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Germany never changes... German leader says multiculturalism has failed.

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  • Germany never changes... German leader says multiculturalism has failed.

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    BERLIN (AFP) – Germany's attempts to create a multi-cultural society in which people from various cultural backgrounds live together peacefully have failed, Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.
    "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.
    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.
    Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, CSU, told the same party meeting Friday that the two Union parties were "committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one.
    "'Multikulti' is dead," he said.
    While warning against "immigration that weighs down on our social system", Merkel said that Germany needed specialists from overseas to keep the pace of its economic development.
    According to the head of the German chamber of commerce and industry, Hans Heinrich Driftmann, Germany is in urgent need of about 400,000 engineers and qualified workers.
    "The lack is causing a loss of growth of about one percent," he said in an interview.
    Jewish leaders in Germany meanwhile warned that German society and democracy were under threat from extremists.
    A recent expert study should prompt the government to act against antidemocratic ideas, the secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer, told the Rheinpfalz am Sonntag weekly.
    The study, by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank, showed that more than one third (34.3 percent) of those surveyed believed Germany's 16 million immigrants or people with foreign origins came to the country for the social benefits.
    Around the same number (35.6 percent) think Germany is being "over-run by foreigners" and more than one in 10 called for a "Fuehrer" to run the country "with a strong hand".
    Thirty-two percent of people said they agreed with the statement: "Foreigners should be sent home when jobs are scarce."
    Far-right attitudes are found not only at the extremes of German society, but "to a worrying degree at the centre of society," the report noted.
    More than half (58.4 percent) of the 2,411 people polled thought the around four million Muslims in Germany should have their religious practices "significantly curbed."
    The integration of Muslims has been a hot button issue since August when a member of Germany's central bank sparked outrage by saying the country was being made "more stupid" by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants with headscarves.
    The banker, Thilo Sarrazin, has since resigned but his book on the subject -- "Germany Does Itself In" -- has flown off the shelves, and polls showed considerable sympathy for some of his views.
    Kramer also criticised CSU leader Seehofer for ideas which he said were "not only petty but outright irresponsible" and slammed the current immigration debate as "hysterical".

    Just more European racism... We truly take for granted things like freedom of religion and democracy here in the US and assume that our fellow first worlders value the same things. Guess not.

    1 in 10 want a Fuhrer!
    "Flutie was better than Kelly, Elway, Esiason and Cunningham." - Ben Kenobi
    "I have nothing against Wilson, but he's nowhere near the same calibre of QB as Flutie. Flutie threw for 5k+ yards in the CFL." -Ben Kenobi

  • #2
    i thought you'd support a fuhrer speer...
    "The Christian way has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found to be hard and left untried" - GK Chesterton.

    "The most obvious predicition about the future is that it will be mostly like the past" - Alain de Botton

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    • #3
      Europe
      Captain of Team Apolyton - ISDG 2012

      When I was younger I thought curfews were silly, but now as the daughter of a young woman, I appreciate them. - Rah

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      • #4
        Originally posted by OzzyKP View Post
        Europe
        I mean really can you believe it? I could never even fathom an American president ever saying something like "that whole multiculturalism and diversity thing... yeah, abject failure. We've given up on that"

        Like holy crap!
        "Flutie was better than Kelly, Elway, Esiason and Cunningham." - Ben Kenobi
        "I have nothing against Wilson, but he's nowhere near the same calibre of QB as Flutie. Flutie threw for 5k+ yards in the CFL." -Ben Kenobi

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        • #5
          If you can't understand this, Alby, then you aren't very understanding of other cultures.
          If there is no sound in space, how come you can hear the lasers?
          ){ :|:& };:

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          • #6
            The USA is something of an aberration where "multiculturalism" is concerned. We, along with Canada, Australia and maybe a handful of other young nations, are a place where nationality and ethnicity are, at least in theory, completely divorced. American identity is largely based on acceptance of a set of abstract ideas or principles. That's really not the usual situation around the world.

            EDIT: Which isn't to say that anti-immigrant backlashes are good, but HC does have a point here.
            1011 1100
            Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

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            • #7
              I think Americans have a hard time understanding why saying Germany should be inhabited by Germans dosen't sound evil to the average European. And saying Pakistan should be inhabited by a Muslim majority doesn't seem evil to the average Pakistani. In both cases this is not a decision people can make for them, it is something they have a right to decide themselves.

              This isnot a European thing. Think Japan, Iran, South Korea, Taiwan, Ethiopia, Turkey ect. this is the default human norm all over the planet, former WASPy countries are more or less freaks in this regard, perhaps with France also being a universalist state.


              European countries don't really have ideas to base themselves around. Why have a Poland a Roumania a Denmerk if they are all based on and only on ideas like universal human rights, democracy, rule of law, multiculturalism, welfare state, high taxation ect. why not just apply for US statehood or just absolve national sovereignty in favour of some Transcontinental spanning Liberal state? Why bother preserving the local languages?


