You know what you can do with your facts?

“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams. “If so,” said Josef Stalin, “so much the worse for facts”.

In that spirit, whatever facts contradicted “the only true [in fact, the only allowable] teaching” of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin were hushed up, while their promulgators were either imprisoned or shot.

It’s refreshing to see the alacrity with which Western countries are adopting, mutatis mutandis, the same approach for the same reasons. The protected ideology is slightly different and the punitive measures are less severe. But the principle remains: anyone spreading uncomfortable truths had better shut up – or else.

The German politician and writer Thilo Sarrazin felt the full brunt of this tendency in 2010, when he published his book Germany Abolishes Itself. There he showed, figures in hand, that – and I hope you are sitting down – ethnically different immigrants are differently able to adapt to German life.

Following the publication, nothing was said about Sarrazin that hadn’t already been said about Heinrich Himmler. He was a racist, fascist, Nazi and all those other things. Yes, but what about the facts he cited? Are they true?

Who cares?, was the resounding reply, followed by the phrase in the title above. That was a rhetorical question, but let’s suppose it wasn’t. Let’s insist that we do care and consider the facts, even if we have to scourge ourselves later with the lash of enforced self-reeducation.

Sarrazin looked at groups of second-generation immigrants, people born in Germany to parents born elsewhere. Those groups, all born, bred and educated in the same environment, were assessed for such outcomes as the proportion of school graduates and those going on to university, average income at a certain age, unemployment rate at the same age and so on.

The differences among the groups were staggering, reaching different orders of magnitude in some parameters. People of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese ethnicity outperformed not only other migrant communities but also the average indigenous Germans.

Those from Eastern Europe and the former USSR were within a few points on either side of the average German levels, those from Turkey were below them, with those from the Middle East and Africa bringing up the rear.

Interestingly, these result tally with those in the US, and Thomas Sowell has been writing about this for at least five decades. The incomes of immigrants from South East Asia are higher than the median American levels, whereas people from Africa and the West Indies are at the very bottom of the list.

Any exponent of the only socially, politically and (soon) legally acceptable ideology has a ready response at his itchy fingertips. Discrimination! The inexorable progress of certain minorities is artificially held back by institutional racism prevalent in the West.

Fine. Agreed. Conceded. But in that case, all groups suffering from such bigotry must be similarly held back. And those groups that succeed beyond average statistical expectations must be getting a boost from positive discrimination, known in the US as affirmative action.

The logic is irrefutable. The only trouble is, it’s not borne out by facts, which both Sarrazin and Sowell demonstrate.

American Jews, for example, suffered from discrimination in the past, and even now it’s hard to argue that they are singled out for preferential treatment. Yet they have always been the most successful ethnic group in America, having only recently ceded that position to South East Asians.

Both Sowell and Sarrazin also cite an even more striking example, the plight of the Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia. Actually, ‘plight’ is only applicable to their civil status. When it comes to their economic performance, ‘smashing success’ is more appropriate.

In Malaysia, where the ethnic Chinese settled in the 19^th century, they make up 22 per cent of the population. Indigenous Malaysians have all the political power, which they use to discriminate against the Chinese and violate their basic civil rights.

In spite of that, the median incomes and assets of the Chinese minority are more than twice those of the ethnic Malayans. And the situation in Indonesia is even starker.

The Chinese make up between 1.5 and three per cent of the population there, and in my lifetime they’ve suffered not only run-of-the-mill discrimination but also genocide. In 1965-1966, there was a massive purge of communists, with over a million killed. But, as always is the case, perpetrators of mass homicide also indulge in a bit of genocide while they are at it.

Thus tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese who had nothing to do with communism were murdered out of hand. Since then they’ve kept a low profile, while ethnic Javanese control the country and discriminate against the Chinese. Nonetheless, ethnic Chinese own more than half of the country’s major corporations. And their median income is three times higher than that of the Javanese.

And in the Philippines, where the Chinese make up about one per cent of the population, they are estimated to control up to 60 per cent of the country’s economy.

All this goes to show that discrimination, even where it’s real and not, as in the US, mythical, can’t keep some groups down. And positive discrimination, be it in the shape of welfare handouts or preferential treatment for jobs and university places, fails to pull some groups in the same countries up.

The reasons for this are numerous and complex. They have to do with differences in cultural traditions, strength of families, social expectations, peer pressure, attitudes to education and hard work. But it would take a Stalinist treatment of facts to refuse even to consider a genetic component in that mix.

By all means, reject it with all the righteous wrath it deserves – but only after investigating it with the dispassionate detachment of a scientist, not the fire-eating venom of an ideologue.

However, even if you aren’t willing to undertake such a study, please accept that more conscientious researchers aren’t ipso facto fascists, Nazis or racists. They may just want to know the truth.