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TechnoratiA ‘Nazi moment’ for Eva
A blunder by German motherhood campaigner Eva Herman will be hard to live down. It's a pity, because her message deserves to be heard.
Eva Herman, German media personality and motherhood campaigner, has put her foot in it. Launching her latest book in defence of the family and women's domestic role, the television talk show host happened to mention that family values were one thing the Nazis got right.
"It was a gruesome time with a totally crazy and highly dangerous leader who led the Germans into ruin as we all know. But there was at the time also something good, and that is the values, that is the families, that is a togetherness," she said, adding that it was all later "abolished" by "the 1968 generation".
Predictably, Ms Herman and her book -- The Noah's Ark Principle: Why We Must Save the Family -- were nearly buried by an avalanche of fury and indignation. For 60 years, the Third Reich has been the epitome of evil, all its policies and activities contaminated by the racial theory that led to the Holocaust.
Clearly, drawing inspiration from the Hitler era is not the way to win converts to family values. Actually, it is hard to think of a worse way. Be that as it may, somewhere under the rubble of this incident is a message that Germany and much of the world needs to hear.
That includes the Lebensborn programme, instituted in 1935, under which women were encouraged and given every assistance to have children -- the more the better. Married or unmarried, it didn't matter. What did matter was that a woman and her mate had the correct racial and genetic characteristics. This was all in aid of building up the master race, the "Aryans", which in Germany had taken such a beating after World War I.
For Ms Herman to find "something good" in this sounds, to some ears, tantamount to Holocaust denial. She might just as well have said that at least medical science was advanced in the death camps. The wounds of the Nazi era are far from healed in Germany and people are hypersensitive both to any signs of regression into Nazi ideology (like neo-Nazi skinheads kicking migrants to death) and to how this looks to the international community.
So, try as she might to clarify her intention ("This isn't about Hitler's values but about basic human values, which were abused in the Third Reich and later abolished"), and insist as she did that she rejects both far-left and far-right political parties, the damage was done. Applause from the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) did not help. Her bosses on the public television network ARD sacked her on the spot. They said guests had been cancelling their appearances on her show.
Clearly, drawing inspiration from the Hitler era is not the way to win converts to family values. Actually, it is hard to think of a worse way. Be that as it may, somewhere under the rubble of this incident is a message that Germany and much of the world needs to hear.
Although in many respects the leading nation of Europe and one of the leading nations of the world, Germany has an abysmal birth rate (1.39 children per woman) and the outlook is grim. Its population of 82 million has been maintained by large-scale immigration -- notably from Turkey -- but even if that continues, the birth dearth will see the population shrink over the next four decades by 8 to 13 million.
Eva Herman is not the only one to be sounding the alarm about this trend. With the possible exception of the Greens, everyone from the government's Minister for Family Affairs to those in the resurgent nationalist movement is concerned about a Germany in decline, dependent on immigrants -- with all the cultural issues that involves -- to maintain its workforce and pay its escalating pension bill. It is three years since Frankfurt newspaper editor Frank Schirrmacher wrote his best-selling doomsday tract, The Methuselah Conspiracy.
Disagreement arises over what and how much to do to encourage baby-shy Germans to produce more than one or two children. The government, following the global trend, is encouraging women to combine motherhood and a career in the workforce. This not only satisfies the dominant feminist school of thought; it is also an economic necessity, given the shortage of younger workers looming. Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, herself the mother of seven children, has pushed through policies to rapidly increase day care places and new parental leave laws designed to involve fathers and to get mothers back into the workforce more quickly.
The originality of Eva Herman lies in her surprising rejection of this dual-track womanhood. In her own best-selling 2006 manifesto, The Eva Principle, subtitled Towards a New Femininity, she tackles feminist assumptions head-on, calling for women to embrace motherhood again and find their primary source of identity and happiness in the domestic sphere. "Let's just say it loud," she writes. "We women have overburdened ourselves -- we allowed ourselves to be too easily seduced by career opportunities." Women can't simultaneously raise children and pursue a career and do both jobs properly, she avers. Germans will die out if women do not change their ways.
Ms Herman is far from being a textbook champion of domestic bliss and motherhood. She certainly hasn't followed the conventional career path for one. At 48, she is four times married, has only one child -- a son, now 10 -- has always worked in a jetset career, and has enough free time to write a book every year or two.
