The first British review of the publishing sensation that trashes the pieties of the 1968 generation. Despite its needless racial provocations, it narrows the gap between the public and politicians
Thilo Sarrazin: are Muslims really lowering the intelligence of German society?
Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How we are putting our country at risk]
By Thilo Sarrazin (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, €22.99)
Thilo Sarrazin, a minor German politician on the technocratic wing of the country’s Social Democratic party, has just written what is probably the bestselling political book in postwar Europe (1m copies in hardback and counting). Everyone in Germany knows at least a simplified version of what Germany Abolishes Itself says, and the reaction to the book is helping to drive government policy on minority integration.
The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that educated Germans are having fewer children and the fastest growing part of the population are poorly-integrated Muslim immigrants). That “stupider” is, of course, contested and has led to accusations of a flirtation with eugenics—of which more later.
But Sarrazin is no right-wing populist in the image of Jörg Haider, the late Austrian politician, or even Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamic leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Much of the book is a dry compendium of economic and social data. Indeed, I suspect his book is the political equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—much purchased but little read. Although controversy has swirled around his comments on group intelligence and the failure of German immigration policy, there is little in German public policy that he does not also take his axe to: welfare policy, education and training policy (apparently Britain now has a much higher proportion of students studying maths, science and technology than Germany), the poverty lobby and more. In fact, it is a meticulously prepared trashing of the liberal pieties of the 1968 generation.
The political and media class’s initial instinct was to denounce the book, and Sarrazin was forced out of his job at the Bundesbank. But as sales started to take off and as the new social media—the bloggers and emailers—lined up overwhelmingly behind Sarrazin, the reaction of political Germany shifted, albeit grudgingly. Chancellor Angela Merkel opportunistically declared the happy-clappy multikulti of the German left to have “failed utterly.” There was even a respectful and self-critical essay in Der Spiegel magazine by a leading liberal, Peter Schneider.
This shift is rather remarkable and it may help to prevent the rise of a serious right-wing force equivalent to France’s National Front. As the book complains, German public debate has, for obvious historical reasons, been more constrained by various kinds of taboos about national culture than any other big European country. As recently as 2000 a leading Christian Democrat politician, Friedrich Merz, had his political career damaged by merely asking that minorities show respect for the law and institutions of the dominant culture (Leitkultur). In the ensuing row the then-president of Germany, Johannes Rau, declared that he was not proud to be German.
Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.
Another difference that struck me was the invisibility of the Turks and the other big minorities living in Germany, compared with the relative visibility of Britain’s minorities. I later worked out why this was. There was what Peter Schneider calls an “unholy alliance” between left and right to pretend that Germany did not have an integration issue—especially amongst its Turkish, middle eastern and north African minorities. By 1990, there were more than 2m Turks living in Germany, many of them second and third generation. Yet the Christian Democratic right still refused to accept that some of the “guest workers” who had arrived in the 1950s and 1960s had come to stay—and rejected the idea that Germany was an “immigration country.” This meant that they put no effort or money into turning Turks into Germans. As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent. So the mainly Muslim minorities were left alone in their parallel worlds.
Things have got a lot better in the last 20 years. In 1999, the then Social Democrat government made it easier to become a German citizen and about 30 per cent of Turks now have full citizenship. Turks and other “New Germans” are more visible in political and public life. The flag waving at the 2006 World Cup in Germany seemed to herald a national “normalisation” and the multicoloured football team at the 2010 World Cup revealed a fully multi-racial land (although they continued to play German, not multicultural, football).
As Sarrazin himself describes, there have also been many successes of integration—not just the so-called Aussielder, people of German descent who lived, often for many generations, in eastern Europe or parts of the former Soviet Union. Also some “visible” minorities, such as Indians and Vietnamese, do well in the education system and the job market, as do many of the asylum seekers who stayed after the big inflow of the early 1990s.
But Sarrazin is more interested in the failure of the Muslim background Turks and north Africans—about half of Germany’s ethnic minority population (which altogether is now about 15 per cent of the total). And he describes the failure in shocking and pitiless detail. The poor German spoken by third-generation immigrants, the abysmal performance in school (72 per cent of Turks living in Germany, aged 20 to 64, have no qualifications at all), the high crime rates, the fact that they take far more out of the welfare state than they put in (only 33 per cent of Muslim Germans live mainly from their labours). According to Christopher Caldwell—who is wrongly described by Sarrazin as British and liberal; in fact, he is American and conservative—the number of foreign-born residents rose from 3m to 8m between 1971 and 2000, but the number of employed foreigners stayed the same at 2m.
There are plenty of explanations for this failure. The fact, for example, that Muslims tend to come from poor, traditional societies and, thanks to the failure of integration, have reproduced those societies in Berlin, Duisburg and other German cities. And Islam itself may contribute to a greater cultural distance than is the case with some other minorities.
The fact that Muslim migrants perform poorly in the context of German society does not, however, support the outlandish claim that they are inherently stupider than Germans or other minorities. Sarrazin does not quite say this but he does assert that their poor performance is dragging down the country’s average ability level—something that could probably be said of most of Europe’s immigrant groups from poor countries, at least for a generation or two. But Sarrazin digs deeper into the intelligence story. He is fascinated by group IQ levels and includes a long discourse on the above-average IQ results for modern Jews—a product, he argues, of the ancient selection pressures on a persecuted minority which resulted in larger families for those who performed well in the trade, finance and intellectual pursuits that Jews were restricted to. Given that intelligence is at least 50 per cent inherited, Sarrazin claims that over many generations a cultural trait can thus become biologically “fixed” in a population.
It is an intriguing argument, but given the vast timescales over which evolutionary pressures usually operate, the complexities of genetics, and the slipperiness of the concept of intelligence, this kind of argument is at best highly speculative. Sarrazin does not provide evidence of low average IQs for Germany’s Muslims—and he is perfectly aware of how environmental factors affect IQ (he cites the famous Flynn effect, which has seen average IQ levels rise by a couple of points a decade in rich societies). Sarrazin is not a racist—and he happily talks about different historic ability levels in different regions of Germany—but he is an “intelligence determinist” and is surely wrong to link current performance outcomes in German society, and indeed the whole system of social stratification, so directly with underlying intelligence levels. There are simply too many other factors getting in the way, and ability can be acquired as well as inherited. As an interviewer in Die Zeit newspaper said to him: “My father was a gardener, I am an academic. It’s not because I am cleverer than him but because I had more educational opportunities.” Turks’ educational and career outcomes would have been vastly better if they had had the money and German-language classes lavished upon them that the Aussiedler have enjoyed—or indeed the educational resources enjoyed by underperforming Finns which Sarrazin praises.
It is a shame that an otherwise powerful and overdue argument about integration should be too easily reducible to a racist slogan: “The Turks are making us stupid.” Germany’s dismal failure to integrate something like 7 per cent of its population is clear enough without requiring a detour into intelligence theory. And the message from this book is hardly going to inspire Turks to become better citizens of Germany: already 58 per cent feel they are not welcome in the country.
