Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, said yesterday that 'Multikulti,' the idea that people of different origins and religions can live together peacefully, 'has failed, totally.' Apparently Germany is being made "'more stupid' by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants."
Well, we all certainly want to use Germany as an example of how to deal with minority groups.
Well-deserved snark aside, this is just another in a long line things that are actually starting to convince me that our paranoid brothers and sisters on the Right are indeed correct, that there is a fundamental clash happening between the Muslim and the (nominally) Christian worlds. Where I differ is that I am able to admit that this clash is desired not only by those obviously seen as radicals on either side, but by multitudes of people who otherwise would be considered quite moderate and sane.
I agree that immigrants should make every attempt to learn the dominant language around them; I certainly worked at learning Korean the 18 months I lived there, despite the fact that I was there to teach English - and how difficult it was to get anyone* to tutor me. I'm sure litbrit has quite a few stories from having to learn American, especially living in the south.
But there is a profound difference between immigrants trying to preserve their own culture amidst the assimilation that always occurs among them and immigrants completely rejecting the host culture in its every aspect. The biggest difference is that while the former is extremely common, the latter almost never happens.
Further, when an immigrant community does become insular and increasingly isolated from the culture at large, in almost every case the blame can be laid at the feet of the host culture. The USA has been guilty of this many times over; pick any neighborhood now regarded as 'quaint' or a tourist destination due to the overwhelming presence of a particular immigrant population - a Chinatown, Little Italy, etc. - and you'll find that those immigrant communities had the dual pressures of desiring to live with people like them and the white community's desire to keep all the Chinese/Italians/Irish/Blacks in one place where they can be watched.
Though Merkel and people like her will never see it, her remarks were a clear and shameful admission of Germany's failure, not the failure of its Muslim immigrants. Immigrants will desire and be able to assimilate insofar as they are given reason and space to do so by the host culture. We don't have to Godwin ourselves, looking back to Germany's Nazi past, to know that their track record in this area is, to put it delicately, not exactly spectacular.
*Worst of all was trying to learn from my wife, whose first language is Korean and whose pronunciation is perfect. That woman had no understanding or compassion at all for my inability to pronounce certain Korean letters. Seriously, she is cold-hearted.
