Tuesday 22 June 2010

"Ihr seid nicht die Mehrheit"


Jan Salloch,  director of the Berlin gay pride festival  ("Berliner CSD"),  does not seem to be a bad man as such,  but he did demonstrate extremely poor choice of words after Judith Butler refused a  "Civil Courage"  award at the Berlin pride festival last Saturday.  His not-so-bon mots start at 5:35 in the clip below  (apologies for the poor subtitles,  nothing to do with me;  there is a much better English version of Judith Butler's part by  10toes10fingers in the comments on the youtube page,  which you can access by double-clicking the video):




My translation of Salloch's bit:

Without question,  we must say that as the Berliner CSD we vehemently reject  -  and I personally find it very hurtful  -  the accusation of racism.  It is simply not true.  And you can scream as loud as you like,  that's simply how it is  –  because,  to be honest,  you are not the majority here.  You - are - not - the - majority.  [much booing from protesters]  To be quite honest  -  quite honest  -  we have  -  as we will always continue to do in the future  -  reached out our hands to you and will work together with you;  the problem is  [waves hand towards group of protesters]  that is clearly not desired.  However that may be,  we are going to simply go on with our programme. 
[in German even more clearly than in English,  "programme" ("Programm")  means not only the line-up or schedule of a show/presentation,  but also the political agenda of a political party or movement.]


Could he hear himself??  "You are not the majority"  –  so we're going to ignore you and your concerns and what you are fighting for,  and we're going to go right on doing what we've always done,  and you can fuck off.

Not so many years ago,  there was another minority which was ignored by the majority,  and they had to make a lot of noise and fight a hell of a lot before anyone cared about their needs at all.

Can it be that this guy has forgotten all that already??


Update: Thanks to Anonymous in the comments for the word  "gekränkt",  which I've translated above with "find hurtful";  I myself couldn't make out what he was saying there.  The subtitler heard it as  "bedrängt",  which would mean  "under pressure"  or  "hassled"  (translated bizarrely in the subtitles as  "whipsawed")  but that didn't seem quite right.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The word you did not quite understand is "gekränkt" (aggrieved or hurt).