Sarrazin’s policy solutions are relatively mainstream, echoing some of the new Labour reforms in Britain: tighter control of immigration and language tests for newcomers; steps towards compulsory citizenship for long-term residents; a sharp focus on teaching German at immigrant-dominated schools. Sarrazin is also concerned at how the welfare system creates alienation, saps initiative and prevents the workplace integration that countries like America are famous for, and so he recommends probationary periods before immigrants are entitled to benefit. The government is already acting on some of these points.
Ultimately, Sarrazin’s hard-headedness is a welcome counterpoint to the wishful thinking of the 1968 generation. The former finance minister of Berlin, who looks like a soldier in the Kaiser’s army, is a member of the awkward squad. You can imagine him causing minor riots at liberal Berlin dinner parties. Most of his argument is clear-eyed and well-informed, but he could not resist the provocations both on intelligence and on the nature of the underclass, which he never bothers to define. Yet the fact that his book has been so influential, despite the provocations, marks an important step forward for Germany—not only in facing up to the failures of its past immigration policies, but also in bridging the wide gap between popular opinion and the political class and thus preventing a German Haider.
David Goodhart is Prospect’s outgoing editor
Juan Romero
Probably the last time Germany had been startled by a bad memory biologization was when the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk spoke of selection and creatian on a small book entitled Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism.
(comment via facebook)
Simon Rogers
Interesting article. A specific question: Does the comment:
“Given that intelligence is at least 50 per cent inherited”
come from the author of the book or the piece?
It strikes me as being a bit of an odd statement.
(comment via facebook)
Ely Cummings
“And Islam itself may contribute to a greater cultural distance than is the case with some other minorities.”
How so?
Richard
Germany’s failure to integrate? what exactly were they suppose to do help the immigrants feel welcome. They don’t want to be Germans. Is that so hard to grasp? what then?
Ray Sawhill
Good article, and especially nice to see a non-hysterical discussion of these matters.
One small issue: I’m just an amateur observer of the evo-bio scene, but it seems that one of the latest cases that’s being made is that more evolution than you’d imagine has taken place in recent years. A good book for getting up to date is Cochran and Harpending’s “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.” I did an interview with Cochran at my blog a little while back. It’s in five parts. You can get to part one here:
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.html
j. p. ward
Without his one-liner, \they are making us stupid\, who would have bought his book? His message got through. That’s the way all clever politicians speak and write since the days of JFK.
J. P. Ward
Martin Adamson
Your explanation for the Turks’ and North African’s educational failure is not really convincing when placed beside the acknoweldged educational success of the Vietnamese and Indians. Aren’t they also from “poor, traditional societies”? Did they have “money and German-language classes lavished upon them”? Of course not. And yet they have succeeded where the Turks failed. And in fact it’s the same story internationally – Far East Asian immigrants prosper in the second generation in the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands while Turkish and North African immigrants do not.
At what point do we start thinking that this consistent world-wide pattern might tell us more about the culture of muslim immigrants than it does about the culture of their hosts?
Scott Kleager
Sarrazin is nothing more than a Eugenics writer of the 1930s who maintains that immigrants have lower IQs than real Germans. Just substitut “race” with “foreigner” and you’ll see what I mean. Which is interesting because as you can see from his name, he ain’t of German stock himself.
I am an immigrant to Germany (American) and married to a German. My two sons both wrote great A-level exams and attend university. Not bad for inferior stock. Sarrazin is a racist and a fool, and you are a fool to believe anything he has to say.
Scott Kleager
Don Kenner
Hey Scott Kleager,
That was a GREAT argument…oh, wait. You didn’t bother to make an argument. You just ignored the extensive, data-backed arguments of Sarrazin and then proceeded to call him a Nazi/racist. I forget, what do we call people who do that? Oh yeah, we call them fools.
AB
“Despite the provocations”, indeed. I think Mr. Goodhart should have used ‘false claims’, ‘bad data’, and, perhaps, even ‘lies’. Mr. Sarrazin’s book does contain some provocations, but it also contains false data and pure speculation, and that is not a good thing if one is trying to direct policy – or whatever grander goal Goodhart thinks Sarrazin aspires towards. He even notes a falsity in the book himself, when he notes that Caldwell is American, not British, as Sarrazin writes.
How exactly does a book filled with sociological/biological speculation and false claims ‘mark an important step forward’? By fanning the flames of ignorance and racism?
Andrea OL
“Given that intelligence is at least 50 per cent inherited, Sarrazin claims that over many generations a cultural trait can thus become biologically ‘fixed’ in a population.
It is an intriguing argument, but given the vast timescales over which evolutionary pressures usually operate, the complexities of genetics, and the slipperiness of the concept of intelligence, this kind of argument is at best highly speculative.”
Not so. Human evolution can happen rapidly, especially under pressures of cultural selection. The pace of evolution depends on intensity of selection, and certain cultures or environments select more intensely or ruthlessly than others.
The Stephen Jay Gould thesis that there was no virtually human evolution in the past 10,000 yrs has been utterly discredited. If anything, the pace of evolution, especially among certain racial and ethnic groups, accelerated and seems to be accelerating.
It is a scientific fact that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest natural IQs.
Jews may be studious and diligent but that alone cannot explain why a people who are only 2% of the US population own 40% of all the wealth(and collected so many Nobel Prizes in hard sciences).
There are also physical differences among races, with blacks being the toughest. Even white liberals generally move out of integrated communities out of fear of black crime. Whites fear blacks because blacks are tougher.
The author of this article puts all the blame on Germans for Turks’ failure to assimilate and achieve, but then, why did Jews achieve so much more in the 19th and early 20th century in Germany when there was open antisemitism? And how come Vietnamese and Indians in Germany, though certainly not favored over Turks by the German government, do pretty well too?
And how come Jewish-Americans succeeded far more than other European immigrants who arrived during the same period? Did American government favor Jewish students over non-Jewish students? Of course not. Sure, Jews had a culture of education, but then, so did German-Americans and Anglo-Americans. But Jews outperformed all of them. There IS genetic basis to IQ, and I’m sick of politically correct denial of truth.
e w f
If the German governments have isolated a segment of their society, denied them equal access to educational resources, but lavished the Aussielder language and cultural institutions with generous grants (and we have), we have only proven that we may be smart but we are not wise.
Winston Bell
Mr. Goodhart should know here is no such country as America. America is made up of several countries between the Canadian Arctic islands and Tierra del Fuego. The United States of America is one.
B.A. Shay
It’s a simple fact that many different racial/ethnic groups across the world have proven to be very successful (on average) in modern high-income, ethnically diverse nations, and some have not.
High IQ can become a biological trait but not because of pure unchangeable racial superiority but of evolution/conditioning/adaptation.
Muslims have proven to be highly unadaptive in modern society. Their culture and ethnic traits ensure this. They are a society apart.
