Wednesday, December 10, 2014

I saw the Emperor - this world-soul - riding out of the city on reconnaissance (Hegel)

Breaking down systematic language imperialism in Western scholarship as well as Western key media such as The New York Times, The Economist, etc.
Read the recent New York Times article "A Confucian Constitution for China" by "Confucian philosopher" Daniel A Bell. It's about China but it doesn't include a single piece of Chinese terminology. As if the New York Times ordered Professor Bell to keep his China text clean of Chinese, so to speak.
The Germans wouldn't doubt for a moment the fact that the German language was essential to understanding their own culture. Yet, for foreign cultures it's exactly the opposite: as far as the German media and academia are concerned, foreign cultures precisely cannot be understood unless translated into familiar German. 
As a result, German scholars, submerged in clean German culture, are destined to misappropriate China's history, etymologies, experiences, ideas and originality and, most importantly, they will intuitively omit the "correct Chinese names" of decisively non-German concepts and hide them from the German public. 
Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. 
There are now "Chinese religions", "Chinese saints", "Chinese gods", and "Chinese universities", and so on. Yet, you will find that what these scholars "translated" from - presumably the words jiaoshengrenshen, and daxue - do not bear any historical or meaningful resemblances to those Western terminologies.
Germany is case in point, where the ruling class controls the general public to live in an artificial German world and demand all immigrants to express "knowledge" solely in the form of German language. Knowledge in Germany exists only if it's known in German. 

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