The sarrazin Beverage II

24. 8. 2012 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2012

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Nobody talks nowadays about Sarrazin. He just wrote a new book against the euro, quite a hot topic in these days, but this time most media have almost ignored him. So these notes about the mediatic construction around the Sarrazin beverage come a little late. Anyway, the subject is still here: the whole “scandal” shred some light over the state of the thing, on the potentialities and limitations of both racist and anti-racist culture in nowadays Germany, the role of different media in forgering pseudoconsensus and the sketch of a nationalist alliance between the elite and the integrated citizens in order to protect the common treasure.

thilos thesen 200 On 2011 Berlin local elections, pro Deutschland had based its street campaign on the image of a forbidden mosque and the sentence “vote for Thilo’s Theses”. In order to keep a cautious distance between his nazi fans and his pretended image of critic of muslims but still democratic citizen, Thilo Sarrazin sued them on court. The judge quickly ordered the authorities of the party to remove all the posters naming Sarrazin from the street. But the images, or at least most of them, remained in the city poles in their original position, which is indeed quite high (when they are installed lower they don’t last too much).

Sarrazin can insist here and there that he doesn´t belong to any racist or  fascist gang but the fact is that he provided a legitimation tool to all of them.

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In several art and cultural institutions during  the Berlin Biennale 2012 you could find one of these boxes set by czech artist Martin Zet. The yellow poster attached calls visitants for bringing Sarrazin’s book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany supress itself”) as a collaboration for a recycling action called “Deutschland schafft es ab” (“Germany supress it”). The way the book was going to be recycled was not explained.

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We could find three definitions for recycling in the oxford Dictionary:

1.convert (waste) into reusable material/

2.return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process/

3.use again.

No dictionary says that recycling is burning, but that was the image that M. Zet elicited in a good deal of german media: the nazi books burnings of Mai 10th 1933. The winds became a storm and some of the same cultural institutions began to ask the artist and the curator of the biennale to explain the idea. They answered that finally the public was going to decide democratically the concrete way of recycling. Very democratic decision, but they were expecting too much: 1) that some thousands of the 1.300.000 subjects who bought the book decided that it was better to recycle it than leaving it in their bookshelves as an act of self-affirmation. 2) that they went home to to look for the book and bring it back to the collecting boxes. 3) a spontaneous and consistent engagement of a public, eager to participate in the action and endure the national media attacks. 4) that the opinion of East Europeans artists about the most sold non-fiction book in Post-War Germany was going to be welcomed by the cultural sections of german media and by the local hyper-critic cultural class. Ha ha ha ha.

Finally the boxes collected other printed material and glasses.

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With my average IQ and after some trips to Germany, I can understand that some stimulus are too strong for some democratic german with historical sensitivity. We can’t deny that the idea of recycling those books we abominate can create at least some misunderstanding. But a good deal of the media reacted to Zet’s invitation with an hypersensitivity which is almost absent in many other opportunities. For example, when the same Sarrazin said, in a visit to Waltrop one year ago, that “anyone denying the hereditary nature of intelligence is idiot or criminally lazy-minded”. There was no histeria this time.

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The heredity of  intelligence is not a scientific proven fact. Measuring innate intelligence is quite a demential goal as genetical, epigenetical and environmental interactions elude precise borders. The IQ values, so important to Sarrazin, are not a measure of natural intelligence but of  specific skills that are built through experience. The figure who insisted more on the genetic nature of intelligence during XX century was the fraudulent Cyrill Burt, a celebrity between white proud scientist and non scientists, who made up in his studies thousands of twins and two secretaries that never existed. But the former Finance Senator of Berlin can say whatever eugenesic image comes to his mind: he will look like a wise guy to those who feel fear or contempt for the poor and the dark skinned. As big media are constantly repeating genetical determinist discourses- in the format of brand new scientific news- there is a wide background for normalising the idiot and criminally lazy-minded expressions of this or the next Sarrazin.

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In Argentina we can witness the same mediatic appropiation of elements of antifascist ethos for attacking antifascist identities: in these days the right wing media, the same that supported every killing of indians, workers, students and poor in the XIX and XXth centuries, are comparing ad nauseam the kirchnerist youth organisations -who are the main supporters of the trials against the criminals who participated in Argentine´s last dictatorship- with the Hitlerjugend. And they find them always worse.

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