Won't go quietly into the night:
Divisive author Thilo Sarrazin
(Source: Berliner Morgenpost)
THE WOLVES ARE CIRCLING Thilo Sarrazin. The knives are out. Yesterday, in an unprecedented step, the august board of directors of the Deutsche Bundesbank dismissed the renegade economist and Islam critic from its ranks. Was he caught with his hand in the till? No, he wasn’t even caught sneaking cookies. Instead, Sarrazin has written a book that Chancellor Angela Merkel is calling “nonsense” and that the Turkish and most of the German press is calling “racist” and “incendiary.” Sarrazin has been relieved of all his functions effective immediately for violating Deutsche Bank’s internal code of ethics. On Monday, German president Christian Wulff is expected to formalize the turbulent author’s dismissal.
Sarrazin’s new 464-page tome Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany is abolishing itself”), which argues that uncontrolled Muslim immigration is making Europe “poorer and stupider” and that “all Jews share a certain gene,” has shot to the top of the bestseller lists since its publication on Monday, even though – or perhaps because – his agent is confronting some unusual obstacles (I already wrote about the book here). For instance, Sarrazin had to cancel the launch of his nationwide reading tour at a bookstore in Hildesheim on Thursday when it started receiving threats of violence. Now Sarrazin and his entourage encounter demonstrators wherever they show their faces.
“I don’t have to recognize anybody who lives off the state, who
rejects this state, doesn’t pay attention to his children’s
education, and constantly produces new little
headscarf girls.“ - Sarrazin in a 2009 interview
Thilo Sarrazin has become a severe liability to Germany's clean, cosmopolitan image, and thus his sharpest critics come from the world of politics and finance. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, has said: “As a citizen, I am appalled by these statements.” The head of the Greens, Renate Künast, has announced that “Sarrazin is no longer acceptable as a representative of the Deutsche Bundesbank.” Sigmar Gabriel, head of the Social Democratic Party, of which Sarrazin is a member, wants to purge him from the party’s ranks as quickly as possible. Most newspapers and magazines are calling his assertions so much reductionist, social Darwinist “garbage.”
But what about ordinary citizens, his target audience? According to a new national survey, 46 percent of Germans agree with Sarrazin that they are quickly becoming “strangers in their own country.” (51 percent rejected the statement.) According to the Berliner Zeitung, the SPD leadership has received over 2,000 emails on the issue in recent days, 90 percent of which support Sarrazin and his ideas. He is also receiving a flood of grassroots support, frequently from quarters where it is not particularly welcome. For example, in the Saxon state parliament in Dresden earlier this week, deputies from the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party disrupted a speech by President Wulff by jeering at him and holding up a sign with the words “Everyone knows: Sarrazin is right!” From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe’s anti-Islam movement, which displays more than a passing resemblance to its counterpart in the United States, is feeling new wind in its sails.
But Islamophobia makes strange bedfellows these days. Germany’s own Neocons and “Global War on Terror” cheerleaders, who include some of the most prominent members of the country’s organized Jewish community, fear and despise Muslims even more than many Christian conservatives. The Central Council of Jews in Berlin has denounced Sarrazin’s attitude, mostly because of his remarks about an imaginary “Jewish gene” (which the man apparently intended as a compliment), but not everyone is toeing the line. For example, the outspoken Jewish journalist and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano, who has already defended the economist on several occasions, said in an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt this week that “Sarrazin has used his sharp pen to catapult issue number one in German domestic policy, migration/immigration, to a new level of public consciousness. He has done so in the face of a political correctness that for too long has irresponsibly treated this issue as a multicultural idyll with minor blemishes that can be removed by applying a bit of social therapy.”
Agrees with Sarrazin:
Journalist Ralph Giordano (87)
(Source: Deutschlandradio)
And what of the book itself? The more reviewers tear into Sarrazin’s exposé, the less impressive his theories appear. In fact, the book – a sort of amalgam of The Bell Curve and Samuel Huntington’s alarmist Clash of Civilizations - bears a stunning resemblance to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and other half-baked works springing from the “Conservative Revolution” of disaffected academics that softened up the dying Weimar Republic for the Nazi takeover in 1933, all offering sweeping solutions for sticky problems. But whether one agrees with Sarrazin or not, the problems of underdevelopment and declining educational standards that he addresses are not going to disappear any time soon.
