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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Does Germany abolish itself? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/does-germany-abolish-itself

Schafft Deutschland sich ab? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/schafft-deutschland-sich-ab

I analyze the latest PISA results to figure out why Germany's performance has declined so much in recent years. My focus is on figuring out the extend to which changes in migration patterns can explain the decline. I won't post the entire post here because it has a lot of figures and will be disjointed to read. Remember to subscribe!

Introduction

In 2010, the book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany Abolishes Itself) was created by Thilo Sarrazin. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Sarrazin's core thesis on the topic of education can be roughly summarized as follows:

  1. The German birth rate is low, with less than 1.4 children per woman. This is contrasted by a large number of migrants, especially from Muslim countries, who have higher birth rates.

  2. Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.

  3. Even after several generations, these migrants do not catch up with German society. This is due to genetic and cultural inheritance as well as little pressure to integrate.

  4. In the long run, Germany’s educational achievements will deteriorate due to this demographic change.

Sarrazin's critics argued that he was right about some things, but that he painted too bleak a picture and mixed truths with falsehoods. They pointed out, for example, that there had been progress in the area of education among Turks, a large Muslim immigrant group. Against the background of the recently published PISA study, in which Germany performed miserably, it seems appropriate to re-examine Sarrazin's thesis. In particular, I will use the latest PISA study to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, migration aspects play a role in the continuous decline of German education...

It did not abolish itself, it is occupied and the occupiers will ensure that Germany is kept in line with their ideology. The Germans knew full well what would happen if the Americans and Soviets would take over the world and there is a reason why they fought tooth and nail to stop it. The foresight of German thinkers in the 20s and 30s was astonishing and they understood the direction the anglosphere was taking.

Are you trying to defend Nazi Germany here?

The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)

The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.

Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.