Sea Change?

Risible Claims

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel has pronounced the death of multi-culturalism in Germany. Well, maybe not the death, but she has argued for its death penalty.

This may be significant. After all, it is Germany and Germany has been a cesspool of simpering progressivist nonsense ever since the guilt imputed to the nation in the wake of the Nazis. Be welcoming to all. Never, ever discriminate or distinguish. Inclusivity is fundamental to human decency. Soft despotic socialism is necessary to prevent any possibility of alienation by any group so as to foster extremist bitterness--and so on.

One of the secular policies promulgated to ensure inclusivity has been multi-culturalism--the recognition and protection of all cultures and sub-cultures and sub-sub-cultures. All have equal rights to exist and to be protected (and funded and supported). Now Angela has concluded that multi-culturalism is a failure in the reich. Not only that, she has tied Germany to Christian cultural values (choke, choke). She has declared that "if you don't like it, lump it. Leave."

Germany's attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country's immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values. Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made "more stupid" by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

"Multikulti", the concept that "we are now living side by side and are happy about it," does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin. "This approach has failed, totally," she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany's culture and values. "We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don't accept them don't have a place here," said the chancellor.

It is clear that Islamic immigrants are within in the purview of her remarks.

"Subsidising immigrants" isn't sufficient, Germany has the right to "make demands" on them, she added, such as mastering the language of Goethe and abandoning practices such as forced marriages.

Merkel spoke a week after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which they pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany's 2.5-million-strong Turkish community.

Even the Turkish Prime Minister reprimanded Islamic immigrants in Germany for forming ghettos.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul, in a weekend interview, also urged the Turkish community living in Germany to master the language of their adopted country. "When one doesn't speak the language of the country in which one lives that doesn't serve anyone, neither the person concerned, the country, nor the society," the Turkish president told the Suedeutsche Zeitung.

"That is why I tell them at every opportunity that they should learn German, and speak it fluently and without an accent. That should start at nurseries."

We agree with Merkel that multi-culturalism will always fail. In effect, multi-culturalism is a paternalistic elitist doctrine that proceeds on a suppressed premise that culture and religion are a superficial phenomenon that, in the final analysis, are unimportant or trivial. All cultures can, therefore, be tolerated and welcomed and accepted because they are irrelevant to one's core being and essential humanity. Culture, therefore, is regarded as being in the same category as race, which it is not. Race and sex do not determine how people think, feel and act.  Culture does.  Culture informs one's behaviour and beliefs: it conditions one's acts and identity in both public and private.  To suggest that race is in the same category as culture is an informal logical fallacy of category confusion.

This is a major blunder and misrepresentation of what makes up a human being. At the driving formative heart of a human being is his intellect, emotions and the will. All three are conditioned and shaped by culture, and culture is nothing more than religion externalised. Race (that is, genetics) makes no distinct formative contribution whatsoever. Race may be skin deep. Culture is definitely not. True multi-culturalism, when applied in the public sphere, leads inevitably to the trivialisation of all cultures, except the culture of progressivism or secular humanism. It is a bold attempt to one set of cultural beliefs and values over all other cultures and beliefs, relegating and trivialising them in the process.

However, we suspect that Merkel is pandering to her political constituency. Her appeals to Christian values are disingenuous. Germany has been at the forefront of a secular humanistic subborning of the Christian faith ever since the Enlightenment. To claim that Germany draws upon and reflects Christian values is risible.