Will Sarrazin go quietly into the night? Don’t bet on it. And he may have the law on his side, too. Earlier this week, the Federal Association of Labor Judges stated that Sarrazin’s dismissal has no legal basis. “As abstruse as Sarrazin’s statements may appear,” association head Joachim Vetter told the press, “they are hardly sufficient to relieve him of his position.” Sarrazin will have his day in court. Expect him to make the most of it.
Losing his head? Dutch racist Geert Wilders
(Source: Wiki)
Meanwhile, as temperatures drop across the continent, the Muslim immigration issue is heating up. Today, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported that a radical imam called Feiz Muhammed has called upon radical Muslims in Holland to behead anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders. According to the cleric, Wilders has insulted Muslims and their prophet and thus deserves to die. Wilders is now being protected by the Dutch anti-terrorist agency, the NCTB. (Never one to miss a party, Wilders is traveling to New York on September 11 to speak out against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque alongside Newt Gingrich).
So don’t put your T-shirts and swimming trunks away quite yet. Europe has a hot autumn ahead of it.
A note on the title of this piece:
The expression "the night of the long knives" derives from early British history and refers to a massacre of Celtic chieftains by their Saxon adversaries at peace talks in around around 460 AD. Geoffrey of Monmouth first coined it. Since then, it has been particularly popular in German-speaking regions, most notably in connection with the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934, where Hitler and the SS murdered the leadership of the unreliable Storm Troopers under Ernst Röhm. It is still occasionally used for other sneak attacks against political opponents. As far as I know, I'm the first to use it in connection with the Sarrazin story.
UPDATE:
On September 9, Thilo Sarrazin announced his resignation from the board of the Deutsche Bundesbank for "strategic reasons," as he stated during a panel discussion in Potsdam. This ends his open confrontation with the German government and opens up new opportunities for him as a pundit and/or politician. So far there is no indication of how he plans to spend his new-found "political capital."
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Comments
Prediction is the acid test, and to be fair to Spengler, he thought Hitler was the one who was truly half-baked.
But "your" economist needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut when he steps to far from his discipline, because the more you do that while your mouth is open, the more likely is a major foot insertion.
So Sarrazin resonates with the plebes...what else is new? In times of stress, say, for the U.S. & Germany...the 1930's all the freakjobs rear their ugly little heads. And I haven't even written about "Somebody Must Be Blamed!" Father Coughlin yet. He would fit right in.
Excellent, excellent piece.
Why would anyone want to be a Muslim in the first place, or a Christian, or a jew? When will atheists speak up & tell all these violent ignoramuses to just shut the hell up and back off, go to church or temple or wherever, practice peace and contemplation (like their sacrosanct founders, mostly - except mohammed. He was an idiot.) and leave everyone else alone.
Spengler is one of the leading historical thinkers and philosophers in history. He was hardly half-baked.
But in a world where the choice is between the Taliban or the Tea Party, we're already doomed.
The Germans never really took to the Turks it seems to me, which is odd, because not only were they allies in WWI, and Turkey stayed neutral in WWII, but they have been there a long time.
We are afunny species that way.
As to the "jewish gene," what if you're the child of an interfaith marriage? Oh, well. I notice more and more that as we point to any group or individual as "the other" and therby marginalize them, instead of focusing on the behavioral concern or impact, we sow the seeds for another tyranny. There's hard work to be done. R
If he is wrong on the facts, point out where he is wrong. If he is correct on the facts but wrong on his conclusions, point that out. If he neglects a good and possible course of action, point to it.
Yelling and calling names is useless.
Now we just need to get the REST of the international banking community to follow suit and purge the rest of the racists hate mongers from their ranks.
*******
the traveler: Yelling and calling names is useless.
the traveler: You are a bigot. Concentrated hatred of yourself gets vented as hatred for what you are. Ever hear of Daniel Burros?
Um, yeah. Hypocrite much?
.
Where I live we have had a large increase in the number of Hispanic immigrants, most from Mexico, the last ten or fifteen years. My wife and I have several Hispanic friends. I have tutored immigrants in English, and participated in mobile health clinics at migrant labor camps. One Mexican girl who was having trouble learning English lived with us for a year during the week in order to improve her English. Two other Mexican kids lived with us for two months when their family lost their apartment. I have no ill will at all toward the Mexican immigrants, and found them to be very friendly, hard-working, and family-oriented.
