I think part of the reason why American propaganda is so powerful is because most people only speak English as a second language. That way they are extra vulnerable for misinformation since they only get the American perspective. And since they can’t speak other foreign languages they don’t get the other perspective.
I don’t think this is realistic at all. Doing so would require global coordination and agreement which would be difficult as each country would want their own language to be the world language.
I do not think people outside U.S. are reading much NYT or CNN propaganda. CIA has always worked to have local language propaganda. Look at how VoA was/is promoting Russian language propaganda in the USSR/RF.
I’m not talking about full abolition of English as a global language, just that other languages should have a bigger role compared to now.
Your second point is a good one, though.
I’d say it works the other way around. English became the “universal” language due to domination of the British Empire and subsequently USA on global stage. Before that, other languages were dominating the scene.
In theory, with the decline of US hegemony, the languages spoken “universally” would change. Idk if it would be mandarin or something else
imo having a global lingua franca will be better for global solidarity more than it enables soft power projection in the long-run
I think it might go the other way, a serious economicly successful revolution in an english speaking country will flip the USA. That’s a while fucking off though.
Praying for Ireland to do something
Idk it took like 1000 years after the end of the Roman empire for Latin to stop being an important language in Europe. If the US vanished tomorrow (if only), im sure many countries would continue to use English for a long time because they’re too busy building a brighter future to learn Esperanto or whatever.
La ironía de publicar esto en inglés.
Ik ben mij daar bewust van ;)
Yeah let’s just go ahead and do that
Of course this won’t happen in a day
Sorry to be sardonic.
What material forces are there to change how massive populations communicate? In the imperial periphery, people are going to learn to speak the language that’s easiest to conduct capitalist business in. What I’m trying to say is that language is downstream of economics, and if we focus on changing language instead of economics we’re going to be at best ineffectual and at worst harmful.
To purposefully try and change the languages people speak would either take massive violence or political will, neither of which we have.
I’m not saying they should forget English, just that the focus should be more on other languages
Honestly, how can we affect that? What’s our role?
Esperanto