Her "Nazi moment" also raises questions about her intellectual powers, if not her politics. But when you think about it, what other model of family oriented policy could she draw upon in Germany's recent history? She is at least right about the "1968 generation", whose radicalism lives on in the entrenched feminist prejudice against women having a distinct role to play in society. This was the generation that welcomed the contraceptive pill and saw the birth rate in Germany drop from 2.5 children per women in 1967 to 1.5 a mere five years later. It is the generation that still, largely, runs the country.
And the Nazis weren't the only ones who used an ideology to clobber their opponents. Sure, Nazi manipulation of the population for political ends merits outrage. But what about the state-sponsored birth control which has prevailed in the West for the past 40 years? Isn't that also a form of social engineering? Social engineering, one might add, that has its eugenic elements, as seen in the practice of abortion for fetal abnormality, and in the current desire of some Western governments to encourage births among professional middle-class women without giving new incentives to women who are already economically "unproductive".
In her enthusiasm for a good idea (and motherhood is a good idea) Ms Herman has overstated the case against combining motherhood with another career. There are women -- Ursula von der Leyen is a dramatic example -- who can do it very well. The majority of women, however, may be less interested in a dual "career" than in "work" that can bring in a second income for the family as well as develop their talents. How this can be done is very much a work in progress today, with the role of husbands in the home a significant part of the picture.
Where Ms Herman's strictures against working mothers count is in the first few years of a child's life. Evidence is mounting against the benefits of day care for children under four, even as governments, including Germany's, opt to expand this sector.
Eva Herman, like other pop-sociologists, sends a muddled message. What is important is not its detail but the direction in which she frantically points. In a country where 30 per cent of women have not had children, it may take more than a year's paid maternity leave plus two months' "papa leave" to prevent the slow decline of the German people. Carolyn Moynihan is Deputy Editor of MercatorNet.
Granny: we are not in disagreement over anything. ‘Population control’ is a deadly form of eugenics, generally practised by rich Western countries on their poor, Third World brothers and sisters. The International Planned Parenthood Federation is a prime culprit, here.
‘The Holocaust’ is generally used to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Of course, others groups suffered hugely, but not in such great numbers: gypsies, Catholics (especially Polish priests), Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Communists.
Richard: How do you define ‘primitive populations’ - or ‘advanced civilizations’ for that matter? The Germans were an ‘advanced civilization’ - and they acted with bestiality. Christians call this capacity ‘original sin’; there is no better way to explain the extremes of human behaviour.
Richard and Francis...I find myself AGREEING with both of you on some points… and DISAGREEING with both of you on some points. As a woman, I realize I “see” things differently. I tend to see “population control” in the same light as Richard sees wars and famines...IMPOSED by those with an agenda who are in positions of power. If we cannot be humane to our brothers and sisters who are residing in the womb, why should we expect any better for those who are also residing in vulnerable locations, such as Africa or the ghettos and slums in the U.S/U.K The “Holocaust” was real and it was targeted at specific groups, mainly the Jewish people, but also those Catholics and others who did not go along with the “Final Solution”...so just as our Jewish Brothers and Sisters were targeted for elimination, so also we who consider ourselves their adopted brothers and sisters are targeted also. The “crimes” we are guilty of are reproducing ourselves through large families and carrying on our traditions and trying to own some property to raise our families. Our Faith Traditions and our fertility are threats to those who have another “solution” Population Implosion is happening all over the West once the Cradle of Christendom. We have abandoned our Judeo/Christian roots with its love of family and childbearing. War is not just fought “over there” War has many faces. The war on the Family, redesigning LIFE etc.is being fought under our noses. For example, the cancer rate is off the charts, and people are wondering “why”. The Race for The Cure seems more like a cover for those who, like Al Capone caused the problem and then cash in on “fixing it” When we fight Nature and Nature’s God we always lose, because nature fights back. Yes, Mandela, Churchill, Thatcher and the U.S Presidents are not in the same camp as the many dictators that have crossed the stage of history, but until we change our lives, we will as always, get what we ask for LIFE or DEATH.
