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North on the other (McWhiney, 1988; McWhiney & Jamieson, 1982). In particular, what aggrieved the Anglo-Saxons was the “laziness” of the Celts. McWhiney (1988) cited an Englishman complaining of the Celtic lack of industriousness: “They are by nature extreamely [sic] given to Idlenes” (p. 48). Likewise, one antebellum Northern commentator was aghast that while “no Northern farmer would neglect to build a bridge over a stream that crossed his property, the Southern planter will ford the creek lying between his house and stable a whole lifetime” (p. 49).
In the present day, the Gaelic language in Scotland is spoken by barely more than 1% of the population of that small country (Macafee, 2000; MacKinnon, 1988), and those who do speak it are marginalized—living on the fringes of Europe on the sprinkling of islands of the Hebrides, with little access to the centers of enterprise and power of Great Britain or Europe unless they leave their home, their language, and their culture behind. Thus is coming to fruition the long campaign of cultural genocide by the English-speaking people. I use the term genocide quite deliberately, for it has long been a stated policy of the English-language power structures to eradicate the culture and languages of the Celtic peoples, though today what we see is the culmination of a “soft” genocide—or ethnocide—by which people are induced to abandon their language and culture voluntarily and of their own free will.
But that free will is no more free than when, in the 1800s, as John Prebble (1963) documented in his book The Highland Clearances, Highland Gaels were evicted en masse from their crofts and cottages were burnt down over the heads of resistant tenants, who were then forced onto the transport ships that took them to Canada, the United States, and Australia. Today, it is true there are no transport ships; there is no need of them—their work has been done. And the fire this time is not the burning of people's homes, but rather the burning of the Gaelic language and the last vestiges of a people's culture.
Many English-speaking Americans, in my opinion, seem averse to bilingualism possibly because of a concern, perhaps misguided, that bilingually educated students are being misserved by being taught in another language besides English, as well as an apparent hostility towards