Thilo Sarrazin
Earlier this week I posted Dr. Frank Ellis's response to
David Goodhart’s Review of Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Abolishes itself: How we are Putting Our Country at Risk. I now have the honour of publishing Frank Ellis's own review of Sarrazin's controversial and ground breaking book.
The following is an abridged version of Dr. Ellis's review, those wishing to read the full, in dept, review (which I enthusiastically recommend) can do so by
clicking here.
Sarah
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Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, 2010, pp.410 + Notes, Index, Appendices, ISBN 978-3-421-04430-3
© Frank Ellis 2010
Mut is der Wind, der zu fernen Küsten treibt, der Schlüssel zu allen Schätzen, der Hammer, der groβe Reiche schmiedet, der Schild, ohne den keine Kultur besteht [...] Zum Teufel mit einer Zeit, die uns den Mut und die Männer nehmen will!
Ernst Jünger
Concerns over the magnitude and speed of population growth, as well as the racial and cultural changes brought about by mass immigration are nothing new. What is new is the manner in which the political establishments of virtually all Western states have abandoned, with complete disregard for the legitimate fears and well being of their own indigenous populations, any form of immigration controls. In the USA and Western Europe, a very large proportion of the political class have tried to justify this mass influx of foreigners with the claim that we need the labour, skilled or otherwise; that the mass movement of people is a necessary part of a globalised economy; that in some vague, sentimental way the prosperous nations of the north have an obligation to throw open their doors to the surplus populations of the Third World. Until quite recently, this mass movement of the unemployed and unemployable from the slums of the Middle East, Africa and the Indian sub-continent, with a fair proportion of actual and would-be terrorists among them, used to be justified by the obviously preposterous claim that the white indigenous populations of northern Europe would somehow benefit from the influx of millions of foreigners into their countries. Indeed, we were told – though not so much these days – that immigrants were bearers of the remarkable gift of diversity; that their presence enriched us.
In common with other Western states, Germany has suffered from the combination of a duplicitous and negligent political class, one which has relentlessly harried its citizens to accept what they instinctively feel and know to be wrong, and from waves of immigrants who, the evidence quite clearly shows, have no intention of integrating. Third World immigrants are attracted to Germany not by abstract concepts of free speech, the rule of law, liberal democracy and personal freedom but by the higher standard of living they can enjoy at the expense of the German taxpayer. In part because of the Nazi period, the pressure on Germans to conform to the United Nations-sponsored ideology of multiculturalism has been immense, much worse than anything we have experienced in the United Kingdom. History matters: the Nazi past will remain an integral part of Germany’s history but no other nation has submitted itself to such soul-searching and public flagellation in order to face up to its past and to make amends. However, one of the downsides has been to treat any assertion of national German pride as a manifestation of Neo-Nazi tendencies, as something hideously offensive and shameful when it is, in fact, the normal, emotional and rational pride in, and commitment to, one’s country of origin, to one’s Vaterland, to use that beautifully evocative German word.
It is this specifically German historical, social and political background that makes the publication of Thilo Sarrazin’s book in Germany so remarkable, and all the more remarkable for its having been written by one of Germany’s top technocrats, a person at the very heart of the German administrative establishment, a person, who whatever his misgivings about the state of Germany, I, for one, would have expected to remain silent. Clearly, Herr Sarrazin has had enough. He instinctively grasps the truth of Solzhenitysn’s eleventh commandment: thou shall not live by the Lie. There is something about Sarrazin that bears the stamp of Martin Luther, Pastor Martin Niemöller and the White Rose students who defied the Nazis in Munich. Moral courage is always inspirational and life-enhancing. Indeed, the fact that Sarrazin’s book has become a best seller in Germany and attracted enormous support for its author may well have prompted Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, publicly to admit (October 2010) that multiculturalism had utterly failed in Germany. Indeed, it has: and not just in Germany.
Before turning to the substance of Thilo Sarrazin’s book I want to deal with the translation of the German title. The main German title of the book has in some quarters been translated into English as Germany is Abolishing itself or Germany is Doing away with itself. The German verb abschaffen can indeed be translated as to abolish or to get rid of something but these translations do not, in my opinion, do justice to the scope, depth and above all the implications of the book’s themes which will become clear below. I suggest, therefore, that a better translation of the main title, one that better reflects the impending German (and Western) catastrophe, would be Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion (or even Germany Commits Suicide or Germany’s Death Wish).