To Richard and Granny: I don’t want to sidetrack this discussion into a defence of Mandela. I am sure he has said wrong and foolish things - just as Churchill did, or Margaret Thatcher, or FDR. Being a ‘statesman’ doesn’t mean you are a ‘saint’ - but it does mean you are not a tyrant or dictator, and that you are capable of magnanimity.
Richard: obviously I can’t comment on your post that did not see the light of day - but I will defend Mercator’s judgement and prudence.
There is so much to contend with in your last post that I only have space to challenge one statement - the sentence beginning ‘the vast majority of the Jews...(Paragraph two). Are you not aware that the vast majority of the Jews (millions of them) died in concentration camps built either to work them to death (Auschwitz) or to gas them immediately on arrival (Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec etc)? It has nothing to do with bombing raids, which are a tragic, random feature of war.
Over here a recent TV programme centred on Belsen, liberated by the English and the Americans. The liberators could hardly believe what they found when entering this camp. It was no bombing raid.
Hitler determined on a policy of Semitic genocide. It is fully documented. Historians like David Irving, who try to pretend the Holocaust never happened and who twist the facts, are rightly censured.
This does not mean that ‘the Holocaust’ should dominate recent history. But the deliberate murder of five million people (which went on until 1945, quite separately from the ‘war proper’) in a country which was considered to have achieved a high level of civilisation in the heart of Europe, should concern us.
Francis,
I don’t want you to think I have been rude by deliberately ignoring you. I spent quite a bit of time putting together a response which I sent in just before responding to Granny, but it never got posted. I can only assume that the proprietors of this site fall under the jurisdiction of the European thought police, and that it is more Verboten to speak negatively of Mandela than it is for Eva to speak positively of Hitler.
Granny,
The damage we “allowed Hitler to do” before we declared war on Germany was not worth the price we paid for trying to prevent more. The vast majority of Jews who died in that war, died for the same reasons that all the other affected peoples died, as victims of bombing raids, as well as from the starvation, and disease incident to the harsh conditions attendant to wartime.
There will always be genocides going on somewhere in this world. Afrikaners by the thousands have been and continue to be slaughtered by the thousands and we don’t even offer to take them in as refugees, let alone ignite a world war that will result in hundreds of millions being killed just to try and save a relative handful of unfortunates. Cruelty and injustice will always be with us, and our misguided and futile efforts to try and prevent or redress all instances of the same only end up vastly magnifying the extent of the eventual suffering.
God had a purpose for famine, plague, and civil wars. This earth can only support a finite number of people. It doesn’t take His infinite wisdom to realize that advanced civilizations artificially enabling primitive populations to expand their numbers to a hundred times what they could sustain by their own devices, merely delays the ultimate day of reckoning and sets things up to be a hundred times worse.
I tend to see things as either Anti-Christ or Anti-Church, so in that context I see the population controllers as being both
That is why I referred to Mandela in the same mode as Marx. If the fertility of the family is threatened or coerced then the people are not free. I think of the Catholic Irish and the fact that their “crime” of having large families and practicing their Catholic Faith as putting them at odds with those who disdained their faithful fertility, such as Churchill. The FAMILY is threatened from both the RIGHT and the LEFT. Nationalism or Globalism can both be a threat to the Freedom that is innate to the Dignity of EVERY HUMAN PERSON
For Granny: I am not aware that South Africa, under Mandela’s initial guidance, is a Marxist country? Correct me if I am wrong.
I think the rock and the hard place are between National Socialism (Hitler) and Communism (Stalin) in this discussion.
For Richard Brodie: Hitler did not invade Russia because of the West. He invaded because he saw the Russians (and Poles) as ‘Slavs’, destined to be the ‘slaves’ of their Aryan conquerors. On your general point that Communism is globally more evil than Fascism, I would of course agree; but we don’t fight wars in hindsignt. We fight them, rightly or wrongly, at the time. By 1939, when Hitler had already invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, and annexed Austria, we could not. in conscience, standy by and leave our allies to their fate. Churchill, another great man, knew this, as few in England did at the time.
It seems to me that you want to whitewash Hitler?
And I would ask “WHY DID WE WAIT”? Not trying to be a backseat driver...but we allowed Hitler to do a lot of damage before we went to war. Word was getting out of the atrocities seems like the U.K and U.S could have come to the “aid of the victims” sooner. W.W.I is so connected to W.W.II and so it seems if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. If Europe doesn’t acknowledge and rediscover it’s Christian Roots… then where will we find hope for Peace?
