“Collective fear” in Germany? Keeping blinders firmly affixed!

Last updated on: January 21, 2016 at 9:31 am by Jane the Actuary

“Collective fear” in Germany? Keeping blinders firmly affixed! 2016-01-21T09:31:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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The Silversternacht attacks.

Groping in swimming pools and at a “welcome party”.

Now an account in Die Welt, a respectable (non-tabloid) German paper, by an utterly disillusioned worker in a refugee shelter in Germany. Here’s a translation into English (yes, this is Pamela Geller’s site, but the translation is legit if a bit clumsy). She reports (a few sentences out of a much longer piece):

They come to me and demand that I immediately give them an apartment and a fancy car and most also want me to procure them a really good job, and I am supposed to say yes. . . . To an originally Arab colleague of mine they have at times yelled “We will behead you!”. . . . There was, for example, a resident who came with his deportation notice and wanted to know what would happen now. I explained it to him and he then went. Soon after he came to my colleague and suddenly showed completely new identity documents with a different name and said he was the man with the different name. . . . And part of them do not respect us women. They do not take us seriously at all. If I tell them something or want to give them a statement, then they hardly listen to me. They immediately dismiss us as unimportant and then call for a male colleague. For us women, they often only give us contemptuous or even intrusive glances. . . . Of the officials I expect no great help. Neither in this case nor in the other problems that exist with us, neither from the Interior Ministry nor the local Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. If you call these offices they often no longer answer the phone.

So, it’s good that this is all being openly discussed, right? Ceasing to sweep it under the rug is the first step towards finding a solution.

But according to Deutsche Welle, this is all irrational, a “collective fear” sweeping the nation due to a “mob mentality” based on the insights of social pyschologists which the site reports uncritically. Germans, supposedly, are simply tapping into their racist roots in their opposition to the new migrant arrivals.

Rolf van Dick, head of Goethe University’s social psychology department, is quoted: “Sexual attacks happen every year at the Oktoberfest, but you won’t read about them in the paper, because this is a positive environment.” Uh, no — I have never heard any claims that coordinated mob-style attacks occur at Oktoberfest, and if there truly are more than minor cases over the two weeks, then isn’t it more appropriate to bring them to light, too, than to use them to minimize the concern over the Silvesternacht attacks?

And, more appallingly DW says, not as a quote but stated as a fact:

The peculiar aspect of the current situation is that the collective fear in question is vicarious. Nobody – apart from the men and women victimized on New Year’s Eve – has any rational reason to fear migrants as a result of the attacks.

Really?

This statement — if it is true of more than one author and an editor who let it pass — is appalling. Either it’s meant to claim that, surely, the attacks on New Year’s Eve came out of nowhere and vanished into nowhere and will never happen again, or that these women somehow deserved what they got but no one else is at risk if they behave more properly. Which is horrible either way.

(Picture: Germans behaving irrationally – that is, at a PEGIDA demonstration. from Wikipedia:
“PEGIDA DRESDEN DEMO 12 Jan 2015 115723941” by Kalispera Dell – http://www.panoramio.com/photo/115723941. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PEGIDA_DRESDEN_DEMO_12_Jan_2015_115723941.jpg#/media/File:PEGIDA_DRESDEN_DEMO_12_Jan_2015_115723941.jpg)

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