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Soros supported Barack Obama's candidacy, telling Judy Woodriff in May 2008, "...Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world." When Woodriff queried Soros on whether it might be a concern that Obama lacked experience to lead in this dangerous time we live in, Soros responded, "...this emphasis on experience is way overdone..."
Experience was actually far underrated in that contest, but we'll have to save that subject for another day.
These words were surely music to Soros' ears as he has been a lifelong Esperantist in the footsteps of his father. Soros is one of the world's few native Esperanto speakers and was wont to quell his youthful depression in London's famous speaker's corner, proclaiming the virtues of creating the Esperantist version of the tower of Babel in the modern world. For readers who might never have heard of Esperanto, it was the invention of a 19th century Jewish doctor, who dreamed of a world free of nationality. He invented a trans-European language to push the ideology and Soros' father, Tivadar was one of its leading proponents.
According to numerous studies and tests in schools throughout the world, children who were taught Esperanto before another foreign language succeeded in learning the second language much faster and better than without taking a prior course of Esperanto. The use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible auxiliary language like Esperanto lessens the second-language learning hurdle (see an article on Wikipedia for examples of pedagogic experiments).
A pilot project, Springboard2languages, was introduced in a number of British primary schools. It offers an introduction to foreign languages through Esperanto, used as a tool to raise language awareness and build transferable skills. It serves as an adequate preparation for learning other languages and was particularly suitable for the non-specialist teacher of foreign languages in primary schools. Esperanto gives all children a taste of success in language-learning, due to the streamlined regularity of its grammar.
If a similar school course of Esperanto as the first foreign language were introduced to the US schoolchildren, it would greatly help American kids in their efforts to learn another foreign language following Esperanto: Spanish, French, German, or any other offered by their school.
In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world a command of multiple languages becomes a "must" and an important competitive advantage for a nation as whole. Instruction of foreign languages in Europe has been taken to new heights, while the US is falling behind.
Inspired by the President-elect Barack Obama's call,
issued during his campaign, for American children to learn foreign languages, we claim that time for this CHANGE is NOW!
Obama was the first Presidential campaign to have an advertisement in Esperanto and translated all his campaign videos into Esperanto. For those of you not familiar with this farce, Esperanto is an attempt to create one language for the whole world and do away with national and ethnic languages. If they want one language, I don’t see why they can’t be bothered to learn English like the rest of us. Anyway, it has been reported to me now by a reliable source that a large part of Obama’s education stimulus is designated for Esperanto instruction in the public schools. There is already a page on Change.gov demanding that all public schools in this country teach Esperanto and I kid you not, it has over 3,700 looney leftists lending their support to this insane idea. We must stand up and fight this idea now. Call you congressman and tell him that this is America.
Besides his linguistic work, Zamenhof published a religious philosophy he called Homaranismo (loosely translated as humanitarianism), based on the principles and teachings of Hillel the Elder.
Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof (pronounced /ˈzɑːmɨnhɒf/ in English; born Eliezer Samenhof, December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an ophthalmologist, philologist, and the inventor of Esperanto, a constructed language designed for international communication.
As of 1975, Esperanto was taught in 600 schools to 20,000 students per year; and there were about 100 journals and 7500 books written in Esperanto, including translations from 65 languages. In addition, it had by that time been used in more than 700 international conferences. As of 2000, per Cambridge Encyclopedia, it had somewhere between 1 and 15 million speakers, according to sources referenced.
Excerpt from the declaration of Homaranismo
1. I am a human being, and I believe that there are only human ideals and ideals linked to the country of origin; every ideal which brings hatred among peoples and entails the power of one ethnicity over another I believe it to be human egoism, which sooner or later must disappear and to which disappearance I must contribute according to my possibilities.
2. I believe that every peoples are equally part of humankind, and I value every person only according to his personal values and actions, and not according to his/her origin. Every offense or persecutions of people because they belong to a different ethnicity, with a different language or religion, I regard it as a barbarity.
3. I believe that every country does not belong to a particular group of people, but equally to every people who live in it, regardless of their language or religion; the mixing of the country’s interests with those of one or another group of people, language or religion I regard it as reminiscence of barbarian times, when there was only the right of fist and sword.