The lure of prosperity brings them to “westernized” societies and their diametrically opposed traditionalism ensures that they will integrate poorly if at all.
CB
Sarrazin is a racist, pure and simple. Many Germans despise him and do not agree with him. And of course it’s typical that this man and his racist screeds get coverage abroad and not the many people who disagree with him. But of course it’s always easy to paint all Germans as racists and Nazis.
And calling the so-called “Aussiedler” a success story of integration is ridiculous, because while some “Aussiedler” have integrated very well, many others have problems finding jobs and barely speak German (even though they’re supposedly ethnic Germans). But because “Aussiedler” are viewed as Germans, even though their ancestors left what is now Germany several centuries ago, they are given the German citizenship after only a few months and are granted lavish financial aid. So much for that success story.
Andrew Bowie
Hardly anyone here queries the very notion of IQ, when there are endless studies showing that there is no such culture-neutral ‘thing’, so the idea that you can show via speculative evolutionary theory that races have different IQs is already more than questionable. Then we can look at the question of race, which is just as tenuous a concept as IQ, as has also been endlessly demonstrated. The question for Germany is, therefore, a cultural, economic, and political one, not one about race and IQ. (This does not mean that there are not individual differences in cognitive ability, but analysing what this means is far more complex than the simplistic ideas in this thread.) There clearly also is a problem of the kind Sarrazin addresses in a more than dubious manner, but if the diagnosis is wrong, the consequences will be even more problems. Finally there is the question of how a case is stated in such a sensitive area, and here Sarrazin’s approach is unforgivable.
jim evans
So where do we go from here?
Whether or not we come from a racial group with average high IQ`s the future appears to be \multiracial\….and it`s no surprise that multiculturalism originates (in its present form)in the USA …because without it America would have blown apart years ago (like Central Europe in the last century or Rwanda did only a few years ago).
The real beneficiary of our present global capitalist world is global organised crime and corruption (as exemplified by Wall Street and it`s global capitalist empire)and monoculturalism/nationalism of the sort found in China and Israel and Saudi Arabia….where there is no soppy nonsense about \everyone being equal\ and \celebrating diversity\ and all the rest of the obvious rot you hear coming out of the liberal \centre ground\ virtual one party states in the Anglo Saxon nations.
Nobody will fight wars on behalf of \cultural diversity\…it`s that simple…and unless we wake up very soon and decide that we are a modern scientic secular monocultural society that doesn`t believe in sill ancient religious fairy stories we shall very soon be replaced by barbarians who do.
kim serca
So post-war Germany, which is prosperous, humane and well-run is getting ‘smaller’ and ‘stupider’. Compared to what? To 1933-45 when intelligent, ‘greater’ Germany plunged europe into war and then eliminated six million people?
Thanks, but I’ll take stupid Germany anyday. Germany abolished itself morally by perpetrating the holocaust. multiculturalism had nothing to do with it
Laban Tall
Not read the book, but the major factor in reducing average German intelligence is unlikely to be Turkish immigration and more likely to be the fact that the most intelligent German women are the least likely to reproduce.
If intelligence is to any extent inherited, the surest way of reducing it in a population is for the cleverest members not to have children.
“Germany was plunged into an anguished debate yesterday about how to encourage reluctant couples to breed after new figures showed Germany with the world’s highest proportion of childless women.
Thirty per cent of German women have not had children, according to European Union statistics from 2005, with the figure rising among female graduates to 40%.”
jim evans
So why is that low birth-rate the norm now in ethnic Germans and British people?
Because of American workhaholic employment practices involving women competing with men at the expense of having children.
The thousands of Asian people nowliving around me in rural England (and benefitting from our bizarre immigration policies)show no obvious desire to work themselves stupid in pursuit of so-called women`s liberation.
Far from it…the men sit in taxis all day and the women have one baby after another…while my children are trapped into childlessness of a sort which has nothing to do with fertility or race or IQ or anything much except the dominance of American culture and economics over white British people and the absence of immigration controls in Britain today.
Jeff Maylor
The commentators here seem full of hostility. Who are the most likely readers of this website? Leftists? The hostility is childlike.
Anyway, IQ is a firmly established measure in science. You might as well claim evolution is false as to deny the reality of IQ differences among populations. Remember, we are not creatures created equal by God, we are animals that evolved over time and it would be unusual if there weren’t many differences among us. And there is more science coming out that supports IQ and behavioral differences that relate to ethnicity. Get used to it. Bear in mind this doesn’t mean “better”, just different. Culture is important, of course, but it is not without constraints.
Neither culture nor biology have absolute determinative power over human behavior and intelligence. It is surely a mix of those two plus other factors we may not know about yet. But biology definitely matters.
JL
Sarrazin’s comments about IQ are well backed up by research, although his figure for the heritability of IQ is an underestimate if we’re talking about adults — heritability rises with age, reaching about 80 percent in adulthood.
This is how Douglas Detterman, editor of the leading scholarly journal Intelligence sums up IQ research:
Intelligence is the best-understood and most powerful variable in the social sciences. Sophisticated psychometric methods, developed largely for intelligence tests, are used to construct and assess modern tests. A substantial commercial industry has grown up around the development and sale of tests. Intelligence can be measured with better reliability than any other social science variable. Huge amounts of data have been collected using the tests and these data span the last century providing a database unavailable in most other areas in the social sciences. Data from individuals show strong relationships to many important social outcome measures including educational achievement, occupational success, income, and death, to name a few. The data collected also provide important information about the genetic, biological, and environmental origins of intelligence. Relationships at the country level have also been investigated showing that countries with higher mean IQs show a greater gross domestic product per person, are less religious, and show higher levels of democracy. In short, by any objective standard, intelligence is the social science success story of unrivaled proportions.
Different races and ethnic groups differ in their allele frequencies. Thus the argument that IQ, a polygenic trait, differs between populations, is unproblematic from the perspective of population genetics. See here: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/08/connect-dots.html
Andrew Bowie
If one person here would give a philosophically defensible account of just what ‘intelligence’ is that can be universally applied in all social contexts, I might believe some of the comments about IQ. They haven’t, because it can’t be done in a generalised way (all the definitions end up being circular) that would license remarks about IQ and the other mythical entity, ethnicity. These are cultural, political, and social issues and reference to IQ and ethnicity just muddies the water with a kind of brown colour.
psychometrician
Here is a non-circular definition of IQ, but you need to understand some math (factor analysis, or principal components or at least correlation): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/iq-compression-and-simple-models.html
The definition of IQ doesn’t matter as long as it has predictive power in modern societies: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0ByYDxaP-OyVjNzNkYTg0NDEtZjM3MC00NTA4LTlhOWYtYzYyMjZlYzkwODc2&hl=en
jim evans
The concern about IQ is a smokescreen used largely because we are forbidden to protect our traditional indigenous ethnicity from assaults and dilution by American beliefs about the desirability of mass immigration from foreign countries.