Sarrazin is well aware that the title of his book will inevitably cause some readers to ask, in all seriousness, whether his central thesis – that Germany is heading towards self-inflicted oblivion – is an accurate reflection of what is happening. The ensuing avalanche of evidence and professional analyses presented by the author left me in no doubt that the suicide scenario is fundamentally accurate. Sarrazin underlines the rather obvious but easily forgotten point that Germany is Germany ‘by virtue of its inhabitants and their living intellectual as well as their cultural traditions. Without the people it would merely be a geographical term’. The same is true of England, Denmark, France and Russia. As befits a highly trained and experienced member of the German technocracy, Sarrazin presents a thoroughly well researched set of arguments. Each chapter addresses some aspect of the immigrant problem – poverty, fertility, declining mean IQ and educational standards, spiralling welfare payments, left-wing and intellectual cowardice and the relentless Islamification of Germany - providing the reader with a series of brilliantly written mini-monographs. He examines the various socio-economic, intellectual and demographic trends which are inextricably linked with one another and which lead inexorably to his synthesis and the work’s devastating conclusions. Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion is a masterly display of erudition and logical exposition; yet additional cause to arouse and nourish the hatred of the lazy and sentimental.
To begin with, Germans, especially high-IQ women, are not having enough children and, as a consequence, the population of indigenous Germans – Sarrazin uses autochthonous instead of indigenous – is dropping below replacement rate. Mean IQ is falling. If this trend continues, immigrants will emerge as the dominant population with serious consequences for the German economy and the country currently known as Germany. Sarrazin notes that it has not been possible to talk about this in Germany for decades. As always the left-wing media would denounce any person expressing these fears as a Nazi, racist and xenophobic. Enormous damage has been inflicted on Germany because of this neo-Marxist imposed silence.
Sarrazin destroys this silence. In Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion he effectively highlights the dangers posed by uncontrolled, mass immigration and the accompanying mendacious and propagandistic view that mass immigration is a benefit. Politicians know that the slogan – ‘diversity is our strength’ – is a lie, and, as Sarrazin notes, these major changes and shifts in population are ‘seldom bloodless’. Moreover, he argues, correctly, that now that the major living spaces of the world, once under-populated, are occupied uncontrolled migration is no longer possible. He continues: ‘[…] the natural population decrease in one country or group of countries may not serve as the basis morally and politically to justify immigration or seizure of land. The territorial principle is an inviolable component of state sovereignty and respect for it serves to maintain peace’.
One of the key problems associated with an ageing population and which is related to the influx of immigrants, is the rising cost of healthcare and this can only be financed by increasing the number of gainfully employed. Since this is highly unlikely one consequence will be that ‘future allocation and financial problems cannot be solved at the level of the national economy by more growth but only by redistribution’. This is a very serious conclusion and, if accurate, an alarming one for individual freedom, since it means that growth will be finite or only very slow and that economic measures more appropriate for a full-blown socialist economy will be introduced. In fact, it may be the most important finding in the book and one about which governments all over Western Europe will want to remain tight-lipped.
Mass immigration from Third World states, primarily Turkey, the Middle East and Africa will not solve Germany’s problems. Germany’s economic future lies in its human and above all intellectual capital. These are the keys to the creation of wealth, and are firmly in line with the data and conclusions of Richard Lynn: see, for example, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (1996); Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001); Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis (2006); and The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide (2008); and the two studies which Lynn co-authored with Tatu Vanhanen: IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002); and IQ and Global Inequality (2006). One compelling finding, one of many revealed in Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion, derives from the work of German researcher, Heiner Rindermann, who studied the findings of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). According to Sarrazin, Rindermann demonstrated that:
[…] data of all three competences from PISA 2000 and 2003 - reading, mathematics and natural sciences – correlated not only extremely highly with one another but also with measured intelligence. Rindermann posed the question whether the PISA tests were measuring not merely intelligence. Furthermore he compared the OECD-wide PISA results with the data compiled by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen of the mean IQs of the corresponding states and likewise established a high correlation: and so Pandora’s box was opened.
