[Bret L]

The Immigration Debate Opens Up (Maybe) In Europe

[Peter Brimelow writes: Nearly forty years ago, I was immensely
impressed with The New Totalitarians a brilliant study of Swedish
political culture by Roland Huntford, making the point that
totalitarianism, in the sense of complete political control of
society, can be brought about by bureaucracy as well as brute force.
(To my amazement, this book’s influence on my own book on Canada, The
Patriot Game, is cited—currently—in its Wikipedia entry.) This
continues in Sweden to this day—while editing Rafael Koski’s article
today I read that the leader of a Swedish political party may be
prosecuted merely for writing an article critical of immigration—and
it is plainly what is now happening, with regard to immigration and
much, in Europe at large. Indeed, the British government’s current
drive to force the anti-immigration British National Party to admit
immigrant minorities to membership is the very essence of
totalitarianism: no private sphere can be allowed; in Mussolini’s
words “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
against the state”. But nothing grows to the sky, and Koski here
argues that the New Totalitarianism is running into trouble both in
Scandinavia and its ground zero, Germany.)

By Rafael Koski

"Germany is one of the most politically repressed countries in Europe when it comes to debate about immigration. Titles like The Death of the West appear only in underground publications, not in best-selling books by TV personalities like Pat Buchanan.

But recently there has been a sign that political correctness is
relaxing of: Thilo Sarrazin, a former Social Democratic Party
politician who is currently an officer of the central bank, launched a
deliberate and successful challenge in a September interview in the
left-wing Lettre International. [Thilo Sarrazin im Gespräch]

Mr. Sarrazin took up many themes that are uncomfortable to the PC
regime: the unwillingness of immigrants to learn the language or seek
work, high criminality, open hostility to the native people—he even
spoke about the inherent qualities of the immigrants, comparing the
I.Q. of Turks or Arabs to that of Jews from Eastern Europe, a wave of
whom came to Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Of course, the R[acist]-bomb was immediately used against Sarrazin.
But this time it didn't really work. The leader of the Jewish Council
of Germany had to back off his statement comparing Sarrazin's mindset
to that of Hitler's because of criticism from other Jews. Der Spiegel,
the leading weekly magazine and a bulwark of political correctness,
had to acknowledge last week that the debate opened by Sarrazin's
provocation was "long overdue". Needless to say, the Spiegel article
didn't really consider exactly who was responsible for the delay in
the immigration debate.

"The alternative media of the internet have revealed the discrepancy
between public opinion and published opinion that is so wide it can no
longer be ignored." So says André Lictschlag of the German libertarian
journal eigentümlich frei in an interview appearing in Junge
Freiheit. ["Wie moderner Terrorismus" October 17, 2009]. [VDARE.COM
note: See Paul Gottfried’s 2002 article on Junge Freiheit here).

Lictschlag sees the Sarrazin case as a sea-change, because this time
Germany’s PC regime did not succeed in destroying Sarrazin’s career
(although he has lost some of his functions at the central bank), and
he received a lot of public support.

This is not just an isolated occurrence in PC-paralyzed Europe. In
Finland, Helsinki University Professor (of Russian studies) Timo
Vihavainen, the author of an essay collection entitled The Death of
the West, was recently (October 4) interviewed in depth by Helsingin
Sanomat, the leading newspaper in the country. The theme of this
interview, which generated a lot of discussion, were the dogmas of
multiculturalism and the impoverishment of Finnish political culture
under this secular fundamentalism.[Professor Timo Vihavainen: Finnish
intelligentsia silent on immigration issues, by Jaakko Lyytinen,
Helsingin Sanomat, Finnish Original]

The concessions made by Der Spiegel in the Sarrazin case and by
Helsingin Sanomat in the Vihavainen case, show that the European Main
Stream Media, which has enjoyed hegemony over public opinion building
and wants to retain it in the future, now has to accommodate these
viewpoints and try to neutralize them by citing so-called expert
opinions, rather than just ignoring or demonizing.

I believe that this development is not simply a reaction to mass, non-
traditional immigration. In Finland, the number of Muslim immigrants
is under one percent of the population, but in the recent elections to
the European parliament, an anti-immigration party received 10 % of
the vote. In contrast, Germany has an estimated 5–8 % Muslims in its
population, but there has been no organized political voice against
immigration (yet). So it is simplifying to speak only of an
anticipated backlash.

Rather I'd say that it is the 2008 financial crisis that is
discrediting the current Establishment. The legitimacy of Western
social democratic regimes after WWII has rested to a large extent in
the advancement in material well-being of the people. Now that the
financial crisis, still without end in sight, has shown that the
advances in wealth of the last 20 years or so have been illusionary,
the legitimacy of the whole political system is in question.

Europeans are opening up to debate, challenging what they thought was
self-evident. They have less to lose—and therefore can challenge
political correctness."



http://www.vdare.com/misc/091019_koski.htm