But there is another side to the story. Many of the Mexican immigrants are poorly educated. Some cannot even read Spanish, thus making it very difficult to learn English. Many work at agricultural jobs where everyone speaks Spanish, and then they speak Spanish at home and watch Univision Spanish TV for entertainment. I met one man who had lived here for fifteen years and was still unable to speak or read English. Many who learn English only know enough to just get by.
Many of the Mexican parents have high hopes for their children, but the parents don't understand what it takes to be successful here. They want their kids to take advantage of educational opportunities, but don't know how to do that. In addition, cultural traditions die hard. I saw one family in which all three girls, having received ESL instruction and other special classes, got pregnant and dropped out of school. Many boys are now being recruited into gangs.
Other immigrants seems to fare better here. We also have a large number of Vietnamese and Romanian immigrants. Many of their children excel in school, even surpassing their American counterparts in just a few years. They tend to come from families that are more educated, that value education, and know how to inspire their children to excel in school, and do not isolate themselves in religious or cultural enclaves.
Immigration is a complex problem, and must be addressed on a country-by-country, person-by-person basis, taking into account the capacity of potential immigrants to integrate and have successful lives in the new country. This is common sense, not bigotry or racism.
i wish someone would explain the utility of immigration in a world over-full of people. it appears that elites want to keep their own plebs poor and humble, by showing them replacements close at hand.
No it doesn't. Sarrazin made that comment in response to an interview question about groups having a shared genetic heritage. The New York Times discussed the shared genetic makeup among Jews was reported on in June.
It has been pulled out of context by those trying to silence Sarrazin. As John Rosenthal and Ben Weinthal have noted, Sarrazin's comments in interviews are obviously philosemitic. In last autumn’s interview, for example, he described the Nazi expulsion and extermination of Germany’s Jewish population as “an enormous intellectual bloodletting” from which the country (and, in particular, the city of Berlin) has never recovered.
***Eliminating certain unpopular groups of people really isn't the solution to the world's problems. In other words, Deutschland schafft sich ab really is reductionist, social Darwinist garbage. ***
Again, this is just dishonest. Sarrazin is talking about limiting immigration and ensuring those who do come in have the skills and motivation to make a positive contribution. This is quite sensible.
As Robert Putman has noted, ethnic diversity can have a negative impact on social capital. Jason Richwine has pointed out that this can be ameliorated by selecting smart immigrants.
The other point, is that Sarrazin is quite correct that intelligence is significantly heritable (like height). If the shortest people have the most children then over time the population will become shorter.
And increasingly researchers are acknowledging that different populations have diverse behavioural and cognitive traits. For instance, University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn & Lanny Ebenstein, last year wrote in Nature that the idea of biological sameness across populations is becoming untenable. This is just an implication of diverse evolution in different environments and cultures.
You demonstrate these failures consistently, and especially so with this article.
Just a few reactions:
@Oryoki
If I had an answer to that I would be publishing my own book this month. As it is, I'm stuck with this blog. But I keep observing this issue and the Scandinavian caricature controversy the way a rabbit watches a cobra - both fascinated and terrified.
@Don Rich
Spengler had his moments, and he was certainly influential. I stick by my statement that he was half-baked, however, and hope some day to write a detailed post about the "Conservative Revolution" to which he belonged. Hang in there - and thanks for stopping by.
@M Bloomberg
I beg to differ, the book really is reductionist SoDar garbage for the way it grossly simplifies complex social problems. However, I've decided to edit that bit out of the text above simply because I myself am not a trained social scientist who is in a position to rule on such matters (the Spiegel is running a detailed and damning cover story on Sarrazin's theories today), e.g. I don't have much to contribute when it comes to "Basque genes," and I am more interested in the ramifications. I will say that Sarrazin is most disturbing for his biological determinism, exemplified by his cracked notions about the "Jewish gene." (The fact that Israeli apologists are now embracing this recent discovery doesn't make things any better). I don't actually care much about Sarrazin himself, and I absolutely defend his right to say and write what he thinks, but I am concerned about the way his ideas, loosely interpreted, are spreading through German and European sociey. It's the "Conservative Revolution" redux. Its proponents weren't all fools either, but they certainly came in handy when it came to justifying anti-democratic political movements. Since you have apparently already read the book and understand it better than I do, I look forward to your detailed review.