Sarrazin argues that the MINT disciplines (Mathematics, Information Technology, Natural sciences and Technology) are the drivers of wealth creation. There is now less work for those who traditionally earned a living by manual labour. We see the same problem in the UK. Sarrazin also provides compelling support for the pioneering work of Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein (see The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 1994). Indeed, he shares the conclusions of Murray and Herrnstein that there is a growing gap between the intellectually talented and the less intellectually able. In remarks that will only offend German xenophile-fanatics, Sarrazin asserts that: ‘The three immigrant groups with the greatest lack of education and the highest social costs are also those who are reproducing themselves the most’.
Regardless whether it exists among indigenous or immigrant populations, the question of poverty – relative or absolute - is critical. Can people really said to be poor in the welfare states of the West? Despite his many objections to out-of-control welfare statism raised in Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion, Sarrazin insists that the weak and helpless, those who cannot feed themselves and their progeny ‘should and must be helped’; that the provision of shelter, clothing and food should be guaranteed. Let me play Devil’s advocate. What happens when the numbers rise so that the means to clothe and feed these poor and wretched can no longer be found? If the welfare net is too generous it subsidises the procreation of the less intelligent. The poor and lazy, encouraged by unscrupulous politicians who exploit alleged poverty to secure votes and a class of poverty bureaucrats who derive a living from dispensing other people’s money to the underclass are engaging in a massive game of blackmail. Confronted with the analyses of people like Sarrazin (and many before him), the poor and feckless, aided and abetted by politicians and poverty bureaucrats, will deploy what they regard as their nuclear option: will you, they ask, allow the poor and needy to starve to death? Now it is completely evasive to say in response that this would never happen; that the question’s premise is too extreme; that things would never get that bad. That merely concedes the principle, albeit implicitly, that the poor and needy, at home and abroad, however we define them, can lay a claim on the public purse.
There are two responses that can be offered. First, the question whether the poor and needy should be allowed to die is misleading: the question removes the burden of survival from the feckless and it imposes it on the responsible: why are the poor and needy poor and needy? Why should the sexually and demographically responsible and the economically prudent even have to consider an answer to the question, let alone provide material resources? One way to deal with the poor and unemployable would be to provide services and food in government centres under strict supervision (food stamps only and absolutely no, or very little, money). Second, an honest answer is that human beings who engage in reckless and unsustainable personal breeding experiments, who use their breeding habits as a way of extorting money, goods and services from others are indeed free to suffer the consequences. I do not kill them or their progeny by not agreeing to permit a transfer of my wealth, goods and services: those responsible are the incompetent and reckless parents who do not grasp or do not care that copulation is only the start of parenthood. That is the honest, morally wholesome and rational answer when targeted by poverty hustler-bureaucrats and politicians using moral blackmail. The same arguments also apply to the demented do-goodery of multimillionaire celebrities, models and pop stars who want other people’s money and other people’s taxes to subsidise the reckless and destructive breeding of the Third World.
Another problem is also evident. Immigrants who live in parallel societies courtesy of German and European taxpayers and who have no intention whatsoever of integrating cannot be considered to be my ‘fellow citizens’. They are aliens among us. Do they meet the conditions laid down by Sarrazin for tax-payer charity when they become poor and needy? Furthermore, Sarrazin’s justification for welfare provision inside Germany will be used – is being used - as the moral basis for the massive transfer of German and European wealth to the Third World. According to xenophiles the starving and diseased in Somalia or Haiti – or wherever the latest Third World disaster happens to be - are our fellow citizens of the world and thus entitled to our money and support.
In Germany, as Sarrazin points out, the problem of poverty, whether it affects indigenous Germans or immigrants, is emotionally driven not analytically (as in other Western states). Sarrazin argues: ‘The poverty risk threshold in Germany today is higher than the average net income of Germans at the high point of the economic miracle at the start of the sixties in the previous century’. Sarrazin tested his theories on the largesse of the German welfare system. He was famously able to demonstrate – for which he shall never be forgiven – that it is possible to eat well and healthily on the money provided by the German welfare system (Sarrazin and his wife put the feeding plan to the test and had no problems). As a consequence of his experiment the results of which were publicly discussed he received hundreds of hate emails. During the course of making a television programme based on Sarrazin’s experiment, one of the cameramen of a television station told Sarrazin that he had been instructed not to film the inside of apartments of welfare recipients because they were full of electronic gadgets. Sarrazin also reports that recipients of welfare payments have above average provision of electronic media. It is the same in the United Kingdom: rows of houses in estates full of the unemployable, all sporting satellite dishes. Sarrazin identifies three reasons why so much emotion is aroused by the recipients of welfare and the bureaucrats and lawyers who work in the field when the provision of welfare is challenged. First, the recipients have a vested interest in the system’s being continued. Second, politicians and the hordes of researchers and media activists have a vested interest in the system: without it they are out of work. Third, if it is possible to live adequately on the money provided but those who receive this money do not live adequately then the problem of poverty can only be a behavioural problem not some existential catastrophe. It is the last point that triggers the rage and aggression.
