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Notes -
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:
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.
Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.
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.
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?
They were fighting for a homogenous high trust society that was self-sufficient and built to last. They fought against communists and liberals who wanted a centralized global order with bland global materialism. They defended Europe from Stalin and their loss is turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east. Germany would not be in severe demographic decline with large scale third world immigration if they had won. They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism and bland American consumerism.
While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.
German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.
For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.
So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.
Before the sailors' mutinies and revolutions of November 1918, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, made the proposal, or so I've heard, for the emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, to negotiate a ceasefire, and to reach out to the US government to sue for a separate peace, as a first step of terminating the war and salvaging a defeated nation. This was probably the only conceivable path to preventing the ensuing national catastrophe, but the emperor decided against it. And from then on, the republic that came into existence only had enemies in the country, save for small-r republican Social Democrats, who were always a political minority. And this republic was never going to be a European bulwark against American and Soviet hegemonic tendencies. This story was always going to end in disaster, I think.
I think the Weimar republic would have survived if Gustav Stresemann had been able to turn the DVP into an effective centre-right party. Crucial to the fall of Weimar is that all the right-wing forces except the DVP (which never moved beyond a niche party for eccentric rich people) and the Bavarian regionalist BVP (which didn't organise outside Bavaria) wanted to destroy it.
Building an effective centre-right party after the Versailles dictate is implemented is sort of difficult.
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