@Henry R
Thank you. May I now offer you a bit of humble advice? Before you call other people "ignorant," read articles before you criticize them. I nowhere call Sarrazin a racist. His opponents do. I am not one of his opponents, I am merely observing the scene. In fact, I have made it clear that he is addressing genuine social problems. My concern is that he is likely to become part of the problem rather than the solution.
How about deleting the spam?
It is off-putting.
Go to the MORE pulldown, next to the VIEW BLOG option.
Choose MANAGE POSTS.
Then, on the left side, choose "MANAGE COMMENTS"
Then you can delete the spam.
Believe it or not, I've already deleted about 30 spams from this post, but they keep coming back - rather like dandelions. I guess you gotta get them by the roots!
http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_rockford/2010/08/30/historic_speech_in_the_nations_capital
.
http://www.dsdinc.com/
Germany is in one helluva pickle when it comes to immigration. EU rules about movement mean that more and more people can move here, not just from Turkey, but also from Eastern Europe or places like Kazahkstan. The main attraction is Germany's generous social welfare system. These people are, not surprisingly, resented, especially as they can sometimes bring crime with them.
But Germany does an awful job of integrating people. It's very hard, even for a third generation person of Turkish descent, to get full citizenship. They're condemned to live in limbo, always being pushed into the second rate stream of high school education.
Unfortunately, it's near impossible for Germans to have a sensible debate about who comes to their country and under what circumstances, because of the weight of their particular history. For that reason, what's going on in Germany isn't totally akin to what's happening in the US or elsewhere.
rated.
Germany is at a point today where France was about 20 or 30 years ago, however with some very different parameters to start from.
I used to spend several decades in France and witnessed how very concrete problems were not answered with pragmatic responses but rather any debate was silenced by the moralizing onanism of those on autopilot who immediately raised their finger and warned everybody that talking about rowdies and criminals of foreign origin only meant being racist (and that those people were victims anyway). The intentions of these people were good, but by freezing the debate and always keeping it within the high spheres of abstract categories (THE Arabs, THE foreigners, THE French, THE people) instead of allowing it to go down to the roots of the problems, the self-proclaimed antiracists contributed as much as the racists to the deterioration of the suburb problems by immediately accusing everybody of being right-wing extremists. You just cannot solve a single problem on the ground of denying them or wishing them away because they do not fit into one's Weltanschauung. Today, the situation in France is mostly out of control in many quarters where no postman or ambulance wants to go anymore and where guerilla-like situations are frequent. But what is worse is the stories that circulate. Everybody has experienced or knows somebody who has experienced gratuitous violence, be it verbal or physical, from people of foreign origin. People keep telling these stories to each other, they accumulate, creating a climate of suspicion and fear whose first victims are, well, other people of foreign background who just want to lead an honest life like you and me but suffer from prejudice (and from the violence of their kin). But that prejudice is constantly nourished by a very visible minority of youths whose behaviour seems aimed at producing as much anger as possible among the general population. While this climate builds up, a growing part of the population starts calling for measures that are opposed to the basic principles of a state of right, thus weakening the fundaments of democracy itself. Additionally, just like drops of black into a pot of white paint will diffuse and eventually change the colour of the whole container, the general level of aggressivity among social interactions in France, even thos not involving any migrants, has risen, at least in the bigger cities. You can measure the cohesion of society just by watching fortuitous interactions between people who do not know each other and the levels of distrust and aggressivity or instead friendliness they spontaneously display.
Had French society listened to the calls for help coming from the suburbs instead of ignoring them or silencing them with moral commandments and accusations of ignorance, then France would be a different country today. But instead, for example, famous artists gave free concerts "against racism and ignorance" and then returned to their big Saint-Tropez estates or wherever. To the people suffering in the suburbs (many of them of foreign origin, by the way), the message read as the affluent telling the poor that they were just too dumb to understand and kept low moral standards and should suffer in silence from gang violence and not bother the downtown wealthy with their problems. No wonder that some of those who could not afford to leave the suburb projects ended up voting for the far-right Front National. It started with people who just wanted to live in peace and be respected and it ended with a profound modification of the political landscape. And when the gangs eventually started to hit downtown, too, twenty years had been lost. A lovely gift of the moralizers to the next generation - along with state debt.
