German racist and pro-capitalist demagogy

This video is called Thilo Sarrazin: Eight Indians Attacked by a Racist German Nazi Mob.

By Ulrich Rippert in Germany:

German media spreads nationalism by right-wing demagogues

17 January 2011

The deepening international economic crisis has led to rapid social and political decline across the globe. Austerity programmes abound. Poverty and social misery are increasing dramatically. Living conditions are becoming intolerable for many people who are attempting to find a way to defend themselves. …

An attempt is now being made in Germany to divert the mounting insecurity and fear of sections of the middle class into right-wing channels. Racist and nationalist demagogues have received an unexpected boost from the media and are strutting the stage ever more loudly, boldly and aggressively. They garner enthusiastic support from numerous newspaper editors and radio commentators, and are courted on countless television chat shows. A political climate is thus being created for the emergence of a new right-wing party.

When Thilo Sarrazin published his book Germany Abolishes Itself last summer, presenting the burgeoning social crisis as a result of “foreign infiltration” by Muslim immigrants, he was applauded by leading social democrats, intellectuals and media representatives.

Sarrazin, who served in the Berlin city government as finance senator for many years and bears major responsibility for the social decline of entire neighbourhoods, ascribes increasing poverty and its associated social problems to immigrants’ allegedly below-average intelligence and their supposed unwillingness to integrate. He remains a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Although he demonstrably interprets statistics falsely and uses pseudo-biological arguments, which have been repeatedly repudiated since the Nuremberg racial laws and the Nazis’ eugenics programme, he is celebrated by some sections of the media as a national hero daring to confront a taboo subject.

His book first appeared in instalments in influential newspapers and was then promoted with great media fanfare. Finally reports about the book’s high sales figures were taken as evidence of Sarrazin’s success in capturing popular opinion in the formulation of his racist theories.

A few months later, Hans-Olaf Henkel published a nationalist diatribe directed against the euro. In a book entitled Rescue Our Money, the former president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) agitated against the Greek population, accusing Greeks of “taking it easy at our expense”. The subheading of his book is “Germany is Being Sold Out―How the Euro Fraud Threatens our Prosperity”.

While Sarrazin limited himself in his 460-page-long book to disseminating the ultra right-wing and neo-Nazi slogan “Foreigners out!” Hans-Olaf Henkel goes a step further. Implicitly invoking the power politics of the German Reich (empire), he demands that Germany must be prepared to act with more self assurance and assert itself in Europe more forcefully. The euro should not be used to harmonise Europe, but to dominate it. He combines poisonous attacks on working people―referring to them disparagingly as “the little people”―and demands sharper cuts in social services, with calls to use Germany’s economic strength to make other countries bow to submission.

He writes: “From the moment the euro was introduced, there broke out in Greece the usual competitive auction”, which he claims also occurred in other countries. “In this kind of competition, every political party wanted to take credit when it came to ‘Who is the most socially minded?’ ‘Who is the most worker-friendly?’ ‘Who has the biggest heart for the little people?’” Sponsored by the “solidarity of the euro”, “charity without end” broke out in Athens (page 107).

Henkel demands an immediate end to this “transfer union”. All payments to indebted countries in Europe should be stopped immediately. This would require the immediate abolition of the common currency in its current form. The indebted countries should be forced to leave the strong euro and join forces in a weak euro zone―” One might call it the southern euro”, he says. He goes on to suggest that the economically strong euro countries should unite under the leadership of Germany in a “northern euro”.

That such a splitting of the euro would have a devastating impact on the German export economy; that German industry has dramatically increased its exports to European countries―including Greece, whose most important trading partner is Germany―since the introduction of the euro nine years ago; that the money from the euro rescue package does not benefit the Greek population, but goes directly into the accounts of German and international banks, which nevertheless demand drastic welfare cuts from the Greek government―all this the former president of the BDI knows full well, but it does not interest him.

Hans-Olaf Henkel is the Bank of America’s Senior Advisor in Germany.