How sweet to hear those words on the radio today, broadcast by the BBC. It was a fine moment to hear the leader of a major European nation admit that one of the most cherished liberal ideologies hasn’t worked out at all in actual practice.
It’s a beautiful fantasy, that all of humanity can join hands kumbaya style because all cultures form an enriching mosaic of diversity…
Of course, successful communities are based upon shared values, not the most widely divergent cultures that can be jammed within national boundaries. Diversity causes conflict, not harmony.
Merkel says German multicultural society has failed, BBC, October 16, 2010
Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have “utterly failed”, Chancellor Angela Merkel says.
In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called “multikulti” concept – where people would “live side-by-side” happily – did not work.
Mrs Merkel’s comments come amid recent outpourings of strong anti-immigrant feeling from mainstream politicians.
A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany 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 the 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… We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality.“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.”
Merkel’s remarks follow a fascinating couple months in Germany, where Thilo Sarrazin’s book critical of immigration from certain cultures created great consternation among elites and a senior German politician called for an end to Muslim immigration.
Below, a video showing the absolute chaos present in a German school where immigrants are present in large numbers.
