Their names are Ataman, Aydemir, Foroutan, Kiyak and Yaghoobifarah. They’re activists, bloggers, journalists, columnists and even scientists. Big media, publishing houses, podiums are open to them. The message is: Look at us, this is where the new intellectual elite of the new Germany is forming.
Their pattern of argumentation is as simple as it is monotonous: old Germany is infested with ‘racism’ and prevents migrants, especially Muslims, from developing their abilities and advancing socially. The author Fatma Aydemir takes the same line in her essay ‘The end of the German dream,’ published in the book ‘Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum’ (‘Your homeland is our nightmare’), which she published in collaboration with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.
Perceived migrant added value
Aydemir begins by describing an offense she suffered at the hands of a competitor for a newspaper traineeship. The competitor remarked that it was “not exactly fair” that “applicants with a migration background are preferred.” It remains unclear whether Aydemir felt offended because the principle of positive discrimination was questioned, or indirectly because her qualification was (questioned).
Anyway, she simply turns the whole thing around and ascribes the preference to the actual merits. It apparently has to do with the fact that “another white German volunteer does not necessarily offer added value. And perhaps the term migrant bonus is not so wrong after all. Only that it is not a bonus that we receive, but one that we award: Perhaps attentive employers have simply learnt in the meantime that they will get more from us for the same money.”
That's the odd thing about this bonus system. Recently the public television broadcasted a report about cell research, electron microscopy and medical diagnostics. The scientist interviewed was highly competent, eloquent, humorous and enthusiastic about his field of research. A really popular figure. The fact that he had a Turkish name was of no interest to anyone. And neither did one have the impression that he had given, or received, a migrant bonus. His added value lay in his personality. However, a look at the statistics shows that his level of qualification is the exception to the rule in the corresponding migrant population.
“I want to take work away from the Germans”
That's why it appears like an affirmation of the irreversibility of German decline, when Aydemir writes on behalf of her clientele: “I want to take work away from the Germans. I don't want the jobs that are intended for me, but the ones they want to reserve for themselves – with the same pay, the same conditions and the same opportunities for advancement. My German Dream is that we can all finally take what we are entitled to – and without it being the end of us.”
If you take their text as a basis for evaluation, Aydemir should really only be getting a few advanced courses. To quote Akif Pirinçci: “It’s a better school essay, without esprit, wit, pathos, surprise, drive and flow, original word and phrase creations and finally without its own style, i.e. without everything that actually belongs in the toolbox of every word artist.”
The contents are garbage. For the basic assertion, on which she bases her argumentation, is that since the 1960s the Germans have predominantly played mini-golf, while the guest-workers from Southern Europe, North Africa and Turkey generated prosperity for them. Such theses are so stupid and insubstantial that they cannot be discussed meaningfully. What Aydemir demands for herself is promotion without performance.
Immigrants’ inferiority complexes
Nevertheless, one should not simply bin her essay, but take seriously the feeling of offense and her resentful outburst as – in the words of the French sociologist Didier Eribon – an attempt at “self-constitution as a political subject.” Eribon's autobiographical book ‘Return to Reims,’ which was published in France in 2009 and also caused a sensation in Germany, could be used for the advanced course in social history.
Eribon, today an established figure in the left-wing intellectual scene, comes from the simplest of backgrounds. The cultural highlights of family life were lowbrow television shows. He discovered other interests early on and wanted to break out. But it’s impossibly difficult to escape the limitations of the social world into which one was born, because one carries the history of one's milieu of origin within oneself, is socially determined and comes up against ‘glass ceilings’ everywhere.
Eribon's “countless humiliations” included shame at the infamy of his residential area. When classical music was introduced in music lessons at the grammar school, his bourgeois classmates exchanged knowing smiles. To conceal their inferiority complexes, the few working-class children could only resort to disrupting lessons. Even as an established author, Eribon wavered between envy, fear of embarrassment and self-denial when bourgeois academics spread their cultivated expertise and ostentatious sense of well-being.
Level of an intellectual lumpen-proletariat
He lacked the social starting capital, the network of relationships, the knowledge of ‘fine distinctions.’ Although the democratization of society also allows members of the lower classes to rise, they often find that what has been achieved has lost its value because the barriers to entry have shifted. Eribon was proud to be the first in his family to attend university. But he knew nothing of the informal hierarchy of universities which determines the value of degrees, and chose the wrong place to study.
On the one hand he criticizes the circumstances and recalls that the fossilized privileges of one set of people exclude the opportunities of the other, leading to the potential for social conflict, injustice and the waste of resources. He also has an explanation for the aggressiveness of Aydemir & Co.: “Does anyone give them the floor? How could they manage to take it on their own?” At the same time he confesses that the bourgeois canon of education and culture is superior to the standards of his social background, and that it must be appropriated instead of being dragged down. Fatma Aydemir, on the other hand, remains in the infantile phase of defiance, confuses resentment with knowledge and disturbs music lessons.
In fact, she’s successful with that, winning prizes and scholarships and staying at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. This has to do with the fact that certain minorities can claim victim status. It’s not one's own achievements that are inadequate, but rather the old standards that are unacceptable, because they are white, xenophobic, Eurocentric – ‘racist.’ This development corresponds to a decline in education in Germany, pushed by left-wing egalitarian forces. Thus one finds oneself together on the level of an intellectual lumpen-proletariat.
Victim-competition with white homosexuals
Meanwhile, new lines of conflict are emerging. Eribon, who as I said is a leftist, is embarrassed by his xenophobic family and clings to the dogma of an overarching class solidarity that transcends national, religious and cultural differences, and ranks them equally. This is contradicted by Aydemir's explicit distinction between herself and the “white” Germans, and the nerve with which she claims the right, from her “non-white” identity, to regard the “white” as a kind of prey society.
Her comrade-in-arms Hengameh Yaghoobifarah – an oriental ‘Cindy from Berlin-Marzahn’ who, however, lacks the wit and self-irony of the pink original – expresses her contempt even more openly. Under the title “Germans abolish yourselves" it says: “The German hatred of Muslims and the paranoia of (...) Islamizing the German (literally) dirty culture prevents the ‘potatoes’ from leading a more beautiful life.”
Particularly sinister is the sideshow of victim competition, where white homosexuals are increasingly regarded as opponents and targets; as smug, arrogant profiteers of Western societies, who reward their conceded recognition and equality with loyalty to the ‘racist’ system and especially with hostility towards Muslims.
Dominance of the blatantly inferior
The newspaper ‘Die Welt,’ for example, drew attention to a tweet that “circulated in the Twitter bubble of Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah” and “achieved a kind of cult status in the feminist-postcolonial Twitter bubble.” It reads: “Why are gay German men such blatant trash?” A cultural fault line and a civilizational downhill gradient become visible. If the non-white, migrant “added value,” as it expresses itself here, were actually to succeed, it would lead straight to the dominance of the blatantly inferior. Let’s rather continue to dream the nightmare of the white racist, German-European ‘potato culture.’
Originally written in German for 'Junge Freiheit', where the article appeared under the title 'Kampfansage an die Kartoffelkultur', on May 1st 2019.
