the money corrupt regimes gain access to. For years the United Nations has showered millions of dollars in aid on the Palestinian Authority, the interim government in Gaza and the West Bank. That aid, mostly swallowed up by the leadership, has buoyed up a brutal regime that strips its people of their rights, their wealth, their dignity, and foments terrorism against Israel. UN aid has also flowed into North Korea’s belligerent Stalinist dictatorship, which starves its people in order to fund an enormous military machine and a nuclear weapons program. What these handouts do is reinforce the walls of prison regimes like North Korea, exacerbate the misery of their citizens, and arm corrupt rulers.
That the United Nations benefits evil regimes is a necessary consequence of its avowed ideal of neutrality. The willful refusal to discriminate between good and evil, between freedom and slavery, can benefit only the vicious. It is only an evil regime that fears moral scrutiny, that needs to conceal its crimes, and that struggles for a veneer of moral legitimacy. The UN’s policy of moral neutrality is precisely what evil desperately craves: a license to commit any depravity and escape with a reputation for being decent.
No organization can resolve conflicts if it evades the objective difference between right and wrong, and perversely treats an aggressor as the moral equal of his innocent victim. The United Nations is far from a means to achieving peace. Because it arms and bestows a moral sanction on vicious regimes, it is an accessory to their incalculable atrocities and murders.
The 60th anniversary of the United Nations should be a time not to celebrate, but to end this morally irredeemable organization.
Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand – -best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
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By W. James Antle III, on October 24th, 2005 The Bush administration strategy that resulted in a 78 to 22 confirmation for Roberts has been abandoned and the early results don’t look good.
Senate Judiciary Committee members may have described Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ questionnaire responses as “incomplete to insulting.” But one item from the background information released to the committee was revealing: the disclosure that she favored a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion during her 1989 campaign for Dallas City Council.
Given that she took this position on a candidates’ survey for Texans United for Life, perhaps it was an example of Miers telling people on both sides of the issue what they wanted to hear. But the combination of her survey responses, pro-life financial contributions and stand against an American Bar Association endorsement of Roe v. Wade – along with a fair amount of anecdotal evidence — strongly suggests that Miers is pro-life.
So does this mean that conservatives should support her nomination? Only if you believe that a Supreme Court justice is a kind of super-legislator whose chief duty is to vote the right way on public policy issues — that is to say, if you repudiate everything conservatives have been saying about the role of the judiciary for at least the last 40 years.
It would be a major concession to the imperial judiciary if, as Ann Coulter wrote, “even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one.”
Miers’ overall judicial philosophy still matters more than certainty about her personal abortion views. That she believes abortion is wrong or even that it should be illegal tells us nothing about whether she would be bound by stare decisis on Roe.
We who are pro-life abhor the policy of abortion of demand Roe imposed on our country. But the 1973 decision has also long been recognized as a good test of how an aspiring jurist sees the role of the courts. More than any other Supreme Court ruling, Roe is symbolic of judicial arrogance, black-robed social engineering and a determination to evade the original public understanding of the Constitution.
A purely results-based opposition to Roe threatens to undermine the coalition that supports constitutionalist judges. As John Tabin observed in the online edition of The American Spectator, “When judicial conservatives can no longer be sure that an anti-Roe judge will be fairly strong across the board, they will begin to part ways with their social conservative allies.”
Paradoxically, such a stance is also less likely to build an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would overturn Roe, but where Chief Justice John Roberts stands is unclear. But Roberts is unlikely to vote for reversal on pro-life policy grounds alone.Â
Miers and the White House are also in a precarious position in the Senate. Democrats — and some pro-choice Republicans like Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter — are likely to push Miers to either disavow her 1989 abortion views or distinguish them from how she would rule as a justice. But anything she says that might reassure these senators has the potential to erode her already tenuous support from Senate conservatives. The hearings could become all abortion, all the time.
Miers’ meeting with Senator Specter offers a preview. After their courtesy call, Specter told the press that Miers agreed with the penumbral privacy right that was the basis of the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision. This could be construed as a hint of her views on privacy precedents and Roe. When the statement reached the White House, Miers issued a swift retraction, attributing Specter’s statement to a “misunderstanding.” But she can’t have such misunderstandings in full committee.
The Bush administration strategy that resulted in a 78 to 22 confirmation for Roberts has been abandoned and the early results don’t look good.
What can be done? The White House must stop trying to simultaneously argue that a.) Miers won’t legislate from the bench and b.) she will legislate from the bench in a manner that will please social conservatives. If their nominee is a constitutionalist, she must clearly and emphatically articulate a judicial philosophy consistent with that label.
If Miers is not a constitutionalist, then there can be no mistaking her for a nominee in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. At this crucial juncture in the Court’s history, an appointee outside this mold does not merit conservative support. It doesn’t suffice to know where Miers stood on abortion in 1989. We must know where she stands on the Constitution and the role of the courts today.
W. James Antle III is a primary columnist for Intellectual Conservative.com. He works as an assistant editor of The American Conservative magazine and is also a senior editor of EnterStageRight.com. The views expressed here represent his alone.
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By Ariel Natan Pasko, on October 24th, 2005 Sharon has gone against the Likud Central Committee a few times recently to pursue his Gaza Expulsion Plan, and in the process he has torn Likud apart.
Until Arafat’s recent demise, Israel’s feckless leader Ariel Sharon was wont to call Yasser Arafat “irrelevant.” Sharon did it at every opportunity. Yet, Arafat was anything but irrelevant. [...]
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