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From: Niven, William
To: [log in to unmask] '
Cc:
Subject: Burchill
Sent: 9/24/01 8:50 PM
Importance: Normal
Dear All:
I seem to have started something of a debate here. Well, here's another
contribution. Firstly, to dismiss Julie Burchill's article as simply
'provocative' or in 'poor taste' or even as simply a 'bad article about the
Germans' is to play it down. In my mind, it is not much better than what was
written in 'Der Stürmer'. It suggests that the Germans have a faecal
language; worse, it suggests that their children are automatons who might
one day carry out atrocities - and I haven't even mentioned the accusation
of obesity, animal-like meat-devouring, overfastidiousness and meanness. If
this is not racist, then please, what is? Do we have to wait till Germans
start leaving the country before we show concern? Might we then concede that
the kind of thing Burchill and others write is racist? I know of German
mothers whose kids come home in mental tatters after having had to withstand
a barrage of insults, or who have been greeted with the outstretched arm or
a picture of swastikas at school. When we were looking for a house here in
Nottingham, one person responded to the discovery that my wife is German by
saying 'Well, I suppose some people have to be'. So this is not racist? Just
good old British humour, slap your thighs and have a good laugh? I can't buy
that, I'm afraid. It's racist in my book. If Julie Burchill had written
comments of a similar sharpness about Jews, or Afro-Caribbeans, or Indians,
wouldn't there have been complaints to various equality commissions? Reports
on the BBC even? I think there would have been. Could it be that, because
it's 'only' Germans, there is a different threshold for when the term
'racist' is applied? If so, why in Heaven's name?
In the course of the email exchange, some suggested it wasn't worth getting
hot under the collar about Burchill, or that to get hot under the collar was
merely to fall into her trap. Does this mean that answering firmly and
perhaps emotionally is to become ensnared in her devious plan? What is this
plan? To have us all crying out in defence of the Germans? Hardly. There is
no plan, and there is no trap. Nor, alas, any provocation. The Germans are
fair game these days, it seems. Having a go at them has become routine,
cheap and devoid of provocative force (Germanists aside, and I don't think
she's after us). This means her remarks are merely racist, she's buoying up
popular prejudices, perhaps a way of luring a few readers away from the
'Sun'. Anything you can do, we can do better. It is the very unprovocative,
casually presumptuous, calculatedly populist nature of such an article in a
so-called LIBERAL newspaper that is the scandal here.
With respect to Peter, I don't think we can compare 68ers having a go at
their fat and wealthy parents or their generation with a Guardian Brit
having a go at the Germans in 2001. Even if we could, isn't there still a
big difference? The 68ers were challenging among other things the parental
refusal to face the past and the fetishistic focus on wealth and materialism
generally. What is Julie Burchill challenging? The Germans' right to behave
as they want in the swimming-pool or their right to eat the breakfast of
their choice? Their right to speak a language that sounds as it does outside
of Germany? Perhaps. But really I don't think she's challenging anything,
because she's not under threat or duress from outside. The only sense of
threat comes from her own psychology, and that is very British and quite
un-German.
I think it's time to call racism racism.
Bill
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