28/05/2013
In a blow for the settled population, the German interior ministry
has declared that, in future, it will no longer issue multilingual guides to the federal elections.
In the 2009 federal elections, there were numerous brochures produced by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, over-written with the legend "Secim Senim" â Turkish for "You have a choice". This was an attempt to encourage the 690,000 naturalised Germans of Turkish origin to exercise their right to vote.
The rationale behind the current decision is that, in order to acquire German citizenship â and thereby gain the right to vote in federal elections - migrants have to demonstrate knowledge of the legal and social order of Germany, and display good German language skills. In that context, foreign language brochures on how to vote would seem to be redundant.
More importantly though, the move sends a message to naturalised Germans, to the effect that, when they vote, they do so as German citizens, not as members of an ethnic community. And if they cannot understand the language, they are not equipped to cast a valid vote.
This is a message that could be conveyed with advantage to our own migrants, here in Britain. As
Autonomous Mind pointed out with one of the Woolwich murderers, there was a fatal confusion of identity, with Michael Adebolajo seemingly unable to work out to whom he owed his loyalty.
The dilution of national identity is, of course, a facet of European Union propaganda, the entire construct fronting a broad attack on the concept of the nation state and the very idea of national loyalty. But the net effect of this, it would seem, is not to create a higher order of loyalties â for instance to the EU â but to destroy the very foundations of loyalty and the sense of belonging.
To that extent, the German move is very welcome. Personally, I find few things more offensive on the part of officialdom than their insistence â at our expense â of producing huge numbers of multi-lingual leaflets and pamphlets for the benefit of immigrants.
If people wish to come here to stay, then they should do so on our terms â and that includes learning the language. (The same might be said of British moving abroad by that is another story.) For us to require them to do so, and to refuse to compromise that principle, seems a valid step in forcing the pace of integration.
And for us to assert our own national identity is no bad thing â not least for the immigrants themselves. If we do not parade our own values, and then attempt to live up to them, what right have we to expect that incomers do the same?
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