The Axioms of PC Madness

Thilo Sarrazin is a best-selling author and former director of the Bundesbank who became controversial a few years ago in Germany due to his politically incorrect views on immigration and Islamization. He has just published a new book that is being relentlessly panned before it is even published, by people who have not even read it.

JLH has translated a brief interview with Mr. Sarrazin that was published earlier this month in Die Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung. The translator includes this note:

Thilo Sarrazin has done it again. This interview is about his third book — like the first, it has a title on which there will be a committee decision on how to render it into English (I just took my best shot) — but essentially it is about the PC-ness of the media, and the [ordure]-storm that is already building up. You may be amused to discover that, like the attacks on Diana West, this altercation too has at least one adamant critic who not only hates the book, but does not intend to read it.

The translated interview:

When the Only Thing That Matters is the Attitude

March 2, 2014

Thilo Sarrazin has recently published his new book on “virtue terrorism”, to which he immediately fell victim

With Germany Abolishes Itself and Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro, the former Berlin finance senator and ex-federal banker has, to be sure, produced two bestsellers, but he has also become an object of hate for the powerful. In the PAZ (Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung), he accounts for how he evaluates the debates about his book and what makes him think. Questions are put by Rebecca Bellano.

PAZ: Before The New Terrorism by Virtue — On Freedom of Expression in Germany has even appeared, journalists are lining up to trash it. The Tagesspiegel internet site, for instance, called it “a drawer-full of dangerous nonsense.” At the end, the author emphasizes that he doesn’t even want to read the book. How do you as an author deal with this attitude and the widespread hostility?

Thilo Sarrazin: Advance critical reviews by writers who admit they have not even read the book are both amusing and characteristic. Amusing because the reviewer is making himself laughable; characteristic because he confirms the media criticism I apply in the book. An attitudinal journalism, strong in its principles, will stop at nothing to discredit and ridicule questions and perspectives it opposes.

PAZ:In your latest publication, you basically take up all the statements you were criticized for, and confront your opponents with numbers and studies. Which of these subjects is especially important, that is, in which cases do you most want to convince the people?

Sarrazin: In my new book, I turn the tables and put myself in my opponents’ shoes. I formulate 14 axioms of the PC madness that is rampant in the media — all of them revolving around the ideology of equality. I first formulate each of these axioms with the greatest consistency from a pro position. This consistency vividly exposes their hollowness. Then I contrast this to the very different reality, and in this way, theories and analyses from the previous two books reappear. But it goes beyond that. Everything in the ideological viewpoint that I am critiquing is interconnected. That was especially enlightening for me.

PAZ: You write that — viewed historically — the collapse of societies because of their internal narrow-mindedness is the rule rather than the exception. What do you believe Germany will most likely founder on?

Sarrazin: We all know that we will die, but not when, how and why. This ignorance is also a blessing. The same is true for states, nations and societies. They are all finite and they will all go under sometime. Then something new will come along; the end of humanity is still far away. If you analyze such downfalls, the causes are seldom only military, but rather those internal blind spots which prevent a measured reaction to the challenges of the present and future. In Germany Abolishes Itself, I show how it could end for our country. I carefully avoid any prognosis. It is a little like medicine. Heavy smokers greatly endanger their health. Nonetheless, one must be cautious with the prognosis of lung cancer. Helmut Schmidt, for example, to whom I wish long life, will not foreseeably die from the effects of his cigarette smoking.

PAZ: You characterize the media as the custodians of a pseudo-reality. How should we understand that?

Sarrazin: I am criticizing a dominant trend, not the media in general. Where ideology and wishful thinking dominate, the processes of the healthy human intellect clog up and out comes a distorted picture of reality. Did you know that, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) definition of poverty, the percentage of poor in Italy is higher than in Romania, and in Germany higher than in the Czech Republic? This results from the concept of relative poverty — a product of the ideology of equality — and all the poverty reports in the German media are constructed on this concept. And in this process, the fact is obscured that a German “poor person,” by worldwide standards, is rich.

PAZ: How can you explain the fact that you write one bestseller after another and yet bring about no change in public opinion or in the voting habits of citizens (cf. the last national elections)?

Sarrazin: I don’t know if my new book will be a bestseller. Hoping for that would presumptuous, and it would also make me queasy to think that it would be possible to somehow affect the course of world history with a book. Marx’s Das Kapital may have altered the world, but certainly not for the better. The influence of a book on public opinion is more or less like a stone thrown into a lake. It is a great accomplishment if it is possible for a few seconds to see the resulting waves circle outward and eventually mix with the other waves. It is possible to speculate endlessly about causality in the real world. Sometimes a book can be like the sweep of a hummingbird’s wing in the Amazon basin, which ultimately causes the eruption of a volcano many thousands of kilometers away.

