Some conquests are obvious. When the United States defeated Mexico in 1848 and stayed in their capital until someone could be found to sign the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it was obvious a conquest had happened. When the Normans defeated the English at Hastings, and then a few years later responded to protests and uprisings with the mass burning and destruction of the northern parts of the country, setting their economic and demographic growth back for centuries, this too was an obvious conquest, so much so that the English language disappeared from the extant records as a written language for hundreds of years before it magically reappeared with a lot of French words included. The same thing could be said of the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Empire, which destroyed an independent Persian empire and put it under the rule of desert nomads. In all of these cases, it was easy to see that a conquest had taken place. Battles were fought, cities were taken, governments were toppled and replaced.

Not all cultural conquests are as obvious, though. When roads are changed to different languages and to honor “heroes” that one does not celebrate–like corrupt politicians–this is a more subtle type of change. When people in power seek to manage elections and disqualify their opposition through lawfare, that too is a conquest, a conquest of a nation by a corrupt political elite that is unwilling to be defeated by ballots and must often be gotten rid of by bullets, which offers its own dangers to the well-being of a republican order. These sorts of changes mark the subtle conquest of public servants who have ceased to think of themselves as servants of the people and who then think of themselves as masters and who then wish to rid themselves of the shackles of feeling like servants by making sure that everyone knows their name because they put it on roads and buildings of all kind. One of the most notable examples of this is in West Virginia, where a longtime senator of that generally poor state slapped his name on everything from medical buildings to university buildings to roads to make sure that the people of his state knew where they were getting their government aid from–through him.

Other ways of demonstrating a change in cultural control is with regards to language. When the Normans took over England, one thing that they did was to bring in their own language, so that while the old Germanic words for animals continued to be used by peasants and servants, the words for what was eaten from those animals–beef, poultry, mutton, and so on–came to be referred to by French names, as a way of showing people that the people who worked with animals were English, but the people who ate animal meat were French speakers. The same is true in contemporary language. When a language faces serious change to its grammar, there are often serious cultural issues afoot. My mother, for example, and I recently had a conversation where she expressed a great deal of sensitivity to changes that were going on with regards to the subject-verb agreement of singular and plural pronouns, not exactly the most riveting material to most people, but emblematic of the trouble that we have been facing with pronouns over the past few years, a problem that we could have seen coming had we been sensitive to the importance of language as a means of expressing what people think and feel and believe.

As we can see from the foregoing, one of the ways that we can notice cultural changes, whether they are obvious or whether they are stealthy, is by the changes that result in other areas of life. People who desire power and control cannot help but make that power that they seek and obtain obvious, and in doing so they change the world around them to suit their own ideas and beliefs. Showing resistance to such changes is a way that one shows resistance against those who gain and use power corruptly, and is one of the reasons why human beings have such an instinctive and universal resistance to change that must be overcome by those who wish to make reforms within existing institutions or societies. Change is a sign that something is wrong, that someone is trying to altar the status quo, and those who desire to stay as they are find those who seek to force change upon them to be enemies, and so they are.