The economic reason is that it stops organised labour from gaining bargaining power through exploiting labour scarcity.While “Socialists” and liberals also support mass immigration for a variety of reasons which betray their real indifference to the indigenous underclass they pretend to represent.
No politician,lawyer,academic,or journalist DARE utter a word against the globalist free market mass immigration orthodoxy if they hope to have a successful career.
Nationalism and labour restrictive practices are now effectively proscribed unless they happen to suit the purposes of our global capitalist rulers…..for example in the USA or China or Israel or Ireland.
My English ethnic identity has been “cleansed” in the interests of filling the country with the excess peoples of every other nation on Earth.But just try that in Ireland or Israel!
JL
If one person here would give a philosophically defensible account of just what ‘intelligence’ is that can be universally applied in all social contexts, I might believe some of the comments about IQ.
No concept of intelligence exists “that can be universally applied in all social contexts”. However, that does not render IQ tests useless anymore than the fact that you cannot use your car to fly to the moon makes cars useless. IQ tests are the best predictors of scholastic and job performance — much better than socioeconomic factors — and robust predictors of many health outcomes, and criminality and other social pathologies. Nor are they, when properly administered, biased against minority groups. As Douglas Detterman said, intelligence research has been a “social science success story of unrivaled proportions”.
the other mythical entity, ethnicity
Ever geographically close nationalities and ethnic groups differ from each other genetically: e.g. http://bigthink.com/ideas/21358 and http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/01/how-ashkenazi-jewish-are-you/
Andrew Bowie
Genetic differences do not equate to ethnic differences, because the latter involve cultural and other social and political factors. IQ tests can be useful in some circumstances, but there is endless research in how it is misused (not least by its inventor) to discriminate against the disadvantaged, so it is disingenuous merely to point to where it can have uses. The point is that such debates are not resolved by assuming there is a basic form of explanation that covers all the factors involved, such as race and IQ. These are all located in power-relations in real contexts, which mean they can never be neutral, even when they are not simply mythical.
eduard beckstein
“It is an intriguing argument…”
It is, and it’s a pity that you haven’t done enough homework to understand it.
> given the vast timescales over which
> evolutionary pressures usually operate”
Hmm, actually those vast timescales are turning out to be a lot less vast than people previously thought, and quite a lot can happen in evolutionary terms within a mere century.
> the slipperiness of the concept
> of intelligence
Hmmm, not at all slippery, in fact. It’s quite stable, and the key components of intelligence (and especially G) have been well understood since Galton.
> Sarrazin does not provide evidence of
> low average IQs for Germany’s Muslims
That evidence is easy to find; try spending maybe five minutes on “the internet” or “wikipedia”,
you might learn something.
> is perfectly aware of how environmental
> factors affect IQ
Hmmm I would say no one is “perfectly aware” of these factors, which is why the nature/nurture debate has been such a heated one for at least the past four decades.
> the famous Flynn effect, which has seen average
> IQ levels rise by a couple of points a decade
> in rich societies
Do you know enough about the Flynn effect to make this definition? Do “average IQ levels rise”, or is it just average levels amongst the lowest scorers? And is this effect consistent and replicable? Is it still continuing today, or has it already maxed out? So many questions that can fluster the incurious mind…
> Prospect’s outgoing editor
So maybe you will now have some extra time on your hands to bone up on basic research before writing any more book reviews.
JL
Genetic differences do not equate to ethnic differences, because the latter involve cultural and other social and political factors.
Yes, ethnic differences are also and in fact primarily about cultural differences. Ethnic groups are not, however, “mythical entities”.
IQ tests can be useful in some circumstances, but there is endless research in how it is misused (not least by its inventor) to discriminate against the disadvantaged, so it is disingenuous merely to point to where it can have uses.
Can you point me towards this endless research, and explicate why it is relevant to our current concerns?
The point is that such debates are not resolved by assuming there is a basic form of explanation that covers all the factors involved, such as race and IQ. These are all located in power-relations in real contexts, which mean they can never be neutral, even when they are not simply mythical.
In other words, because the results of IQ research insult your sensibilities, they must be wrong and replaced with terminally vague theories about “power relations” or whatever that have zero explanatory power.
It is interesting that you place extraordinary demands on the validity of IQ, whereas at the same time you will apparently accept any half-assed, empirically untested and untestable “theory” about “power relations”.
jim evans
Observe the often unspoken biases in our mainstream media and you may understand how the primary “power relationship” in our society….between the media and the general public…is used to shape our attitudes and values….and what you are not safely at liberty to think if you know what is good for you. The “why” is more difficult to deduce.
But just as a victor writes the history so it`s my intuitive belief that the powerful define the IQ of “their” tribe as higher than that of those tribes with less power….if they value IQ as a concept.
Florian
I find your article very well researched and I found it educative. But I would like to point out that somewhere you missed what is really going on in Germany, at least in my experience and that of my associates.
Some bold thesis by Sarrazin in itself is for sure not the downfall of the ethical integrity of the Germans. But if you look beyond the book – and its sales numbers – you must look at the people reading it and what they are making of it. This is where the real story starts.
I am one of many Germans who have recently left their country to live elsewhere with their non-German spouses. Most German emigrants I talk to about this topic found the political climate intolerable (no matter whether they are muslims or not), and the rise of xenophobia (hidden behind the pretense of justified criticism of Islam) shocking. Yes, immigration policies should be looked over, but not only that. In every conflict, both parties owe each other the effort to solve the problem. The German people have refused in the past to integrate their guests (but of course the guilt is laid at the immigrant’s feet), and believe me they will find reasons to refuse in the future.
We Germans love the idea of hospitality, and do we ever love to mention it when we come back from our holidays in Turkey and Italy. But when it comes to our turn, we invite people to live and work among us, only to gossip behind their backs first how they eat too much from our plate, and then later with open resentment say how its maybe time to go back home and stop molesting our arian daughters.
Germans should make up their mind eventually, whether they either want to welcome strangers in their country, with all the sacrifices they will have to make to acommodate them, or they should stop inviting them out of holocaust-related guilt (hey look how much we like foreigners!) and a lack of workers (the price of modern societies and little reproduction, maybe). One or the other, not both.
I hope my pessimistic prognosis is wrong, but the past years have been exactly what I predicted. You may think Sarrazin is no Haider, but believe me he is worse. He is much closer to the general population, and when that population gets going on xenophobia there may be no turning back.
Simon
Re source, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Lynn/Varhannen 2002) puts Turkish IQ at around 90, German at 102 (normed to UK=100) – other national estimates put German IQ slightly lower, ca 100. Turkish immigrants to Germany tend to be from the poorer, more backward eastern areas.
Twin adoption studies show that adult IQ is highly heritable, and that (within the normal range, aside from extreme abuse/deprivation) does not depend on the environment of the child. However there is strong evidence for partly environmental,non-genetic effects at the cross-national level, eg the (much measured) median African-American IQ of around 85 is much higher than the (less measured) West African median IQ of around 70, although the two are around 80% genetically the same population group. Factors like education, iodine in salt, and living in an advanced technological society may be important. Conversely African-American children raised by white-American adoptive parents do not show significantly elevated IQ as adults compared to those raised by their natural parents.
