Sarrazin's Truths: Political Correctness Is Silencing an Important Debate

[sysop]

German*central banker*Thilo Sarrazin is being pilloried over his polemic chastising of Muslims, but there are a few things his critics clearly fail to understand. You can't cast away what the man embodies: The anger of a German people who are tired of being cursed at when they offer to help foreigners to integrate.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...716648,00.html

[cghka]

Dear Mr. Matussek,

you quite correctly noted that Dr. Sarrazin is being heavily criticised for his polemic statements. He spoke in public, using his position as member of the board at the Bundesbank and as member of the SPD. He is now being criticised publicly, and I can hardly call that being pilloried. I call that being upbraided.

You are completely wrong in claiming that political correctness is silencing an important debate. It's not about political correctness, it's about veracity; both political and scientific.

Dr. Sarrazin is no expert on genetics, no expert in cognitive psychology; he is a doctor in economics. I expect an academic in the field of economics to understand what statistics prove and do not prove - and not to use them to "prove" that Germany is dumbing down because of the influx of Turkish people, who, as he claims, are so prolific, quote: "The Turks are taking over Germany exactly as the Kosovars took over Kosovo: via a higher birth rate. I wouldn't mind if it were Jews from Eastern Europe with a 15 percent higher IQ than the German population." e.o.q.

Asides from Dr. Sarrazin's slipshod use of statistics, his insinuation that Turkish people have inferior genes and are therefor as a people less intelligent justifiably earns him the label racist!

If you do want to delve into a discussion pertinent to IQ and sociology: the change in the average IQ of a section of the population is known as Flynn-Effect.

Sincerely Yours

[tleave2000]

The UK media is at least as bad as the German media for political correctness at the expense of truth. It's like journalists see their primary role as that of a shepherd, rather than as reporters of reality. It's patronising and an abuse of the trust that the public place in journalists.

[Inglenda2]

Poltical correctness has become a curse in nearly all European countries, not only in Germany. People are getting frightened to tell the truth, because someone else is almost bound to be offended. A whole list of names could be written, Such as Hohmann, Steinbach and Sarrazin, where just because a true statement has deliberately been taken to be offensive, insults start to pour, before the critics take the trouble to check their facts.
"Give a dog a bad name," is easier than proving that something said is wrong.

[bsdetector]

Dear Mr. Matussek,

I am a Turkish-American who has an older brother who moved to Germany in early seventies as a guest worker. I do not personally have the experience of living in Germany as a Turk, but I met quite a few Germans while visiting my brother and heard the experiences of my brother and his kids that I feel I can contribute to the debate.

First of all, I am disappointed that Mr. Sarrazin was forced to leave. He needs to speak freely. It will help me clear up some questions I have had about German society. Let me explain: back in 1987 I was a summer fellow at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and I met a German student who asked me, with a smirky smile on his face, why all the Turks he sees in Germany were cleaning the floors. I did not know that was the case and I did not know the answer. Regardless, I was happy to learn from Mr. Sarrazin that the brothers and sisters with whom I share my inferior genes upgraded their skills to becoming grocery store and doner kebap restaurant owners. Now, World Bank ranks Turkey 15th in terms of GDP, so you would think that you probably need people with more than just grocery store and doner restaurant running skills to have that kind of economy, especially if you are an economist like Mr. Sarrazin, but hey, what do I know, I am just a Turk.

Then, while visiting my guest worker brother in Bonn in late 80s, I met a very interesting man, with whom I became close friends. No gay stuff, just friends, mind you? I am emphasizing this, because another German guy I met asked me whether it was common to be gay among Turkish men. Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, but I must say I was slightly puzzled by the question, so I wanted to clarify. Now back to my German friend: pretty intellectual person, an editor who lives in Cologne with books wall to wall at his home. I was working on my PhD thesis on Quantum Chromodynamics at an American University (Rutgers) at the time, so when he asked me what I was doing and heard what I said, his response was, "I never thought a Turkish person would be interested in Quantum Physics". Now, I am looking for answers on why a reasonable (read leftist) intellectual German person thinks that people of a certain nationality would not be capable of certain things, but I am clueless, and I am hoping that this debate would clarify that, so let Sarrazin speak.

Before I finish, I should point out that my guest worker brother had a son born in Germany. This son figured out that groceries was not the right industry for him and he rather eat doner kebap than make and sell it, so he decided to go to Law school. Now, he is practicing law in Bonn in his own office. His closest friends are German, so you may think he is what Sarrazin considers an integrated Turk. What he tells me is that the Germans he meets still asks him when he is going back home. I am wondering, if it is ever possible that German street will accept an integrated Turk as one of his own fellow country men, and if so, what will take for it? So, let Sarrazin speak.

[BTraven]

It’s a pity that Matussek removed the part where he attacked the “juste-millieu” to which in his opinion belongs the man (heckler) who was forced to leave the reading because I focused on it when it was discussed in the German forum. Nevertheless there are still many issues I do not agree with him so, for example, the one which starts just after the “Technicians of Exclusions” headline where he states that people “are sick and tired - after putting a long and arduous process of Enlightenment behind them – of being confronted with pre-Enlightenment elements.” That sounds as if the Enlightenment had just been successfully implemented 20 years ago. What does he mean? The sexual revolution? The fight for equal opportunities for women? But that were matters that had nothing to do with the Enlightenment. A further aspect is the alleged lack of influence of Turks who are quite successful on those who do not want to integrate into Germany (by the way I do not think that it is measurable). What should they do? Pressurize those who do not send their children to school? A lot of them were invented to political chats where Sarrazin’s book was discussed. Most of them refused to criticise their countryman openly. I think they were right since it would only split them, with the consequence of being not accepted anymore by those who are more traditional.