              Deep down despite constant scolding from the EU most European citizens do expect fellow citizens to share the same nationality. And yes nationality is synonymous with the ethnic group. Someone's nationality means being part first and foremost part of a nation not a state. Austro-Hungarians did think of themselves as Austro-Hungarians but when asked for their nationality they would state German, Hungarian, Serbian, ect. in also if you asked some inhabitants of a region of Western Russia a century or more ago what their nationality was they would say Polish not Russian.
              Last edited by Heraclitus; October 17, 2010, 22:25.
              Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road “change.”
              The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense.
              The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Al B. Sure! View Post
                I mean really can you believe it? I could never even fathom an American president ever saying something like "that whole multiculturalism and diversity thing... yeah, abject failure. We've given up on that"

                Like holy crap!
                Let's impose American norms on the rest of the world. Now I see why you want to become a marine and kill afghans.

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                • #9
                  Nice. Defending racism as a multicultural right.. ironic that for the sake of multiculturalism you support the opposition to multiculturalism.
                  "Flutie was better than Kelly, Elway, Esiason and Cunningham." - Ben Kenobi
                  "I have nothing against Wilson, but he's nowhere near the same calibre of QB as Flutie. Flutie threw for 5k+ yards in the CFL." -Ben Kenobi

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                  • #10
                    Killing Brown people until they agree to be just like us





                    Hey what if I let the Brown people live and live as they wish if they promise not to bother me? What if I spent some of that surplus money on alleviating poverty, lowering taxes or actual defence programs?
                    Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road “change.”
                    The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense.
                    The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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                    • #11
                      In Argentina we received many thousands of muslim immigrants in the late XIX and early XIX century, and most ended up being absorbed and with Catholic descendants.

                      I think that the main reason for that were 2:
                      130 years ago the cultural distance between a syrian peasant and a spanish/italian/latin american peasant were much smaller than nowadays, they were all peasants, their wives would wear scarves on the head, and were socially conservative.

                      The other is that they were completely isolated and surrounded by catholics, in the other extreme of the world, so the pressure against apostatizing was very weak.

                      Nowadays that is impossible in Europe, the middle east is right next to europe and the low classes of the middle east (or most middle easterners perhaps) are very different from modern euro westerners

                      The problem is muslims, not multiculturalism, I don't think the Germans have any problem with the Vietnamese
                      I need a foot massage

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                      • #12
                        I think the problem is the number of muslims, the fact that more are showing up all the time and ethnic Germans aren't breeding fast enough.
                        I'm consitently stupid- Japher
                        I think that opinion in the United States is decidedly different from the rest of the world because we have a free press -- by free, I mean a virgorously presented right wing point of view on the air and available to all.- Ned

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                        • #13
                          I'm not convinced that the problem lies fundamentally with Muslims, except that there are so many of them. Within the group unhelpfully labeled Muslims there are a lot of variations. It includes Urban Turks from Istanbul as well as rural "Turks" from around Diyarbakir. Brandy-drinking Bosniaks as well as khat-chewing Somalis, if you'll excuse my tone. Not to mention Christian Middle Easterners are almost as clannish and different from Westerners as the Muslims.

                          As for American exceptionalism, it "works" only at the cost of segregated cities with razor-sharp racial divides, and the world's largest prison population to enforce it. But social darwinism apparently works for you as you've always lived it and don't know a different life. Europeans still remember their traditional, homogeneous, high-trust societies mostly devoid of those same problems you have "solved" in this pragmatic manner, and are suffering a transformational crisis.

                          Denying that there have been tremendous changes in Europe in a short time due to immigration, globalization and inter-European integration (anti-immigration sentiment often goes hand in hand with EU skepticism) is impossible, and there is a need to discuss it honestly. What Merkel appears to be doing is trying to take command of the discussion and not abandoning it to the fringes of politics. From one perspective it could be seen as an outcome of the traditional parties' fear of losing control of the direction of politics.

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Al B. Sure! View Post
                            I mean really can you believe it? I could never even fathom an American president ever saying something like "that whole multiculturalism and diversity thing... yeah, abject failure. We've given up on that"

                            Like holy crap!
                            Well, politicians admitting failure is exceptional.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Heraclitus View Post
                              I think Americans have a hard time understanding why saying Germany should be inhabited by Germans dosen't sound evil to the average European. And saying Pakistan should be inhabited by a Muslim majority doesn't seem evil to the average Pakistani. In both cases this is not a decision people can make for them, it is something they have a right to decide themselves.
                              I don't know about evil, but it certainly sounds disappointing and verging on racism to this average European.
                              Jon Miller: MikeH speaks the truth
                              Jon Miller: MikeH is a shockingly revolting dolt and a masturbatory urine-reeking sideshow freak whose word is as valuable as an aging cow paddy.
                              We've got both kinds

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