Very few Turks who came to Germany as workers ever returned home. Their families then joined them from Turkey. This has created a huge, hostile underclass. The whole guest worker programme was, Sarrazin insists, ‘a gigantic error’. Muslims arriving in European states bring many problems. Among them are: (i). below average integration in the employment market; (ii). above average dependence on welfare and handouts; (iii).above average fertility; (iv).spatial segregation with a tendency to create parallel societies; (v).above average religious adherence with an attraction to fundamentalist Islam; (vi).above average criminality (street crime) and participation in terrorism.
Some truly horrendous consequences arising from Germany’s generous welfare provision are cited in this book. One observer describes the chaos of life in an immigrant Turkish family: ‘And the flat screen television is always on, always’. It seems that one of the classic features of the underclass, be they black, white or Islamic immigrants in Germany is an addiction to television. It is almost as if television, with its relentless diet of soap operas and celebrity trash shows, is deliberately designed to cater overwhelmingly to the underclass of all races in all countries. Television is the narcotic of first choice for the international underclass. Then there is the example of some small German town where the population of 300 Turks is derived from just two families: one of them boasts that ‘we don’t need the Germans’. Statistics for the Berlin district of Neukölln are staggering. The district has about 305,000 inhabitants of whom 120,000 are of immigrant background. It is estimated that the total of illegals is 20,000 – 30,000 out of a total illegal population of 150,000-200,000 in Berlin. There are many such examples of Neukölln in Germany where immigrants are rapidly displacing the indigenous population. Sarrazin’s devastating point that - ‘A German going through these districts would feel like a foreigner in his own country’ – would secure a lengthy standing ovation were it addressed to an indigenous British audience in some of our major cities. Crimes in Germany involving immigrants are often suppressed by the mainstream media for the very obvious reason that reporting these crimes would show that the perpetrators are immigrants. We have the same problem in the United Kingdom concerning the prevalence of gun and knife crime in our cities which is essentially a black problem. Regarding the suppression of the truth or just ignoring it (another form of censorship), Sarrazin asks: ‘Who is actually helped when facts in the public domain are suppressed, facts which those who are affected do not deny? Certainly neither the truth nor clear analysis or integration’.
Sarrazin concludes his book with two scenarios: nightmare and salvation. In the nightmare scenario he looks ahead to the end of the twenty-first century. He sees a Germany that by century’s end is no longer German. Rampant welfare spending and the failure to control Third World immigration have led to Germany’s being effectively turned into a Muslim state. The German-language requirement for immigrants is abolished – it is deemed to be a manifestation of latent fascism and cultural superiority – and Germany’s famous churches, among them Cologne Cathedral, are converted into mosques. There are demands for a new German flag, one with a black background, a red crescent and a gold star.
Salvation, if it is not already too late, stems from the growing support for populist right-wing parties all across Europe. Europe’s voters are well aware that their living standards had dropped and that the Schengen agreement left Europe wide open to illegal immigrants. Immigration controls are tightened, educational standards raised and the number of children born to high-IQ women starts to rise. In those parts of German cities long known for housing immigrants women in headscarves were far less visible. Immigration restrictions, the reduction in the number of migrants seeking a life on welfare handouts and the continual moving out of the economically successful was clearly having an effect. The migrant quarters in the big cities were shrinking and far lass Turkish and Arabic were heard on the streets. Germany has been brought back from the brink.
What makes Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion so valuable to any thinking German patriot who has had to endure politically correct lying over so many decades on anything to do with immigration and race is Sarrazin’s fearless, rational honesty. Germans reading Germany Consigns itself to Oblivion must have experienced something similar to that experienced by a Russian reading a samizdat version of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago during the Cold War: an exhilarating sense of moral and intellectual liberation which only the honest search for, and confrontation with, truth can deliver. I salute Herr Sarrazin for his moral courage and intellectual acumen: and God bless his great nation in the struggle to save itself from oblivion. Nun aber los!
Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab, p.7.
