On Sunday, I browse all through the internet and here is some of what I learn:
The Unesco threatened the cities of Dresden and Istanbul to disallow them the title of World Cultural Heritage.
For Dresden, this has been pending for quite some time, because they built the “Waldschlösschenbrücke” and Istanbul is hit during the very year when the metropolitan city on the Bosporus is named “cultural capital”.
To my way of thinking, World Culture is something great and beautiful. It has a positive connotation. Basically, the same is true for heritage. Yet when it comes to World Cultural Heritage, I start getting thoughtful. Does it mean that we, collectively, already prepare for our ends and already write our last wills, to have it generally known what we want to hand on and what not?
Then I click onto something new and read about the military intervention of France in the Sahara and Sahel zones against North-African Islamists:
“… the region is rich in mineral resources, for instance Uranium, which France needs for its nuclear industry and the exploitation of which it permits companies like areva”
What strikes me in this sentence is the word exploitation, which, in the context of resources sounds ever so harmless. It means: retrieval of the natural treasures and making use of the richness you find. That is how I learned it in my geography lessons during the 1960ies. The “exploitation of resources” was taught to be a normal and legitimate almost duty in order to promote the people’s well-being.
But here is the original meaning of exploitation: increase of your own profit without any regard to loss for third parties by maximum optimization!
So I am back with the World Cultural Heritage we humans are handing on to future generations. And it makes me think of World Exploitation Heritage.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
With this small word-play, I wanted to show that playing with words and thinking about phrases is a pre-requisite for thinking critically and constructively. Just like the attempt to make language more precise by means of dialectics. It is something we should give a lot more attention to in education and schooling.
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