&gt;<i>The comment you took your quote from already mentioned that I&#x27;m German.</i><p>Hmm, you&#x27;re right, kind of read past that! I was still thinking I&#x27;m replying to an American as in my first comment.<p>&gt;<i>Your argument is basically: &quot;The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X&quot;. I think this is a fallacy.</i><p>That would a fallacy indeed, as the Nazis also did some good stuff (cheap cars, some good welfare laws IIRC, etc), and also neutral stuff.<p>But I didn&#x27;t say that for &quot;all X&quot; -- only for specific X which I, for one, think are of the Nazi&#x27;s bad heritage -- &quot;one global monoculture&quot; I&#x27;d say is one of these, even if the culture is the English one.<p>&gt;<i>I don&#x27;t think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.</i><p>I guess our difference is mostly in how important we see language as part of culture and&#x2F;or how sensitive we are to mightier cultures&#x2F;languages taking over others.<p>For me losing a language would be as bad as losing a country&#x27;s literary corpus -- that is, a huge part of the culture (where another might consider the whole literary corpus as something to be dispersed with, or not a big deal if it just survives translated or even forgotten).<p>On the other hand, something like &quot;units of measurement&quot; I agree are inconsequential -- and could be unified without much impact.