PAZ: How do you evaluate the public reaction to the referendum in Switzerland?

Sarrazin: The German media are sneering and insulting the majority of the Swiss people, because they failed to heed the higher wisdom of foreign commentators, and have made it clear that they themselves will decide who is allowed to live on Swiss land. Now it is clear to everyone that the participation of the people must be avoided at all costs, if European integration is to be pushed forward. After the rebellion of June 17, 1953, Bertolt Brecht said: “The people have lost the trust of the government. Would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one?”* It is wonderful how a great poet can bring things into focus.

*   Quote from Günter Grass’s 1966, play depicting Brecht in the theater, working on his production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, when the rebellion breaks out in the street and is brutally put down. Truer to Brecht’s character as Grass saw it than to the actual events. So, in a sense, the “great poet” is Grass.
 

24 thoughts on “The Axioms of PC Madness

    • I hate to say it, but there seems to be some kind of conspiracy that prevents Sarrazin’s books from being published in English translation.

      • There is absolutely no need for a conspiracy. The Radical left, the “muscle”*of the mainstream left, continually harasses, even assaults those publishing “illegal” books. Publishers are also afraid for negative publicity, their employees are afraid it will be difficult to get a job if they move on from their current employer. Perhaps a Muslim works at their office and they are afraid to even bring the subject up.

  1. “The media as the custodians of a pseudo-reality”.

    Good point. It makes me want to dust off my
    German and read the book.

    Another thing I observed about PC – political
    correctness is that the people who fall for it the
    most have a need to validate their own intellect.
    As it always has been, obedience to a dogma is
    the easiest way to feel validated.

    An natural antidote to PC should be a training in
    deduction, independent thinking, thus a basic science
    education, completed with reading the great authors
    of the past: the Greeks, Stoicism, the enlightenment
    authors, Nietzsche, etc.

    I became an atheist and a skeptic reading Diderot, at
    the tender age of 9. Since that time, I’ve been immunized
    against any form of PC.

    When I speak to my own countrymen, I find out that
    they never have heard of Diderot, all they know is trite
    spewed from TV. Never in the history of humanity has
    knowledge been more freely available: everything
    is now available with a few keystrokes, but instead people
    choose ignorance and frivolity.

    “Nous autres, civilisations, savons que nous sommes mortelles”
    (We, civilizations, know that we are mortal), was writing Paul
    Valery after the bloodbath of WWI.

    We have forgotten that lesson. Dark clouds are looming at the
    horizon. There will be a day of reckoning.

    • We choose different paths based on the same or similar information. You’re right that there is more information available than ever there was, but there is also far better access to banality and evil than was the case in the past. So given a choice, with that most wonderful gizmo, the computer, now available to most people the choice is pr0n…salacious material always wins. I’d recommend that you do a search for the stats, but you’d be inundated with ugly, vile stuff.

      Humanity is not very far along…we do a step forward a century maybe, but for every step we find better ways to kill one another. A crucial breakthrough for our development would be a way to really comprehend what a baby WANTS when he is crying non-stop for three hours. His anguish isn’t random but we have as yet no way to know what it is. When we reach that point, there is much hope for preventing the Hitlers and Stalins and Pol Pots…

      What makes one person an atheist can make another a theist…so far that’s random, too

      • “What makes one person an atheist can make another a theist…so far that’s random, too”

        God’s purposeful gift of free will enables people to make a free will choice of whether to be an atheist or a believer.

        Either way, God still exists – and the choice to choose God still exists.

    • Choosing atheism – which is the current Western culturally-approved fad religion of the moment – is the PC choice.

      In current Western society, an atheist will rarely lose any jobs or friends.

      • That’s a cynical view, Egghead. I’m a (reluctant*) atheist because religion seems to me nonsensical, and Christianity especially so (though not as much as Islam).

        *Not because I’m concerned for my personal survival, but I’d like to think human life had a purpose beyond being good to one another- though this alone is not an unworthy aim.

        • Yes, it is cynical, and that is sad since Christians believe in Scripture. In John, he says that God is love and that with God all things are possible.

          When we use terms like “will” it is handy to know that the faculty of the will is outside of direct human consciousness. We can develop our will, as we can any faculty, but that must be an indirect application. The medievalists understood that well. They would have found discussions of “will power” fatuous.

          It is unfortunate since Freud we’ve had to accommodate an understanding of the unconscious – i.e., knowing that our whole thinking and feeling processes aren’t open and available to us. We have sometimes to guess our motives when “commonsense” doesn’t supply an immediate answer. But as Pascal said, before Freud, the heart has its reasons that our Reason knows not of…

          Religious faith is often called a “gift”…I have no idea why my belief is so ‘easy’ and yours is not. But I am convinced that the foundation of your agnosticism, or whatever you’d call it, is no more accessible to your consciousness than the fundaments of my own belief can bet got at by me.

