So the Pegida marchers marched again in Germany on Monday night, including a record 18,000 in Dresden.
Pegida? That’s Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West).
And the marchers have prompted more push-back including some large counter-marches, and an open letter opposing them in the (right-of-center) tabloid Bild signed by fifty prominent Germans.
Whatever one’s views on multiculturalism and mass immigration (I’m no fan of either), there are reasons, as I mentioned on Sunday, to feel uneasy about elements in the Pegida coalition.
And then there’s this from The Guardian:
At first glance it seems a Pegida rally has something for everyone. This also applies to its fashions – from middle-class protestors in wax jackets and cashmere bobble hats to thirtysomething hooligan types in Lonsdale sweatshirts (the NSDA letters in Lonsdale recalling the initials of the Nazi party, NSDAP, making it long since a label of choice for neo-Nazi sympathisers).
… Many of the slogans held aloft by participants are hard to disagree with, such as “If you go to sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship”. Others, such as “Beware Ali Baba and his 400 drug dealers”, seem to be trying hard to make the point that drug-dealing and immigrants are synonymous….
What Pegida stands for is hard to ascertain, especially if you ask Pegida, largely because demonstrators have been urged not to talk to what they call the “Lügenpresse”, or liar press (a term of condemnation also used by the Nazis, by the way), and its organisers rarely give interviews. Some speak, but only through gritted teeth. They mention a desire for tighter immigration controls, for keeping war refugees in their homelands…
Often their sentences begin “I am not racist, but” or “It is unfair to bunch us together with Nazis”, despite neo-Nazis being visibly in their midsts. Commentators refer to them as “Wutbürger” or “Frustbürger” – citizens angry and frustrated at everything from a higher cost of living to Greek bailouts. Their supporters despise these terms.
But then there is this (The Guardian reports, my emphasis added):
On Tuesday a leading German civil rights activist called for dialogue between politicians and supporters of the group. Frank Richter, a prominent campaigner in protests that led to the collapse of the East German communists in 1989, offered to hold a meeting in Dresden where he would act as a mediator between Pegida supporters and mainstream politicians…
“We are clearly dealing here with a whole array of problems,” Richter, the director of the Federal Agency for Civic Education in the state of Saxony, told Deutschlandfunk. “From a lack of understanding in our political system … to a loss of trust in institutions, people don’t feel they’re being listened to enough. They feel they’re being talked down to, they don’t understand the way the asylum law is applied. It all has to be taken very seriously and I can only hope that what has been taking place on the streets will soon find expression in a constructive dialogue.”
And from an earlier (December) report in the Guardian:
Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.
Writing in the Spectator, Ed West (deputy editor of the Catholic Herald) takes a step forward, dragging the discussion beyond Germany:
Europe’s establishment is overwhelmingly universalist, in that it believes that not only are all humans equal in dignity and rights but that we as people have no moral right to discriminate between in-groups and out-groups. This is a secular heresy of Christianity, and it is why diversity has become a sort of religion in countries populated by Europeans, especially for those who have lost their actual faith; outside of European-populated lands such an idea remains mostly alien, and totally impractical, especially in the countries from which Germany now attracts many of its migrants.
Yes and no, I’d say. “Diversity” has become something of a cult, but it’s not only the post-religious who are a part of it. Europe’s Christian churches have also been very active in pushing a multiculturalist agenda. And as for mass immigration, one only has to read some of what Pope Francis has being saying about the current inflows into Europe, perhaps most notoriously in a disreputable and slyly demagogic speech on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the speech that Anthony Daniels so brilliantly dissected in an article back in 2013. Here’s an extract of what Daniels had to say:
By elevating feeling over thought, by making compassion the measure of all things, the Pope was able to evade the complexities of the situation, in effect indulging in one of the characteristic vices of our time, moral exhibitionism, which is the espousal of generous sentiment without the pain of having to think of the costs to other people of the implied (but unstated) morally-appropriate policy. This imprecision allowed him to evade the vexed question as to exactly how many of the suffering of Africa, and elsewhere, Europe was supposed to admit and subsidize (and by Europe I mean, of course, the European taxpayer, who might have problems of his own).
West concludes:
[The idea that] we as people have no moral right to discriminate between in-groups and out-groups… is incompatible with Islam, a religion in which the division of humanity into believer v non-believer is strong (and with most Islamic societies being clannish), and will not be disintegrated by Europe’s lukewarm melting pot.
No it will not.
And yet Europe’s establishment parties plow on as if nothing is wrong, the more cynical of them doubtless believing that the societies now emerging will either give them a built-in demographic advantage or, by their very fragmentation, be easier, paradoxically, to control. To challenge such policies is taboo and sometimes a crime.
Yet again, I’ll quote those words by Mark Steyn:
If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.
Which brings me back (perhaps) to Pegida.