Thread: Merkel says German multicultural society has failed

Merkel says German multicultural society has failed

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German"
Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.

The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany.

A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".

The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for its social benefits.

Foreign workers

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country."

She added: "We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality."


Angela Merkel took pains to say immigrants are welcome.

The words "utterly failed" are very strong, but there are also nuanced messages about the usefulness of immigrants in a country that needs skilled labour.

She is pitching it very carefully, with important elections coming up in the spring.

The tone is very important.

The chancellor is basically saying that Germany needs immigrants but immigrants need to do something to get into the society.

Germany's charged immigration debate
"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

In her speech in Potsdam, however, the chancellor made clear that immigrants were welcome in Germany.

She specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany", like Christianity and Judaism.

Mrs Merkel said: "We should not be a country either which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don't speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here."

Mounting debate

There has been intense debate about multiculturalism in Germany in recent months.

Correspondents say Mrs Merkel faces pressure from within her CDU and its allies to take a tougher stance and require immigrants to do more to adapt to German society.

Earlier this week, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, said it was "obvious that immigrants from different cultures like Turkey and Arab countries, all in all, find it harder" to integrate.


Earlier this month the chancellor held talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany's estimated 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.

The debate first heated up in August when Thilo Sarrazin, a senior official at Germany's central bank, said that "no immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime". Mr Sarrazin has since resigned.

Such recent strong anti-immigration feelings from mainstream politicians come amid an anger in Germany about high unemployment, even if the economy is growing faster than those of its rivals, our correspondent says.

He adds that there also seems to be a new strident tone in the country, perhaps leading to less reticence about no-go-areas of the past.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451

Merkel says German multiculturalism has failed

By Sabine Siebold

POTSDAM, Germany | Sun Oct 17, 2010 12:46am BST

POTSDAM, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society has "utterly failed," Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday, adding fuel to a debate over immigration and Islam polarising her conservative camp.

Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel said allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating had not worked in a country that is home to some four million Muslims.

"This (multicultural) approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin.

Merkel faces pressure from within her CDU to take a tougher line on immigrants who don't show a willingness to adapt to German society and her comments appeared intended to pacify her critics.

She said too little had been required of immigrants in the past and repeated her usual line that they should learn German in order to get by in school and have opportunities on the labour market.

The debate over foreigners in Germany has shifted since former central banker Thilo Sarrazin published a book accusing Muslim immigrants of lowering the intelligence of German society.

Sarrazin was censured for his views and dismissed from the Bundesbank, but his book proved highly popular and polls showed a majority of Germans agreed with the thrust of his arguments.

Merkel has tried to accommodate both sides of the debate, talking tough on integration but also telling Germans that they must accept that mosques have become part of their landscape.

She said on Saturday that the education of unemployed Germans should take priority over recruiting workers from abroad, while noting Germany could not get by without skilled foreign workers.

In a weekend newspaper interview, her Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU) raised the possibility of lowering barriers to entry for some foreign workers in order to fight the lack of skilled workers in Europe's largest economy.

"For a few years, more people have been leaving our country than entering it," she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "Wherever it is possible, we must lower the entry hurdles for those who bring the country forward."

The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) says Germany lacks about 400,000 skilled workers.

Yet Horst Seehofer, chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's sister party, has rejected any relaxation of immigration laws and said last week there was no room in Germany for more people from "alien cultures.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE69F19T20101016

Good to see that we are not the only ones with these troubles and the only ones waking up to the failure "multiculturalism" is.

Originally Posted by AmericanElizabeth

Good to see that we are not the only ones with these troubles and the only ones waking up to the failure "multiculturalism" is.

We are certainly not the only ones. ALL of Western Europe is experiencing this, and so is Russia. Its an outright assault on Western Civilization. Its not just our nation that is in danger of dying. It is all of the West that is in danger of falling.

What's that saying about some trying to ride on the coat tails?

Seems many of the third world nations can't get beyond their inner bickering, ethnic squabbling and corruption that they have not yet gotten to a point of success in their own nations, so they hitch a ride along with those who have, hoping it is easier to take over what is already established and successful.....and if not take it over for it's success, plunder it for the riches they can gain, while they suck it dry.

Time for those who have worked hard for the western worlds success, to fight back to keep what we, and our ancestors, have worked hard for.

Originally Posted by AmericanElizabeth

Time for those who have worked hard for the western worlds success, to fight back to keep what we, and our ancestors, have worked hard for.

Well said!!!!!!!

All you have to do Is study just a little bit on THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE,and you will begin to understand that we may have ALREADY PASSED the point of no return with regard to Illegal Immigration In the United States. Our so called representative government has failed to represent IT'S OWN CITIZENS. You can see the results of their misguided policies In your daily life EVERY DAY .... Uncontrolled ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION can and will destroy this country If It Is not stopped NOW

http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/cultu ... ation.html

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF AMERICA

By Frosty Wooldridge
January 30, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

By the time the Roman Empire died in 476 AD, few noticed, few cared and few stood up to do anything about it. If you look at America today, exactly the same events that collapsed the Romans accelerate within our borders in the early part of the 21st century.

Rome was a Republic that morphed into an empire. It began in Italy and quickly conquered most of the known world. Its power spread from the Middle East, Africa and most of Europe. Its armies numbered 300,000 soldiers that attacked lesser nations at will. But soon, the most powerful civilization on earth ruptured, bled and died.