Laban Tall
Jim Evans – “so it`s my intuitive belief that the powerful define the IQ of ‘their’ tribe as higher than that of those tribes with less power….if they value IQ as a concept.”
Thank you for sharing your intuitive belief. I know everyone, liberals included, likes to think their in-group is the best, but there are a few tests involved – I don’t think the figures are just plucked out of the air.
From Steve Sailer’s IQ FAQ :
Q. Are there differences in average SAT scores among racial groups?
A. Yes. Ashkenazi (European) Jews appear to average the highest—maybe around 110-112—followed by Northeast Asians (105), and then by gentile white Europeans and North Americans (100). The world mean is around 90…
Q. Aren’t all IQ researchers white supremacists who just want to show their race has the highest IQ?
A. If they are, they’re doing an awfully lousy job of it. (See above.)
Omar Chamra
The problem is not one of race but one of education. While most moslems in the USA are successful, most turkish moslems in Germany and Austria are not. The simple reason is, that German and Austrian industry has imported during the boom years of the 60ies a lot of cheap labour from Anatolia. Most of their children married again women who couldn’t read and write. And now many of the young boys of turkish background do not finish school and can’t find a job. So they live of the dole thus giving arguments to the extreme right. However most Iranians who are also Moslem succeed in Germany and Austria. Therefore it is not a problem of discrimination or of religion.
jim evans
Florian…I think you will find that Germany is like Britain (and anywhere else that is part of America`s empire or zone of influence)…..the general public will have NOT been asked whether they want to share their country with foreigners…nor are they going to have a choice about it while the liberal(?)elite have any say!
That`s dictatorship ….and if it was being imposed upon an African people many liberals would be incensed about it.
I wish you and your partner a long and happy life but I would want some control over whether you came into our overpopulated underesourced British Isles.
jim evans
Laban Tall and Simon….let`s assume your take on this issue is correct…how should politicians act to most effectively give expression to your opinions?
Here in Worcester England I am surrounded by more and more people from across the world..including lots from China and India/Pakistan.Why? We have a shortage of housing and fewer and fewer real jobs…so WHY?
The ruling elite tell me that these intellectuals (?)are here to do work that our unemployed are too idle to do….but half of them are clearly mothers of lots of small children while their partners seem to be involved in providing services we have never asked them to do…like providing far more available taxis than we could ever want.
If I say anything remotely critical about this mad situation I am set on by all and sundry as a racist and xenophobe.
My question is not about German liberalism directly…..but about whether liberals generally are determined to repeat the history of the last century in Central Europe when a large number of people with high IQ`s got murdered.
If the Ashkenazi IQ is so high how come they keep getting exterminated and persecuted…and what sort of high IQ takes an American colony of westernised Jews to Israel…. among some of the most hostile neighbours on Earth? If that`s high IQ then I will settle for being relatively stupid!!
Andrew Bowie
“In other words, because the results of IQ research insult your sensibilities, they must be wrong and replaced with terminally vague theories about “power relations” or whatever that have zero explanatory power.
It is interesting that you place extraordinary demands on the validity of IQ, whereas at the same time you will apparently accept any half-assed, empirically untested and untestable “theory” about “power relations”.”
This is truly hilarious: so the debate about the status of Muslims in Germany has nothing to do with the fact that for decades they had no political and other power? You don’t need a big theory to establish that: I lived in Berlin for years and saw it every day. And theories of IQ are constitutively contested right across the academy, let alone theories of race. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used (though biological theories of race just don’t stack up, because you can’t isolate human biology from culture), but the way they have regularly been used together by right wingers has regularly been shown to be invalid. I find your tone offensive, and would rather communicate with people interested in the real issues, so this is my last post.
Simon
Jim – high IQ people do lots of stupid things, you know that! Higher IQ populations tend to be less impulsive at an individual level, which can mean eg less crime, but as groups they are certainly prone to getting hold of bad ideas and running with them to disastrous conclusions. A couple uncontroversial examples would be Germany (IQ 100+) launching WW1 in 1914 “before Russia got too strong” or Japan (IQ 105+) attacking the USA in 1941 for similar reasons. Arguably attitudes to immigration among high IQ elites could be considered similarly, at least in Europe – in the USA with less of a welfare State there are arguments that mass immigration does provide disproportionate benefits to the wealthier, more powerful and generally higher-IQ parts of the population, by lowering the cost of unskilled labour.
Simon
Andrew Bowie:
“This is truly hilarious: so the debate about the status of Muslims in Germany has nothing to do with the fact that for decades they had no political and other power?”
Jewish immigrants to America started off with no political or other power, and faced more overt discrimination than Turks in Germany, but being of high ability within a few decades they achieved wealth, status and power, and arguably eventual dominance in some areas. You see the same with eg the Chinese in Malaysia – it takes almost Nazi levels of discrimination to keep a significantly higher-ability group from excelling. More recently in the US, the descendants of impoverished Korean peasant immigrants and other north-east Asians achieve a higher status and wealth than Anglo-Americans. Certainly IQ per se is not the only reason why some groups do better than others, a strong work ethic is also a major factor.
JL
This is truly hilarious: so the debate about the status of Muslims in Germany has nothing to do with the fact that for decades they had no political and other power?
Sarrazin’s argument is that the higher fertility of the Muslims and of lower class ethnic Germans will bring down the intelligence level of the country. The political or social status of the Muslims is a separate question from this. Moreover, as pointed out by Simon above, far worse discrimination has not prevented other minorities from thriving.
And theories of IQ are constitutively contested right across the academy, let alone theories of race. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used (though biological theories of race just don’t stack up, because you can’t isolate human biology from culture), but the way they have regularly been used together by right wingers has regularly been shown to be invalid.
At the 1938 Congress of the German Society of Psychology, IQ tests were denounced as “Jewish intelligence test[s] [...] made according to an intelligence type strongly present among Jews”. Later critics of IQ have generally come from different political perspectives, but their prioritization of political expedience over scientific evidence has in most cases been similar to that of the Nazis. Similarly, most criticisms of the race concept are woefully inadequate, particularly in this era of ever cheaper genetic sequencing. But as you’re not willing to make a more detailed argument, it’s no use for me to continue on this.
I find your tone offensive, and would rather communicate with people interested in the real issues, so this is my last post.
I accept your concession of defeat;)
Andrew Bowie
I see JL has followed that other piece of undisputed science, Godwin’s Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Auf Wiedersehen.
Ford
Presenting the American workplace as a model to be followed might be a little unwise, given that the US is famous for workplace shooting massacres.
Regarding the alleged poor performance of immigrants from Muslim countries, they seem to do pretty well in “new” countries like the USA, Canada and Australia, perhaps because these countries have a somewhat formless culture.
