According to the US
Ambassador to Israel this week, if Sir Starmer had been the UK’s PM during
the Second World War, we’d all be speaking German now. He’s not the first to
use the “…all be speaking German now if it weren’t for” (insert saviour
of choice here) line, and he probably won’t be the last. It’s like some sort of
bizarre corollary of Godwin’s
Law, except in this case it’s an argument of first resort rather than last.
Those deploying the line usually seem to think it’s an absolute killer line,
but all it really demonstrates is an ignorance of history, especially
linguistic history.
Even had the outcome
of that war been different, the probability that the German overlords would
have been able to replace the languages of all the conquered peoples with their
own in such a historically short timescale are pretty much negligible. For evidence,
one has only to look at what was, perhaps, the single most prolific attempted
perpetrator of linguistic and cultural elimination in history, namely the UK
itself, in its then guise of the British Empire (and it was, incidentally, the
British Empire which declared war on Germany, not the UK). Whilst the language
of the colonial administration might have been English, most people in the conquered
realms continued speaking their own languages throughout the period of
colonisation. And here in Wales, half a millennium of attempted linguistic cleansing
succeeded only in reducing the use of Welsh, not eliminating it.
But the real problem
with it as a line of argument is the way in which it reduces the consequences
of conquest to a rather simplistic question about which language people end up
speaking. It wasn't even relevant to the ambassador’s underlying point, which was that providing food to a
starving population who have been driven from their homes by a completely
disproportionate response by Israel somehow equates to a capitulation to Hamas:
he would clearly prefer them to starve to death. Labour’s Emily Thornbury was
surely right in saying that “This Ambassador is clearly an idiot,” but
isn’t being an idiot his prime qualification for serving as part of the Trump administration?
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