So I hope that Germany will not make the same mistakes and instead carry out a pragmatic, solution-oriented discussion on what to do and not leave it to the moralizers to carry the debate to the big philosophical categories and abstract levels of race, religion and stuff or to constantly swing the rhetoric club of nazism supposedly showing up again (thus trivializing nazism by undue comparisons). The problem is that of a small minority of high violence enjoying being highly visible as well as eagerly posing as supposed victims of racism as soon as somebody criticizes or wants to stop their behaviour. And they are like a snowball, carrying up momentum, starting to take over some quarters street by street. But most of all, they have started populating Germany's everyday-conversations, too, with ugly stories of gratuitous violence, like in France in the 1980's and 1990's. (My 80 year old neighbour, a small and polite man, told me yesterday how he has been threatened several times over the past twelve months by aggressive foreign youths calling him a nazi or a "Scheißdeutscher" for no reason other reason than for the enjoyment of intimidating somebody unable to defend himself.) These people will have to be contained with strong signals before it gets worse because they will interpret anything else as weakness and therefore as an encouragement to go on. That is a grassroots job for police, justice (which has had some surprisingly weak responses in the past), school and social workers with support from politics (hopefully not discontinued after the debating dust wil have settled). And this will require the help and support from the majority of people of foreign origin who just want to have a good and law-abiding life in Germany without harming anybody and who are the first to suffer from any growing prejudice, e.g. by reducing their chances to get jobs.
To me, the roots have much more to do with educational methods imported from other society models that do not really prepare the youths for our type of society because the set of rules and values to fit into is different and not all parents do see this. So we have these young, mostly males, who just grow up from overstrained (or oppressed) mothers and absent fathers without learning the rules, practicing violence as the default method of problem solving and equipped with a frustration management skill of a two-year old. But that is no privilege to those who come from afar: we also have some blond, blue-eyed youths of affluent German families whose parents always paid them all the toys they wanted but, poor kids, did not give them enough love, and who are just as poorly equipped to manage their own frustration and who grow up thinking that everything they want, they should just take without asking. No religion involved. It's education. Religion is always a pretext for sometimes absurd traditions to maintain themselves by donning a spiritual varnish.
And it has to do with a very different relationship to the state, because their states of origin are seen as an enemy in the hands of a small and corrupt camarilla from which each quarter, tribe or village should protect itself by building physical or mental citadels and enclaves. That is no religious particularity, either, since the South of Italy is not much different (and in Germany, Italians have a poorer average education level then Turks).
Additionally, both German and French expect clear statements on behalf of these (may I temporarily call them) communities, but these statements will probably not be made because these people come from cultures where any clear statement on anything can get you your head chopped off and where there therefore understandably is a strongly interiorized behaviour of extensively beating around the bush of any subject without taking clear sides.
I have not enough detailed knowledge about the way this is handled in the United States to compare it to Germany. Germany however has some advantages over France: little resentment inherited from the violence required to maintain some colonial empire and coming back at the former colonists with immigration; much more diversity in terms of countries of origin; and a more open and compromise- and solution-oriented discussion culture. So I hope that we will be able to rid the debate of the terms of religion and race and to learn from France how not to do things (or not to not to do them). There are also many reports on successful integration of migrants coming from many German cities, thanks to intense grassroots work. These are good signals, since Germany has not become aware of being an immigration land before the end of the 90s and yet is not faring that bad at all. So let us keep the debate down-to-earth and remain in cooperation mode and refuse to build any clear front line notwithstanding the uncooperative minorities. In the process, Germany itself could culturally benefit from fresh air and fresh views to wipe off its remnants of provincialist mental structures and enter Weltbürgertum, world citizenship.
Alan, sorry for being long. And yes, you rightly think that I could have written that on my own blog (might still do that) rather than abusing yours. But the media and one or two comments here are so full with simplifications that they caused me a déjà vu from my past in France and I had to get this off and your post was a good place to start from.