It’s a great shame that Europeans are still inhibited from criticising immigrants because of political correctness. It seems that if you are an immigrant and you want to preserve your culture, you are morally spotless and beyond criticism; however, if you are a native European and want to preserve your culture, your opinions are worthless because you must be a NAZI! There is no logic, and no good outcome, to this way of thinking.
J Taylor
The liberal totalitarians (oxymoron?) control the discourse. You must only believe what the existing consensus allows.
The fact is The present IQ of different racial ethnic groups varies
Askhenazi-112, Chinese-104, Europeans 100, Hispanics, Arabs 90, US blacks 85 African 70.
Probably mostly herditary, some environmental. Its not what I like, but its reality
Simon
Ford:
“Regarding the alleged poor performance of immigrants from Muslim countries, they seem to do pretty well in “new” countries like the USA, Canada and Australia”
Upper-middle-class Muslim immigrants to the US and Canada have mostly done well; Shi’ite Lebanese immigrants to Australia have done poorly.
AB
Dear Jim Evans (@7:32PM)
Can you name a point in history when humans have not ‘shared their country with foreigners’? As a species, humans have always wandered, travelled, and intermingled. The assumption behind all your statements is that their was a time, or can be a time, when one’s country is inhabited only by those (genetically/biologically,culturally/…?) like oneself. This is absurd.
And by the way, YOU ARE a racist and a xenophobe.
Steve Sailer
What does prudence suggest?
There has been 45 years of working class and peasant immigration from Anatolia of people initially brought in to fill low-skill factory jobs of the kind that are vanishing from Europe. Germany is now well into the third generation of Anatolians, so we have a huge amount of data by now. The great preponderance of statistics appears to be on Sarrazin’s side that the academic and employment performance of German-born Turks is well below the German average, which is very expensive in a welfare state like Germany.
Mr. Goodhart suggests, in effect, that, well, the fourth or fifth or sixth generation might turns things around, but fails to give any evidence for any trend in this direction other than it’s “outlandish” to notice the patterns of the last 45 years.
The reality is that West Germany largely shut off unskilled economic immigration in the 1970s, so much of the immigration since then has consisted of “family reunification,” which largely turns out to mean arranged marriages of German-born young Turks to people from the Old Country to take advantage of Germany’s welfare state.
When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Thus, since 2001, the government of Denmark has taken steps to cut down on forced marriage immigration fraud, such as not granting permanent residency to foreigners where one spouse is under age 24.
jim evans
AB…I realise that thinking isn`t your strong suit…and that the British people have been systematically and comprehensively brainwashed into defining almost everything as racism….but could you please justify your defamatory comment or apologise and withdraw it ?
And…by the way…fewer people are listening to that sort of rubbish any longer…brainwashed as they are they are beginning to see that the current policies on immigration are hopelessly impractical and entirely unsustainable….so if you are the opportunist your half-baked comment suggest you are it`s time to take a different direction in your political career!
jim evans
And..AB….why not identify yourself at the same time?Surely you are not ashamed of your (cowardly?) attack?
If I win my case against you and Bronwen I will donate any profit to Victoria Climbie`s parents….they (and their wretchedly unfortunate daughter) suffered far more from your beloved multicultural fantasy than I ever will.
Ed Whitson
Sarrazin’s book definitely should be smaller. It’s got the stupid thing down pat, though.
britkraut
I am not reacting to the discussion but to the review.
I live in Germany and am absolutely sick of people jumping on the “taboo” bandwagon, pretending that Sarrazin’s argument is “overdue”, presenting anything new, or that Sarrazin proposes new “policy solutions”.
Yes, Sarrazin is echoing what many people think, and what many, many politicianst and publicists have reiterated for years and years. The supposedly repressive atmosphere of political correctness everyone keeps yammering about doesn’t exist, mainstream politicians have been free to voice anti-immigrant sentiment in ways that are unthinkable in the UK. The fact that many people agree with Sarrazin doesn’t make his arguments more true. Many people disagree.
The government was “already acting on some of these points” long before Sarrazin published its book. Welfare has turned into workfare, there are language and citizenship tests, immigration into Germany has been made much more difficult.
By the way, Sarrazin is not what I would call a “minor politician”, he was Berlin’s finance senator, notorious for making suggestions about what people on welfare should eat.
There is no such thing as an inclusive collective identity that immigrants can feel welcomed into. Germanness is still defined largely in ethnic terms and Germanness and citizenship are virtually indistinguishable. There are problems with representation, inequality and prejudice. These can’t be solved by placing the onus of integration solely on individuals and minority groups.
I could go on forever but have been discussing this so much in Germany that I feel tired. I’m glad this has been reviewed but am disappointed with the tone.
jim evans
Could you at least summon up the strength to explain where Germany has gone wrong?How would they integrate people they didn`t want in the first place?
The real tragedy is that we have allowed American casino capitalists to run Europe by mobilising mass immigration and our sense of collective guilt about the World Wars.
I don`t recall ever being asked whether I wanted to be forced to compete for housing and jobs and public services with millions of cultural strangers from across the world…..and I am left wondering if we learned anything from the failure of enforced multicultural experiments of the past.
Soros
RE: the commment: “At what point do we start thinking that this consistent world-wide pattern might tell us more about the culture of muslim immigrants than it does about the culture of their hosts?”
Islam as a culture devalues learning that comes from outside of its own traditions to the point that Science and Biology, to mention just two fields, are barely taught or taught poorly in many Muslim countries. Stressed still, is knowledge of the Koran and the Hadiths, memorization rather than creative, critical thought.
Education tends to be moral education, intended to place the individual into the hierarchy of society rather than train him for a career in the modern world. Until this changes drastically, expect academic under-performance, especially from poor Muslims immigrating to the West.
As for Jews, the culture values education highly, most likely because a good career brings greater safety when times get tough. If this has had genetic benefits over time, good for the Jews.
Dr. Marc Latham
I think the IQ inclusion was stupid, as it meant Sarrazin opened himself up to accusations of racism, instead of focusing on the real point: that groups of immigrants (mostly Muslim) want to overthrow their host countries, and that a lot of people in the top positions of our countries only care about themselves, and nothing about the country or its people.
I only know the situation in Britain, but it seems similar to the German example, and supports the concise and coherent case presented by Jim Evans in earlier comments.
During the New Labour years, multiculturalism was used as a mantra to suppress any argument against immigration. I’m happy to live in a multicultural country, but it seems more than that to me: it’s about multiculturalism eradicating all semblance of Britishness, with colonial Britain punished for its sins.
Anybody who questioned it was called a racist, and native British people who lost their jobs due to cheaper foreign labour were told it was economically imperative, as otherwise industry could not compete.
Andrew Neather later admitted New Labour did it to for social engineering and to rub the right’s noses in it (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222613/Labour-let-migrants-engineer-multicultural-UK.html)
but the main victims were Labour’s traditional supporters: the British working classes.
And then the economy collapsed, and it was all shown to be a spin illusion, but Blair doesn’t care, as he set himself him to profit from his position as our beloved leader, and is now off making money around the world.
