Re: Colorado rednecks don't trust bilingual material in libraries

In article <1125932679.666352.113570@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"=?windows-1257?q?P=E7teris_Cedri=F2=F0_(Peteris_Cedrins)?="
<cedrins@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The United States has no official language; it doesn't even have a
> state language. Despite its linguicidal history, it has _always_ been
> multilingual -- and immigrants are currently learning English faster
> than they did before. I don't see how having Spanish collections or
> Spanish branches would prevent anybody from "becoming American"
> (whatever that means) -- in a sense, it would be little different from
> having other special collections, like a music library. Let librarians
> decide how to run libraries -- I very much doubt that they see language
> like Hui does. As to sending the Mexicans back to Mexico -- why don't
> you give back the land you stole from Mexico, instead? Not that this is
> restricted to Mexicans -- Puerto Rico, part of the United States, had
> Spanish as its sole official language for a time; it's now officially
> bilingual, as is Hawaii.

Correct indeed. The story of how English established itself on the
territory of what is now the United States makes for hair-raising,
stomach-wrenching reading. It was not just Indian languages that had no
history, culture, or literature in the European sense, but also Spanish
(the entire southwest), French (Louisiana and as a trading language along
the Mississippi Valley), German (in Pennsylvania), Russian (in Alaska),
Hawaiian, Dutch (in the Hudson River valley), and Swedish (in Delaware),
all of which once spoken by established communities on the territory of
what is now the United States, consigned to the trashheap of history,
replaced by English, the "killer language" It makes what the Russians did
on and off during the past 110-odd years to promote Russian and benignly
neglect the local languages in the Baltics look almost civilized.

The manner in which the Kingdom of Hawaii was subverted and annexed by the
United States is also a story that self-determination-loving Americans
would rather not know about. The same goes for some rather nasty
predations and massacres perpetrated by the American military in the
Philippines (and which also resulted in the consequent spread by an
occupation army and administration of American English as a second
language there) during the Spanish-American war:

Source: http://www.bibingka.com/phg/balangiga/default.htm
<quote>
<deletions>
Virtually every member of America's high command in the Philippines had
spent most of his career chasing Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, and Sioux.
Some of them had taken part in the massacre at Wounded Knee. According to
historian Stuart Creighton Miller, it was easy for these commanders to
order similar tactics in the Philippines when faced with the frustrations
of guerrilla warfare. Easy, because that warfare was waged against an
enemy belonging to an inferior race. That, too, explains why today the
Balangiga Massacre still means in American history books the killing of
forty-eight Americans, not the killing of tens of thousands of Filipino
civilians.
</quote>

Regards,
Eugene Holman
.

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