          I like Gabriel Marcel’s descriptions of his own journey from the atheism of his childhood to the conversion to Roman Catholicism in his maturity…he was a wise and obviously a loving man. One of the few times I spontaneously wept at the death of a stranger was when I found out he’d died some weeks previous to my finding out. Talk about a hole in my little universe…

          • From the Vatican: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a3.htm

            For the entire course of Western history, humans have debated (via religion and philosophy) the reality and meaning of free will.

            God is indeed love – and being love, God freely gives all humans the gift of free will leading to the ability to choose salvation through Jesus. Some accept and some refuse God’s gift of salvation – and such choices have consequences. Rebelling against God’s reality does NOT ultimately affect the reality.

            Freud was a fraud – a PC MC cult leader whose goal was to confuse Christian culture. It clearly worked. Freud’s work was fundamentally unscientific.

            To state that humans lack overt free will comes dangerously close to predeterminism – a belief in which, as we have clearly seen in modern times, leads to disbelief in God and an open embrace of atheism – to the detriment of God and Christians.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predeterminism

            http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

            http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm

          • Freud may or may not have been a fraud. Whatever. His body of work, which could reasonably be paralleled in terms of its relativity to Einstein’s ideas on space and time. But fraud or true, his notion of the “unconscious” is with us until some other theorist comes up with a more riveting explanation for the things that lie outside direct experience.

            Roberto Assagioli was an Italian doctor who wrote extensively about the Will. He had a very good track record for “healing the will” of addicts that others had given up on as incurable. He didn’t attack the will directly, but (among other things) had his patients spend hours a day writing passages from Scripture or something similar. Whatever they chose as having particular meaning to their situation, they were required to write thousands and thousands of times. (This wasn’t their only work, but it was the most remarked upon, both by cured patients later and by those who observed their treatments). One man in particular described how his own work with a Psalm changed him permanently.

            I am not “debating the reality or meaning of free will”. Of course the will is free, but it is free on a metaphysical level. As I’m sure you have experienced in your own life, any concerted attempt to bend your will in a direction it doesn’t want to go will be a vain effort. That is not to say the will cannot be trained. It is potential until we actually begin to work with it. Rather like music – one doesn’t just sit down and begin playing. Or at least most of us don’t. It is a matter of endless practice until playing *seems* effortless.

            I don’t know why you stuck a wiki on predeterminism in your comment. What a dreary bit of theology *that* is. As Billy Joel said, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”…

            Besides, who are we to judge what constitutes another’s rebellion against their God? It’s none of our business.

            So define the love that God is…

          • [interviewer]: Do you mean to say that the dominant intellectual force today would be depth psychology?

            [Eric] Voegelin: No. Depth psychology doesn’t mean very much. You cannot explore the depths of the philosophical sciences psychologically. You can only draw something out of those depths by way of insights, but to handle this as psychology doesn’t get you anywhere.

            An unconscious is never conscious, you see. An unconscious that can be made conscious by a psychoanalyst is no unconscious. And when you take Jung’s archetype, there is nothing unconscious about that except that you accept it uncondition­ally as fully conscious symbolizations of experiences of reality which have been placed by psychologists and their patients into their unconscious. So, if you analyze only pathological cases, you will find a lot of symbols [ascribed to the] un­conscious, which in healthy cases would be “con­scious.”

            [http://voegelinview.com/philosophies-of-history-pt-2/3/]

          • To me, consciousness is the only remaining ‘spiritual’ part of a body made physical at the time of the fall. Man was created from dust (Adamah in the Hebrew) Yah breathed (Nefesh) life into him (Neshama).

            “Dying you will die” (Literal Hebrew) as a consequence of eating the forbidden fruit, one death of the nishma/nephesh and another of the physical the Adamah (delayed).

            Adam’s consciousness remains ‘spiritual’ but he loses the neshama, the link to the tree of life.

            Adam was a very powerful spiritual being created in the image and likeness of Yah and being taught by Yah, but he throws it all away….

            So now we wonder in Adam’s physical realm, trying to make a spiritual connection through our still spiritual ‘consciousness’. The result is confusion unless we “seek FIRST the Kingdom of Yahovah”

            If you are still with me see http://www.mike93c.com 🙂

          • Dymphna, Although I do love the music of Billy Joel, I think that he is mightily confused when he sings that sinners laugh and saints cry. First, he is confused by imputing joy to sin which only brings heartbreak and pain. Second, he is confused as to why saints would cry – which would be out of pity and empathy for the suffering of sinners who are freely choosing to miss the joy of the love of God which saints enjoy. If you were honest, you would rather hang around with happy moral people than unhappy sinners – so why do you claim otherwise?