Many of the upper classes who profited from cheap foreign labour still have their high paying positions, or they have retired overseas after selling up to foreign owners.
On the streets, multicultural facism, which portrayed the native British as stupid and lazy, and the foreigner as smart and resourceful, provided a fertile ground for mostly Asian paedophiles to groom mostly white children, as seen in the recent case from Derby, which is said to be happening across the country: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8157739/Asian-gang-prowled-streets-searching-for-rape-victims.html
The upper classes seemed willing to sacrifice underclass children (with the derogatory term chav being used to demonise them) for the greater multicultural good: Brand UK.
And New Labour threw money instead of common sense facts and international realities at Muslims, building up their image of victimhood and right to conquer the world, instead of getting them to face up to how their fellow Muslims have been responsible for war, murder, slavery, colonisation, atrocities, misogony, homophobia, racism, inequalities and prejudice around the world.
I wrote an article about the British liberal love for Islam, and hatred for Britain, the USA and most of all the Jews, for Suite 101 recently:
http://www.suite101.com/content/is-the-british-stop-the-war-coalition-racist-and-xenophobic-a311229
jim evans
I am happy to live in a multiracial country but view multiculturalism as an alien American concept created to make sense of the cultural/racial diversity found in the USA.
I dearly wish that the population of the world was much smaller so that people could move about and find the sort of environment best suited to their needs without creating a feeling of threat among what we call “host populations”…when in fact we “hosts” have no say in whether our “guests” arrive here and demand our scarce resources in “democratic tolerant multicultural Britain”. Ho ho!
jim evans
Marc…why don`t we modern scientific secular westerners stop tolerating and pandering to prehistoric religious irrational alien so called cultures here in the West …but ALSO… at long last… STOP MEDDLING in THEIR traditional parts of the world?
Why are we constantly interfering in the East?
I feel sorry for all the victims of the London Bombings… including the bombers and their families.Why do we keep importing foreigners and dumping them in areas where their welcome is far from enthusiastic….their housing is poor…and their job prospects are no better than those of the indigenous British underclass?
Dr. Marc Latham
I know Jim, I agree. In the last fifteen years in Britain it’s as if God has shown itself again, but it hasn’t, there’s just a new wave of religious fundamentalism, and it’s creating the same kind of division and conflict as previous ones.
I’m a vegetarian and consider myself more of a Buddhist than any of the other big religions, so for me it’d be cool if we mostly had nice peaceful yoga enthusiasts and vegetarian/environmental progress, but most of what we hear in the media is Muslims trying to get us to eat halal with its regressive slaughter policy, repeating the same kind of monotheistic propaganda that everybody has already heard before with Christianity, or threatening violence.
I supported removing the Taliban before 9/11, because of their inhuman policies, but with the corruption in government I’m wondering if it’ll be worth anything even if we do keep the Taliban out. I hope it is worth something, and not for any imperialist reasons, but for the Afghan people, and those who’ve given their lives trying to improve the situation.
Peter
Sorry Soros but a muslim failure to integrate is not a worldwide pattern. here in canada the vast majority of muslims immigrants have integrated into our society quite well.
Germany’s experience is instructive. If you bar citizenship to immigrants, to their children and even to their grandchildren the message is “we don’t actually want you to integrate”.
Every group of immigrants faces similar arguments from some people – they are stealing “our” jobs, competing for housing etc. If the jobs regularly go unfilled they’re not yours, you obviously don’t want them.
jim evans
There are no jobs Peter…it`s nonsense…we could halve our population and live to a much higher standard of living without all that “extra labour” which in truth is often doing tasks no one wants done or servicing the immigrant community that we don`t really need anyway.
It`s more “growth” nonsense…growing an economy when we don`t need it and overpopulating our territory with people who exhaust resources like and housing water….and pollute our environment with their “industry” and domestic waste.
Let`s get real!The Christians and Muslims simply procreate with one thing in mind…getting rid of the non believers and taking over your land in the name of their faith …so they can raise more generations of brainwashed followers who flood out of their original territory and take over the land of those who live peaceably within their own borders.
If you try to engage them in sensible talk about population control they tell you “God will provide” for all those new Haitians or Rwandans or residents of Calcutta or Manilla or wherever else their irresponsible “faiths” take hold.
We can`t go on like this….and we can`t let brainwashed dreamers decide our grandchildren`s future either….whether that`s the Pope or Soros or Osama Bin Laden or anyone else who refuses to take a sensible rational approach to the fact that in my lifetime the population of the world has got three times larger!
What will happen when London is like Haiti? will the immigrants stop coming?Perhaps…..if Britain has turned into a hell-hole and all decent infrastructure and public services have disappeared under the pressure of impossible levels of demand…and Britain is like the USA ..or Rwanda.
Hi There
Or Oklahoma.
Mark Breza
Hey Jim Evans they didn’t want your colonialism
when U came to their countries.
How could U expect them never to come to your country.
U dont live in a vacuum !!
jim evans
Gosh! There`s a lot more interest in this subject (immigration and cultural cleansing)than anything else on this website! What a surprise!
Could it have anything to do with the total absence of any rational debate about it between the electable political parties….or is it even more deep-seated than that?
Possibly the sense among ordinary europeans that they are sharing the fate of many of their ancestral relatives and being driven from Europe by the money men …..who want to replace the indigenous “idle and feckless chavs” with hungrier less demanding slaves of the sort they have in China and India?
It`s happened in the British Isles many times before
jim evans
Mark in Breza…I have never been to Bosnia and demanded to live at the expense of (or in competition with) the Bosnian people…so I can`t see what you are complaining about.And its a long time since we had an empire Mark.
If you want to complain about empires have a talk with Russians or the German-run EU.
Hi There
Well, I’ve never been to Spain. Or to Albuquerque. However, I did pump gas in London — London, Ohio.
I declare this discussion…over.
Chuck
“but he is an “intelligence determinist” and is surely wrong to link current performance outcomes in German society, and indeed the whole system of social stratification, so directly with underlying intelligence levels.”
Mr. Goodhart surely in not a psychometrician; where he, he surely would know that one can link many performance differences and much social stratification to underlying differences in general intelligence. And Flynn surely would agree. Whether the problem with the Turks is linked to differences in general intelligence is something that can easily be investigated — the research I have seen suggests that it is — This, of course, is an issue separate from that of the etiology of these differences, something which is rather difficult to investigate.
Frank Ellis
David Goodhart’s review of this all important book in Prospect Magazine fails to do justice to Sarrazin’s achievement. The obvious comparison is not, as Goodhart would have us believe with Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, it is with Charles Murray’s and Richard J. Herrnstein’s, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). It is also quite clear that Sarrazin has carefully studied the work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, specifically, Richard Lynn’s 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). It is, among other things, Sarrazin’s mastery of the secondary literature that makes Deutschland schafft sich ab so effective in demolishing the cult of multiculturalism.
