From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Re: ///SAK///  GERMANY, Racism, Symphaty, Other Subjects.
Date: 7 Jan 93 18:12:07 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

emremsia@sage.cc.purdue.edu (Emre Erkut) wrote:
> ptisu_sa1@nl102.ittpub.nl writes:
>>     In Germany there are a large number of Racist people.
> That's true. But it's more than that. The Germans always think they are
> the most intelligent, most diligent, highest people on Earth. And they 
> will never recover.

The obvious response to this kind of racist stereotyping is that it's only
less obnoxious than that of the Nazis or the KKK because it emanates from
a member of a people with less power.  But there's a more important aspect
than its moral repulsiveness: it prevents anything being done about it.

German racism has very specific institutional underpinnings which have
nothing to do with "national character".  The German legal code enshrines
racism, most acutely in its codification of citizenship, which is only
paralleled in Israel: it defines a citizen by racial descent so that only
people who can prove "German" ancestry can become citizens.  This was used
a couple of years ago to deny citizenship to a man I have only seen named
as "Ernst W" on the grounds that his ancestors were exclusively Jewish
(though they had lived in Germany for generations).  More significantly it
is the main legal tool in the repression of "guest workers" from Turkey and
elsewhere: neither they nor any of their descendants can ever be entitled to
German citizenship and they are subject to almost arbitrary deportation.
With the whole legal machine of the state against them, it's no surprise
they're easy targets for racist thugs.  Undocumented workers in the US get
the same for the same reasons.

Saying that all this is due to German genes is never going to change it.
Saying it's a barbarity unparalleled anywhere else in Europe that can be
targeted for political action just might.  German legal rigidities have
already been bent by activist pressure recently - with the liberalization
of the federal law on abortion to match the greater freedom of the old
East Germany - and while this one is going to be a harder fight, it's a
natural weakness in the repressive German state given its need to integrate
with the rest of Europe.

Sebastian Cobler's book "Law, Order and Politics in West Germany"
(published by Penguin in the early 70s) was a scarily prophetic look at how
German state repression got started.  He goes through large chunks of West
German legislation and shows how it's a thinly disguised rewrite of the
Nazi legal code.  Now we're seeing it in action.  Germans who said the kind
of thing Cobler was back then were immediately labelled "terrorist
sympathizers": Turkey wasn't the first state to pull this one when
confronted with inconvenient opinions.

-- 
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