November 24, 2004
MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE HERMAN GOERING AGAIN:
Turkish workers a mistake, claims Schmidt (Hannah Cleaver in Berlin, 25/11/2004, Daily Telegraph)
Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, has inflamed the country's debate on immigration by saying that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, and that bringing millions of Turkish guest workers to Germany was a mistake."The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society," he told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.
He added that it had been a mistake that during "the early 1960s we brought guest workers from foreign cultures into the country".
Gotta love the Germans, who think the answer to everything is more authoritarianism. The Nazis didn't seem overly multiculti. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 24, 2004 10:36 PM
oj's right. Europe is toast.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at November 24, 2004 10:51 PMIf you convince yourself and your population that they can prosper with a 35-hour work week and benefit packages that are in no way tied to productivity, you will have a country that gets a might alarmed when foreigners come in and start becoming a key part of the labor force. Having neither an economic growth rate nor a birth rate to speak of only exacerbates the problem.
Posted by: John at November 25, 2004 12:34 AMHe is right, though. A commune can only work when populated with identical slaves to the ideal.
Inspector Clousseau got away with wearing a guitar in a nudist colony, but barely.
Posted by: Randall Voth at November 25, 2004 12:48 AMThe European theory of government is to buy off the lower classes by giving them all kinds of goodies, and if necessary responding to their prejudices, siphoning off energies that might otherwise be used for regime change. That Schmitt, a North German haute bourgeois, would assert that democraacy and 'multiculturalism' are incompatible is not a surprise.
It is a leftover from feudalism. There is no interest in treating those beneath your station as equals, they are obviously not. So, you are left with two choices, squashing them or bribing them. The results are obvious as you can see.
Posted by: Bart at November 25, 2004 8:23 AMI have to agree with the Schmidt's contention that multi-culturalism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Multi-culturalism is simply tribalism dressed up in po-mo speak. It asserts the rights of kin groups over individuals and families. A democracy cannot survive that. Immigration has become a problem in the USA only with the combined rise of multi-culturalism and the welfare state. Get rid of those and we could absorb far more immigrants.
P.S. Schmidt's claim that multi-culturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes rings true, because who is it that promotes it? The same people who'd love to have everyone else live under their authoritarian regime. The German's mistake was to import Turkish workers without being willing to transform them in to Germans.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at November 25, 2004 10:45 AMAOG:
It's not compatible with anything but anarchy, is it?
Posted by: oj at November 25, 2004 10:52 AMNo , but tried to appeal to their would be puppets to the east like Bandera,Pavelic,
Haj Husseini (Arafat's uncle) & Rashid Ali
Ghailani (the first Iraqi prime minister in
the 20s turned Arab Vichy candidate;Godfather
of the Baath) on the platform of faux nationalism based on anti-Semitism