Is German the language of bad people?
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German is the language of bad people
[edit | edit source]Pro
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Pro German is the language of the mass-murderous Hitler and the German Nazis.- Pro German is the language of the pseudophilosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
Objection These are not generally recognized as pseudo and bad people.
- Pro German is the language of Marx, one of the most dangerous men who ever lived, whose pseudophilosophy and pseudoeconomics has caused untold harm and still presents a tangible risk to the world.
- Objection That assessment of Marx is not generally accepted.
- Objection Even if we accept the above: if German is the language of thinkers, also bad thinkers are likely to end up using the language.
- Objection English is also a language of thinkers, but one struggles to find anything as bad as Marx (or other culprits/suspects). (French, another language of thinkers, fares worse than English given all those post-modern pseudophilosophers.)
- Pro German is the language of the absolutist and rigid Austro-Hungarian empire, oppressing the poor non-German nations in it.
- Objection This seems very one-sided; one should be able to say good things about the empire.
- Pro German is the language of two of the three empires that partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, per Wikipedia:Partitions of Poland.
Con
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Con German is the language of great poets (e.g. Goethe, Schiller, Rilke).- Con German is the language of great literary authors (e.g. Goethe, Mann, Schiller).
- Con German is the language of great philosophers (e.g. Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Popper, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle)
- Con German is the language of great mathematicians (e.g. Leibniz, Euler, Riemann, Gauss, Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind and Hilbert).
- Con German is the language of great logicians (e.g. Frege and Gödel)
- Con German is the language of great scientists (e.g. Kepler, Mendel, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger).
- Con German is the language of great musicians (e.g. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brams and Handel).
- Con German is a major language in Switzerland, the only (or one of very few?) world's direct democracy, where citizens really participate on the government.
