[bsza]

What I was implying is, language barriers are a firewall against charismatic, manipulative psychopaths trying to brainwash you into doing unspeakable things.

They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"

[marginalia_nu]

I'd argue lacking a shared global language is more likely to isolate a population and ensure they can only hear the local mustache man's narrative.

[bsza]

But having one gives a platform for those narratives to spread and potentially become dominant.

To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things:

1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking.

2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.

[tsimionescu]

While I fully agree with you that the diversity of languages should be cherished, not squashed, I don't think those are good arguments. We've gone over argument 2 and why I don't think it works in the other thread.

For argument 1, that is known as the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis, is mostly discredited, at least in its stronger versions. By and large, people speaking the same language have a huge variety of differences of ideas, but you can also find areas with remarkable cultural similarity between people speaking different languages.

For an example of why this is not true in practice, look at Canada. The French speaking parts of Canada have far more in common with the rest of Canada and with the USA then they do with France, and even more so compared to Guinea or French Guiana.

The reason why language diversity should be preserved instead is that it gives access to a trove of cultural history that would be lost and forgotten, at least outside of scholarly circles, if it people could no longer understand it. This is by far the most problematic for oral cultural history, but even for written culture it is highly relevant.

[bsza]

Sapir-Whorf states that language affects the way you perceive reality. I only stated that it affects your way of thinking, i.e. the set of ideas you are capable of having. It is ironic that the existence of this very concept in the English language, "Sapir-Whorf", has a gravitational effect that makes one associate similar ideas with it and automatically label them as wrong. This is a tool very often used in politics, and it only works if the idea you want to discredit has a sufficiently close relative in your language with a succinct name and a negative connotation.

For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.

As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.

[tsimionescu]

The Sappir-Whorf hypothesis is precisely related to cognition, ideas, and not perception of reality. In fact, the only aspect of linguistic relativism that was somewhat confirmed was the part related to color perception, so you seem to have this reversed.

One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.

I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.

Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.

[bsza]

Sapir-Whorf, in its original form, claims language influences your perception of reality. Its "stronger" form, linguistic determinism, claims language determines your thoughts. I claim neither of those things. I claim that, since language, as a highly intellectual cognitive function, obviously has some sort of effect on your thoughts (but not to the point of determining them), having more of them makes us, as a collective, capable of having ideas we might not have had otherwise, some of which might be effective vaccines against mind-viruses (or mind-viruses themselves, in which case it's lucky we're not a monoculture).

That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.

> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII

They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.

I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.

I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.

[echoangle]

You think germany would have taken over europe by convincing them if the citizens of the other countries spoke german?

[bsza]

They had Europe's most accomplished public speaker and its best propagandist at their disposal, both of whom had a better understanding, or at least a more insidious approach, to crowd psychology than perhaps anyone at the time.

[tsimionescu]

This is a cute ideea and one I'm sure many have believed over the years, and one that Charlie Chaplin perhaps made most famous with his gibberish-spewing dictator character.

However, in my opinion, the truth is that Hitler's ideas and the way they fit German culture at the time were far more powerful than his speech-giving skills. His speeches and style did not resonate with American or British or French audiences (to the extent that they didn't - he was in fact a pretty popular politician all over Europe before he began attacking them) not because they didn't understand German, but because they weren't Germans.

His speeches preyed on German bitterness after losing World War I, they preyed on German poverty because of the reparations, they preyed on German conceptions of national pride, and, of course, they preyed on German antisemitism and xenophobia more generally.

Many of those elements were not present in, say, France (who had defeated Germany in the recent war), so even if the French had spoken German, they certainly wouldn't have been swayed with arguments about how they had humiliated Germany, or about how Germany needs more "living space". The Spanish or the Polish would not have been swayed by Hitler's notion that blond blue-eyed Germans are the chosen people who rightfully rule the world. And the Japanese would have barely even understood what he was talking about, even if they had all been native German speakers.

And conversely, Hitler had no shortage of allies before and during WWII, not because Mussolini or Hirohito or Stalin were such fine speakers of German that they were mesmerized by his carefully crafted speeches, but because they liked his actual ideas and plans for conquest, regardless of language.