4. I believe that in his/her own family life each person has the natural and indisputable right to speak whatever language or dialect he/she wants and to confess whatever religion he/she wants; nevertheless, when communicating with people from other origins he/she must, when it is possible, aim to use a neutral language and to live according to neutral religious principles. Every attempt of a person to impose his/her language or religion to other people when it is not absolutely necessary, I regard it as a barbarity.[1]
Originally posted by mikerussellus
reply to post by Stormdancer777
I feel that we are losing our national identity. A sense of national pride. There is an uneasy acceptance to desicrating the flag, which would have been unthinkable, just short years ago. Our national language, our individual identity, is being shifted to a new "group" identity.
It is disheartening.
While Esperanto may naively be considered as nothing but a high point in the period of enthusiasm for artificial languages that swept Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America during the period from the eighteen-seventies up to the beginning of the postwar period,(2) it hasn't been pointed out too often that the invention of Esperanto differed in a fundamental way from that of other constructed languages. Schleyer created Volapük because God told him to make an international language. The French reformists created Ido because they felt that an international language should more accurately reflect the linguistic habits of the most civilized nations. De Wahl created Occidental because he believed that an international language should represent the thought processes of the civilized West. Gode created Interlingua to give the West a "Standard Average European" language. All of these people set out with the end purpose of creating a language.
Esperanto was devised by a Jewish physician in Warsaw during the 1880's. But it wasn't (and still isn't) just a made-up language; it served as the embodiment of a cult formed around the ideas of "internationalism, anti-sectarianism and cosmopolitanism," in the words of Soros biographer Michael Kaufman. (p.12)
Esperantists believe that a new world order of harmony and cooperation will be ushered in through the adoption of their made-up, one-world language. They see language as the vehicle that will enable them to re-create the world according to their own specifications.
Tivadar Schwartz seized upon the cult of Esperanto to fill his own God-shaped void, a vacuum created by his repudiation of Judaism.
If Tivadar and his fellow Esperantists had been as well-versed in their own Judaism as they were enthralled by their own intelligence and ingenuity, they would have clearly remembered that a strikingly similar idea had already been conceived and quite neatly recorded by their own ancestors.
The cause of Esperanto consumed Tivadar's life between the two World Wars, allowed him to place man at the center of the universe, and to throw off the encumbrance of morality contained in the 10 Commandments. This abandonment of his Jewish morality is probably what enabled Tivadar to so readily survive Nazism when the Germans took over Hungary in March of 1944.
As David Horowitz and Richard Poe point out in The Shadow Party, escaping the Holocaust by assimilating with the Nazis was "an option unacceptable to most and, in practice, open to only a few." (p. 83) Most Jews caught in Nazi peril preferred to save their souls at the expense of their earthly lives; Tivadar and George Soros evidently accepted an alternative Faustian bargain.
Most would expect George Soros to have been traumatized by the horrors to which he was exposed during the War. Astonishingly, he would later recount to his biographer that the years 1944-1946 were "the most exciting time of my life." (Kaufman; p. 48) How could this possibly be? A seventy-year old Soros explains:
admitted to the Fabian Socialist London School of Economics in 1949. He had been a little down, but he wasn't out. Still empowered by his narrow escapes from the Nazis and the Soviets, he was perfectly poised at the threshold of revelation, and he indeed got one. Not from God, but from another atheist, Karl Popper. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in "The Capitalist Threat," Soros says that Popper's analysis of the "Open Society" "struck me with the force of revelation."
Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1997, Soros explained his "visionary" Open Society and its values:
Moreover, the open society as a universal concept transcends all boundaries. Societies derive their cohesion from shared values. These values are rooted in culture, religion, history and tradition. When a society does not have boundaries, where are the shared values to be found? I believe there is only one possible source: the concept of the open society itself. (Emphasis mine)
Originally posted by mikerussellus
reply to post by marg6043
I don't want to focus on Obama, for obvious reasons, but this appears to be a groundswell that has been in the works far before his term, and looks to stay long afterwards.
Again, all I have is a national identity. Perhaps that is simplistic of me. I call myself an American.
Why the need to dilute that?
but this appears to be a groundswell that has been in the works far before his term, and looks to stay long afterwards.
Why the need to dilute that?
While I don't subscribe to the "Esperanto Theory" it will take Obama more than just 4 years to really do any real changes but the one geared to the health care.
On that I have to agree with you, you know that I have been keeping on with what goes on, but this theory is new for me.
It's a true conspiracy, if you ask me.