            You should look up criticisms of both Freud and Einstein, and you will begin to see the truth of both men which is that both were terribly morally flawed men engaging in both immoral and unethical – and perhaps even illegal – behavior. Freud made claims that were unable to be proved in a scientific context and attempted to professionally destroy any and all who disagreed with him. Einstein substantially plagiarized the work of others before him without giving them credit. The modern reputations of both Freud and Einstein are part and parcel of the ‘myth of genius’ produced by PC MC propaganda and enforced by the same powerful New World Order that currently promotes the demonstrable frauds that are climate change and ‘Islam is the religion of peace’ meme. Yes, and self-proclaimed genius Al Gore ‘invented’ the internet, too, before he foisted ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ upon us in an effort to build carbon exchanges to enrich himself and his friends to the detriment of the Western world.

            Hesperado, Yes, the subconscious is subject to the idea that ‘things that are watched act differently than things that are not watched’. In other words, by the time that you notice the subconscious, then the subconscious IS the conscious.

            MC, I read the website that you referenced. In the 3 Days and 3 Nights essay, the author states, “Satan is trapped on ‘earth’….” and “The dispensations so necessary to make Christianity work are in fact Satanic….” Do you agree?

  2. From the intro: “He has just published a new book that is being relentlessly panned before it is even published, by people who have not even read it.”

    ——————————–
    His own words:

    Thilo Sarrazin: Advance critical reviews by writers who admit they have not even read the book are both amusing and characteristic. Amusing because the reviewer is making himself laughable; characteristic because he confirms the media criticism I apply in the book. An attitudinal journalism, strong in its principles, will stop at nothing to discredit and ridicule questions and perspectives it opposes.

    Attitudinal Journalism is exactly right.

    And he shows the internal contradictions of such a posture: “strong” principles but will use any method available to discredit its opponents. This is a dictatorial characteristic, fundamentally nothing more than the schoolyard bully. It will take a revolution in our raising of children to eliminate this annihilating thrust, so prevalent now in the public square.

    Ever see kindergarteners display this cool irony toward one another? It’s chilling.

    • …”“strong” principles but will use any method available to discredit its opponents. This is a dictatorial characteristic…” It is also a dead giveaway – If one truly believed in one’s principles one would be only too willing to defend them; the attitudinal journalist on the other hand merely attacks those that question that which (he says) is so dear to him. He feigns a moral superiority as support for his reluctance to state his case, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the reality is he lacks confidence in the strength of his own argument.

  3. “And in this process, the fact is obscured that a German “poor person,” by worldwide standards, is rich.”

    The PC trap of the swapping of cultural relativism for inverted cultural relativism, in PC practice a German can never be a “poor person” until (or even not then) his socioeconomic conditions are reduced to that of the Third World. This is the race to the bottom the downgrading of Western socioeconomic aspirations and standards.

    • With due respect to Mr Sarrazin, I wonder whether he allows for the relative cost of goods and services? In Prague last year I found cigarettes at less than half the UK price, and eating out and train travel were also cheaper.

      • But isn’t that sort of the point?

        Diddums!! – you paid too much for ciggies?

        Try walking five miles to get water for cooking and washing. Carried a load of firewood on your back the same distance?

        No?

        I’ve seen beggars on the streets of melbourne sucking on fags that cost $15 a box. Are they poor? Relatively speaking, yes, but that $15 is a monthly living subsistance income in some countries. And even here could have bought a decent veggie meal from the Krishnas.

        • @RHW,

          “Try walking five miles to get water for cooking and washing. Carried a load of firewood on your back the same distance?”

          Try getting water from the tap and cooking/heating power from the mains when the utility companies smart meters disconnect the supply for non-payment. Try bartering your AK47 or jihadist machete at the local Tesco supermarket for food when the cupboards are bare.

        • Cigarettes in Australia cost no less than $16 for a box of 20 and $19 for a box of 25’s!

          And the Hare Krishna’s, whilst their Kings Cross, Sydney, restaurant will charge $5 for a healthy meal, would allow any plausible impecuniosity-claiming person the same meal for free.

          • Note the PC induced perception of the Western “poor person” has to be associated with a vice of projected self-loathing, in this case the addiction to nicotine whilst the Third World “poor person” has (contradictory) the descriptor of self-sufficiency whilst demolishing the tree huggers forests. Had the Western “poor person” possessed a machete PC induced perception would demand that he be prosecuted as a potential serial killer.

            The last Penny for the poor black children in Africa!

        • My point was that necessities (not cigarettes, perhaps!) are cheaper in the Czech republic than in Germany, and this should be taken into account when comparing welfare payments.

  4. Thank you for exposing me to this author and
    diann west. There must be that english translation and airing of his work.

Comments are closed.