The way Sarrazin was treated by Germany’s equivalent of the Guardian-reading classes underlines yet again the totalitarian impulses of those, who, without any mandate, want to impose multiculturalism on the indigenous populations of Europe. Angela Merkel’s public acknowledgement that multiculturalism has failed merely confirms what has been obvious for the last forty years all over Western Europe. Why has it taken so long for Europe’s politicians to face up to the truth? And why indeed do they hate the truth?
Goodhart claims that: ‘Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany’. This is a ridiculous claim. The gap is just as wide in Britain and not just between published opinion and public opinion. In Britain, as in Germany, politically correct activists in the broadcast media endlessly lie about the real costs and damage inflicted by multiculturalism. On issues of race, the scale and nature of black crime, multiculturalism and legal/illegal immigration the BBC and universities simply cannot be trusted. There is nothing liberal about liberalism either in Germany or in Britain. Given Germany’s National-Socialist past, the Germans have something of an excuse for the zeal with which they have pushed the United Nations ideology of multiculturalism. But for how much longer are Germans going to torment themselves about 1933-1945 and to tolerate being harassed and bullied by xenophile fanatics? Nie wieder and ich bin Deutscher und bin stolz darauf can happily coexist. It is high time that Germany’s nation-hating left woke up to this fact.
Goodhart is wrong to suggest that indigenous Germans are in any way to blame for the failure of Turks and other immigrants to integrate. Sarrazin makes it quite clear that the reason masses of immigrants from Third World slums and failing states are attracted to Germany has nothing to do with Germany’s cultural and intellectual achievements and everything to do with the fantastic levels of welfare provision available in Germany and a standard of living that would be impossible in their own countries. Without the welfare handouts these immigrants would not have come to Germany and they would not have stayed. They would have found another host.
‘The intelligence story’, to use Goodhart’s words, offers by far the most convincing explanation for the failure of Muslims to meet German standards in Germany. In the case of Britain, it explains a whole range of undesirable outcomes associated with the underclass (immigrant Muslims and blacks and indigenous whites), as demonstrated in The Bell Curve. On a global scale the low mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africa – circa 70 – explains why so much of Africa exists in a wretched and savage condition. That Muslims tend to come from ‘poor, traditional societies’ is part of the problem, but Goodhart explains nothing by telling us this. Why are these societies poor and backward? Why is Sub-Saharan Africa poor and backward, despite its vast mineral wealth? What do unskilled Turkish and African immigrants bring to an advanced First World economy such as Germany? Germany’s left will claim that indigenous Germans are being enriched by the diversity. So what is it like for an indigenous German to go through parts of Berlin and other German cities experiencing all this life-enhancing diversity? Does he feel enriched? Sarrazin suggests otherwise: ‘A German going through these districts would feel like a foreigner in his own country’ (Deutschland schafft sich ab, p.300). I know the feeling Herr Sarrazin. Even if the Christian Democratic right refused to accept that Turkish guest workers would not go back to Turkey, as Goodhart claims, they bear no responsibility for the failure of Turks to adapt to Germany. That failure falls squarely on the Turks themselves and the nation-hating agenda of Germany’s middle-class left. Of them Goodhart notes: ‘As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent’. I wonder whether Germany’s home-grown nation haters would object to German immigrants in Russia being expected to learn the language of the NKVD.
Sarrazin’s arguments on IQ and the consequences of Germany’s mean IQ being lowered – a demonstrable dysgenic effect – are not provocative. They are well founded. Sarrazin offers data and explanations which the left in all Western states are too frightened to contemplate because leftists despite all the public propaganda know that all men are not created equal; that some people are more intelligent than others and that this has real-world consequences which cannot be explained by racism and other ad hoc explanations. In chapter 7 (Immigration and Integration: Expect More, Offer Less) Sarrazin, contrary to Goodhart’s assertion, does provide a comprehensive definition of the underclass in its Muslim variant and one that would be instantly recognizable in Britain. Its main features are as follows: (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 (Deutschland schafft sich ab, p.264). Strip out the Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism and we have most of the features of the immigrant black underclass as well.
Germany is very fortunate that it has produced a man of Herr Sarrazin’s calibre. His moral courage and intellectual ability are obvious. In Britain we have no politician of comparable ability and honesty who will tell the truth about multiculturalism and its dire consequences. On these issues our own political class is cowardly and mendacious. In writing this book Sarrazin has rendered his fellow Germans a great service: and not just his fellow Germans. Deutschland schafft sich ab is also an absolute must read for all the white, indigenous populations of Europe who are being racially, culturally and physically dispossessed in their ancient homelands, who are, in other words, being consigned to oblivion.
jim evans
Frank Ellis…it`s a joy to read some common sense on this issue…..thank you.
However,I think it is now abundantly clear that the USA provides the template for our brave new global capitalist world …and the powerful use their influence to promote:
1)The sort of virtual one party capitalist/globalist ersatz “democratic” governments we have in America and Britain.
2)Mass immigration and multiculturalism of a sort that gives capitalists free reign to undermine and disempower indigenous organised labour.
3)A globalist “mediaocracy” (or New Inquisition) that uses the power of the media to promote ideas like free markets deregulation open borders multiculturalism miscellaneous “faiths” (or religious delusions) and regime change….while they actively persecute nationalists (unless they are Irish or Israeli or other favoured groups) non-believers socialists,etc.
Their power is so great that we can think and say what ever we like (however scientically valid) and it won`t make any significant difference to the spread of multiracialism and mass immigration.
Politics and economics are not a democratic rational process where we sit about in a permanent global brains trust thinking up the ideal future and then implementing it in a deliberate thoughtful way.
The powerful write the future in ways they want it to happen….genetics and IQ and “social science” are their tools… not the arbiter of what they do….or (sadly)of the knowledge we are allowed to have via the media and politics.
Hi There
I thought I told you guys to shut up.
Tuc Brinton
The real questions are:
1 Is Thilo Sarrazin lowering the intelligence of German society?
2 Is there something wrong with the German educating system that it can produce such buffoons as Sarrazin?
3 If he so lacking in intelligence that he can only make a living by pandering to people even more intellectually-challened than himself?
4 Where does he plan to site the first Concentration Camp for Muslims?
C. Nutrio
You say that given the vast timescales over which evolutionary pressures usually operate, the complexities of genetics, and the slipperiness of the concept of intelligence, this kind of argument is at best highly speculative. Those three reasons are the usual fallacies of those who deny the biological differences in intelligence. First, many recent works in genetics show that humankind is evolving much faster than previously thought. Second, something can be complex but at the same time, be determined by a rich network of genes. That happens with height, for instance. Concerning the concept of intelligence, it is not slippery at all, since it has been correlated succesfully with g, with income, with beauty, with health, with myopia… with so many things… those correlations would be higly improbable if it was just nonsense. Last but not least, remember that ashkenazi jews are just 0.2% of global population, but they have got about 30% of Nobel prizes… is that sliperry too?