In 2010 Thilo Sarrazin, a prominent member of  the board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), had his book published. With the support of big media panzers, like those belonging to the Axel Springer group, “Deutschland schaff sich ab” (“Germany abolishes itself”) has today more than 1.5 million copies sold. A german best-seller you can find in supermarkets but has no translation: it was kept as a national question… one of those local folk things that may have global projections. To have an idea of the so-called “Sarrazin Thesis” here is a short selection:

“I don’t have to respect anybody who lives off welfare but rejects the state, doesn’t do enough for his children’s education and constantly produces little girls in headscarves.”

“The Turks are taking over Germany exactly as the Kosovars took over Kosovo: via a higher birth rate. I wouldn’t mind if it were Jews from Eastern Europe with a 15 percent higher IQ than the German population.”

“All Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.”

“The lower the class, the higher the birth rates.”

“We are, on average, becoming dumber in a natural way.”

“If you take a look a closer look, it becomes apparent that weight loss is the smallest problem facing welfare recipients.”

Most anti-racists in Germany are fed up with the “Sarrazin scandal” and also keep the feeling that the provocation remained unanswered. But what does that mean? There were in fact a lot of manifestations, publications, debates and creative interventions against the mediatic construction labelled “Thilo Sarrazin”. The status of a “scandal” was only possible after intense reactions. Maybe the big shock was to realise, once again but more clearly than before,  the unevenness of communication power between the big media groups, in one corner, and the disperse constellation of democratic forces, in the rest of the ring.

The success of the Sarrazin campaign evaporated the last dream someone could still have of  living by some sort of german miracle in a society where racism is a marginal phenomenon.

The mediatic power -with all its technical devices  including people who operate them- is no more than hot air when it hasn’t human reactions that sustain it: when it finds no echo. This simple distinction between media and social approval is harder to see in societies where governability is sustained by a stable alliance between the government agencies and big media, able to renew every day their desirable pseudo-consensus. In these boring and homogenous techno-spectacular societies, social consensus has been replaced by what corporative loudspeakers say people think and want. And we don’t have a clue about it, unless: 1) we have  investigation strategy to grasp what people may think and want or 2) the alliance is broken up in the sky and we then can witness the storm of a media confrontation. The last is happening in those southamerican countries which european media consider to be ruled out by populist governments. But that´s another story.

There is no much internal consistence in the eclectic “sarrazin theses” nor adjustment between them and real facts. But they seem not to need any. They are an echo that answers to itself: a feed-back that express, in terms of a pretended national commonality, a wide interclass alliance. This arch includes Bild readers & Bild editors, tv clowns, members of political parties -from SPD to the fascist NPD and proDeutschland- and many other anxious integrated citizens. They may have many differences but share some sort of a cocktail made up of fear and  hatred  for immigrants and for the poor, including germans who get unemployment money.

Fear: of being attacked or robbed or that the economy -the common national treasure- goes to hell because of all those parasites! But fear is more polymorphic than this. So we should include at least other nightmares like loosing purity by collective mixing with the inferior ones (genetical or cultural) or just loosing the position of integrated and become marginal: the horrorific possibility to be like them. Which means us!

It would be, however,  a mistake to reduce Sarrazin’s  success to a common irrational. Even when his affirmations can be refuted with proper genetical, cultural and demographic information, they are an answer to the “thirst for knowledge” that Etienne Balibar has identified as a driving force of  racist and neoracist explanations. Most people want to know and to understand what they see and feel. Racists provide simple arguments, ready to consume and very economical in terms of mental and social energy. They confirm hierarchies and justify them with a biological or cultural basis -or both like Sarrazin- so that preexisting prejudices reach the status of scientific knowledge and then any attempt to reduce unequality seems to be useless or undesirable.

Our interventions can not be reduced to angry accusations of racism or to demand a game of more political correctness. Neither to insist blindly that “we are all the same” when human diversity is so obvious and also fascinating. Diversity doesn’t mean hierarchy. The knowledge of the real, in its integration from the molecular to the social and viceversa, is on the side of antirracism. From the beginning of physical anthropology in XIX century to today all racialist theories have been proved to be wrong.  On the same pace, it has been demonstrated that the term race has no biological meaning for the human species. We must be able to answer to the “thirst for knowledge” with knowledge, which means we need a strategy of the truth, able to recognise and overcome its main political and cultural obstacles. It’s an appealing challenge for people who work with images and texts. It can be argued that knowledge is not enough. But that depends on what we understand by knowledge and the ways we can link it to ethics and political action.

(to be continued)