Does this sound like the nation you live in? The United States was once a Republic, but today, our military bases penetrate as an empire in dozens upon dozens of countries around the world. Our president and Congress provoke wars on sovereign nations at will: Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kuwait, Iraq and potentially Iran. The United States morphs into world conquests without end. America hemorrhages with the same calamities that destroyed Rome.

In his brilliant book, “The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and Barbarians,â€

America in Decline - 2
Millennia-old "sanctuary" customs are now routinely ignored.
By Will Offensicht | October 11, 2010 This series focuses on less well-known signs that things are indeed coming apart. The goal is not to counsel despair; America is still the greatest country on earth, and as Adam Smith observed, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." The goal is to remind voters of the stakes involved while there's yet time to turn things around.
America has done a great deal of good for many generations of hard-working people. As a nation we became so well off that people from all over the world wanted to get in on it - that's why it's said that America is a nation of immigrants and why we have so much controversy about illegal immigrants who jump the queue.

Politicians seem to believe that our people have forgotten that our economic success was founded on individual liberty. As we gradually lose our liberties to a growing government, our economy declines. If it declines far enough, nobody will want to come here any more. This will solve our problem with illegal immigration, but we'll lose a whole generation of entrepreneurs who would work hard to pay lots of taxes to sustain our society if we'd let them.

With any decline comes many small signs that all is not well. We need to keep these things in mind to remind us that there are consequences when government involves itself in the economy.

The first article in this series pointed out that many states are allowing formerly-paved roads to revert to gravel as they had been 75 or 100 years ago. This saves the governmental entities money in the short term but it costs drivers a great deal of extra expense maintaining their cars. This is the sort of sign of decline we're looking for.

Medieval Rules of WarCivilization, and along with it law and order, essentially disappeared after the Western Roman Empire collapsed on September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain.

From that time forward, might essentially made right. Ordinary people had no recourse against bandits, thieves, or rapacious local rulers. Most people recognized that it would benefit everyone if some entity could enforce laws as the Romans had, but there were no entities powerful enough to do so.
The impetus to try to bring a bit of order to the darkness came from the church. Starting in the 11th century, the church undertook a long-term project of behavior modification and tried to promote a "code of chivalry." The idea was that anyone who was skilled in the use of weapons had a duty to God and to everyone else to follow certain rules which were designed to limit the horrors of war.

The code of chivalry forbade warriors to attack women, children, priests, peasants, or merchants. They were supposed to restrict hostilities to combatants and leave noncombatants alone.

One of the most important rules was that soldiers weren't supposed to attack the wounded. The rules said that wagons carrying wounded had to be clearly marked, and it was dirty pool to attack them. This tradition continues down to this day, somewhat - the Red Cross paints big crosses on their ambulances and hopes not to be shot at while trying to save lives.

The idea of not harming noncombatants was abandoned during WW II with the fire bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, London, Canterbury, and many other densely-populated cities as the concept of "total war" gained adherence. Even during the darkest days of total war, however, the thought of shooting deliberately at hospitals or ambulances was somehow not quite right. Hospitals were supposed to be places of healing, not places for the dealing of death.

This cultural code was so strong that it even had some influence over people who'd abandoned ordinary codes of ethics entirely - the criminals. Up until very recently, hospitals and churches in even the most dangerous inner-city combat zones were mostly immune from direct attack; people being chased or assaulted who managed to make it to sanctuary would not be pursued by their attackers, and even the lowest thug wouldn't attack a priest or doctor in uniform.

Open Season in Hospitals
Unfortunately, the longstanding tradition of the inviolability of hospitals has taken a beating of late. Mexican assassination squads routinely pursue their victims into hospitals when they don't kill them on the first attempt. This may seem like a far-away issue, but it's getting closer and closer to home.

I had a recent occasion to accompany someone to the emergency room of a downtown New England hospital. I hadn't been keeping up with the deterioration of our social consciousness, however, and I was shocked to find a sign just inside the door announcing that the emergency room was a "zero tolerance" zone for both violence and abuse. The sign announced in both English and Spanish that the hospital security forces had a direct line to the police station and would summon the police at the slightest sign of any disturbance.

To drive the point home, the emergency room wall had a glass panel which looked into a closet-sized room which housed a uniformed security guard. There was a small hole in the glass so we could talk to the guard. The glass wasn't quite as thick as the one-inch stuff I had seen in branch banks in tough Boston neighborhoods because it was protecting mere people instead of protecting money, but it looked plenty strong enough to deter most attacks on the guard while he called the cops.

An emergency room which needed a security guard to keep people from commiting violence against patients and healers!

It got worse inside. The place had the usual curtained rooms where they try to give patients some privacy, and counters with bandages, IVs, and the usual hospital paraphernalia. Right there on a counter was a pair of scissors. It was a perfectly ordinary pair of scissors, but it was chained to a cabinet! There seemed to be no need to chain down the more exotic and less easily pawned medial devices; the scissors, however, might grow legs or wind up in someone's chest where they didn't belong.

In our inner cities, hospitals are no longer respected as places for healing. They've become places for violence and theft.

What a decline! Even warriors in the Middle Ages knew to leave hospitals alone. When moralizers worry that we're heading towards a new Dark Age, they may be being over-optimistic.