[Uwe4270]

There used to be the view that the earth is flat. And it was as dogmatic as it was convincing in everyday life. And then some day there were astronomers who fancied a new view of the solar system, in which the earth was relegated to be just planet number three orbiting the sun. And people were very unhappy about such heresy. Eventually, however, the modern scientific view of the world prevailed, in astronomy as in other fields of science.

The idea of Mr. Sarrazin as the new Kopernikus or Galilei of population evolution irrevocably predictable by differentials in genetically inherited subpopulation IQ, and the further idea to thereupon grant Mr. Sarrazin an implied status as a heretic silenced by the inquisition of political correctness of contemporary German society, all such ideas simply do not hold up - neither with the social and political dynamics of the debate, nor with the scientific foundations from modern cognitive psychology of learning and memory, and evolution biology and its foundation in modern genetics.

Mr. Sarrazin had full access to the contemporary mass media. Even more so, he availed himself, very strategically optimized I should think, of every opportunity to maximize his public footprint in the media spotlight, in particular throughout a two-week period at the end of August and early September. The debate spawned enormous numbers of online forums, and it is even continued for sure in the pubs at many a German "Stammtisch", at fitness club locker rooms and anywhere else imaginable in society. But most importantly, professional journalists and experts from all relevant fields of social and natural sciences voiced their impressions, opinions and commentaries in oral live TV debates, as well as all the leading print and online news and information media in Germany (as well as, to some extent, in other countries). Thus Mr. Sarrazin was fully and extensively heard.

However, if it now turns out, that his biologistic ideological foundation of predictable evolution of IQ districution etc. does not impress the experts and intellectual elite of Germany, then that is a judgement of collective factual opinion guided by matter-of-fact reality of individual honest intellectual scrutiny, not political correctness. There is no evidence that the numerous items of independent negative commentary of many professionals from the relvant fields of psychology and biology, are biased through any form of adherence to a common base of political correctness or official prevailing ideology.

Quite the opposite, as it turns out, Mr. Sarrazins biologistic ideology as such is being largely rejected. So, as more time goes by, he can rather be viewed in metaphors such as the emperor of the old children's fairy tale "The Emperor's new Clothes". Or better still, Mr. Sarrazin's simplistic, one-dimensionally biologistic IQ-inheritance ideology as the irrefutable single magic predictor of the future evolution of collective intelligence in Germany, that ideology is like the adherence to a traditional flat-earth view of the world in a world where the enlightened modern scientific age has long adopted a far more multidimensional view to concepts of intelligence, how it evolves throughout an individual human being's life, and how to train it and even, if really desired, how to perhaps measure it.

If Mr. Sarrazin wanted us to follow him to a dark age of one-dimensional backward-oriented flat-earth type of viewpoints, the German people quite rightfully were smart enough to expose his ideology and to reject it. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of political correctness.

[cghka]

I like the sarcasm in your saying "let him (Sarrazin) speak"! Let me add something, and I mean it with equal sarcasm: I don't generally mind foreigners. The only problem with these {pointing at a group of Ausländer} foreigners is that they're not from here!

Now back to "let him speak". He can. There is no law in Germany forbidding him to do so. He may speak his mind, publish, do whatever he likes. However: his position at the Bundesbank required a conduct that does not damage their reputation. He had a choice to make, which is either to practice more restraint or go elsewhere. His xenophobia is also not commensurate with the tenets the majority of the social democrats(SPD) in fact the majority of most Germans, so has a choice to make there too (IMHO) He cannot have the cake and eat it!

I'm not really surprised about even the German physics student at CERN. The names Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark should ring a bell. It's amazing: both were Nobel laureates and yet they founded so called Aryan Physics. This goes to show that intelligence and education are not automatic antidotes to racism.

I do feel, that I need to defend the majority of Germans. You cited some pretty nasty examples, but it should not be pars pro toto. I object to that, regardless of race, gender, religion or nationality.

cghka,
(Dipl. Physiker [Bonn University])

[a_former_yank]

As a former American citizen who recently took Dutch (NL) nationality, I have a strange perspective in understanding how the Turkish/Arab populations in Europe feel and exactly why the idea of 'Integration'as espoused by, in my case my new fellow countrymen, rubs foreigners the wrong way and disincentives us to integrate - because the European version of integration is actually assimilation. And this is exactly the problem with the European approach to integration is that generally, what Europeans seem to want is for people to ASSIMILATE, that is, give up all aspects of their former culture and adopt, without exception, all the traits of the new culture. Even I have experienced different treatment by the 'Natives', having been told by various people that I will never actually qualify as Dutch. Literally, I've been told that I'm not a 'real' Dutchman because I wasn't born there.

I eat cheese, I speak the language, I know the culture, I have started multiple businesses there, I pay tons of taxes, I am politically active, I have passed all the exams required (both language and cultural) and yet, somehow, I will always be labelled an immigrant.

I wonder when the counting of the generations will stop for immigrants. When does a 6th generation immigrant stop being a 6th generation immigrant and become simply German or Dutch or French? For me, I'm quite sure that my children will be considered Dutch, but I am fortunate enough to have white skin, blue eyes and blond hair.