Martin Lichtmesz

What is most remarkable about Germany's Thilo Sarrazin controversy is the fact that its outcome is still undecided. Usually arguments that challenge the beliefs of the mainstream and the ruling class are quickly silenced, and the heretics burned alive on the media stake. Here is a man who broke almost every political taboo imaginable -- who spoke honestly about the high economic cost of immigration, the failure of integration, the decay of the educational system, the incompatibilty of Islam and the West, and the alarming demographics of the German people who in a few decades will be a minority in their own country.

All this wasn't news to readers of the website, nor to anyone who has studied these matters thoroughly. Since the 1970s conservatives, sociologists, demography specialists -- and even several members of Sarrazin's Social Democratic Party -- have predicted the desperate situation Germany finds itself in today. Their warnings were suppressed, their views defamed, their voices silenced.

The response to Serrazin’s comment and new book might very well reveal that the Zeitgeist is finally shifting -- though it might already be five past twelve.

Books that point out leftist and liberal failures are becoming top bestsellers in Germany. The once highly popular talk-show host Eva Herman was fired by her TV-station after she wrote a book about the damages caused to the family by feminism; Herman survived the vicious media witch-hunt that ensued and struck back with a highly successful book exposing media manipulations. A few weeks before the publication of her explosive report on immigrant crime, juvenile magistrate Kirsten Heisig was found dead in a forest near Berlin. The official story of her suicide has been seriously questioned ever since, especially in the blogosphere; in any case, her book, too, became a well-received bestseller. Meanwhile German media intensely discuss the possibility of a new center-right, conservative party apart from Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is constantly losing its traditional conservative supporters. Some observers, including the well known and respected philosopher Norbert Bolz, even call for a rehabilitation of the notion of the “Right,” which in left-wing dominated Germany is generally defamed as “Nazism” and “extremism.”