As the FAMILY goes...so goes the NATION
Granny,
The Pope certainly had more insight than did the secular world leaders of the time. Marx’s Communist Manifesto propounded a global agenda, whereas Naziism’s ambitions were inextricably connected only with the fortunes of the German people. If we had simply let this latest in a long string of European conflicts play itself out without throwing our own lethal military machine into the fray, considerably fewer Americans, French, Germans, Poles, Russians, Japanese etc. would have been killed. Hitler would have had no use for incorporating non “Aryan” peoples into his Reich, and would ultimately have retreated to the boundaries of the pre WWI German/Austrian empire. Germany under Hitler or a successor would eventually have become a friendly trading partner, and the Jews would not have been injected into the body of Islam leading our endless bloody conflicts in the Middle East.
I just checked my facts and realised that we (Britain and France) did not go to war with Germany until after Hitler ‘annexed’ Poland.
Francis I agree with what you are saying about Hitler, however, I don’t know that I go along with praising Nelson Mandela. Caught between Hitler and Marxism is like being caught between a rock and a hard place. It seems that I read the Pope thought that while Hitler had to be stopped… it would be Marxism that would ultimately give us the largest suffering in numbers of those killed worldwide and in how many people would be oppressed in the name of “property and State” Whenever the “natural” family is threatened, e.g. forced abortions and sterilizations such as in China...and to a degree in the U.S and U.K (it is not overt..but pressure has been created through the media, education and political shenanigans so that women and girls are “trapped") or the right to OWN PROPERTY is diminished, or our TRADITIONS are taken from us...then we are NOT FREE.
To Richard Brodie: I do not believe Hilter ‘preached a healthy national pride’; what he preached was a perverted nationalism based on, among other violent prejudices, hatred of the Jews.
What do you mean by ‘maintaining racial identity?’ That Jews should not marry non-Jews? That black people should not marry white people?
The last time I read the word ‘miscegenation’it was being used by the Afrikaaner government in South Africa to perpetrate a colossal injustice towards the African majority. The racial laws Verwoerd and his followers enacted from 1949 onwards, caused untold harm and suffering. It is to the credit of that great man, Nelson Mandela, that when South Africa at last got majority rule it was without bloodshed.
About Hitler and Russia. It was the opinion of Hitler’s generals (privately) that when he opened the Eastern Front he would lose the war. Stalin beat him at Stalingrad (with huge losses on both sides.)
Was Hitler justified in invading Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia? We did not go to war with him until after this last invasion. It was not ‘annexation’, but deliberate aggressive invasion.
For TLDS: well, of course I care! You’re a fellow member of the planet earth and so I salute you. BUT: why should I have to address you by your sexual orientation? It seems as if I am being pushed into a political position I don’t want to occupy. If we met in a coffee bar and chatted, we would exchange our first names wouldn’t we? OK, so this forum isn’t a coffee bar but I still wish I knew your real name, that your friends call you...So I will call you TLDS, which to my mind means ‘lady’ and to yours ‘lesbian’.
It sounds as if I am being pedantic here.
I also object to calling myself ‘straight’ - it suggests that the alternative is to be ‘bent’ or ‘crooked’. And I object to the word ‘gay’. It suggests that the opposite is ‘dull’ or ‘sad’. For the first 30 years of my life ‘gay’ meant ‘lively’, ‘animated’, ‘vivacious’. I know words change their meanings all the time - but this is one change of meaning that saddens me.
In writing this I expect I am laying myself open to the charge of ‘homophobia’. ‘Homophobia’ is as deeply wrong as its opposite: ‘heterophobia’. So TLDS: let’s be friends.
Thank you for your supportive response to my posts.
You say you are “fixed” or do you mean “fixated” on a woman’s choice to raise her children any way she wants? If a woman raises her children without regard to the “natural law” then she has chosen to deny a reality to her children, thereby giving them a defective model which will sooner or later fall apart. There is such a thing as “objective truth” ..so while we all have “choices"… we must realize that some of those “choices” are not good and there will be consequences that are also not good. Good choices are built on the natural law that is universal and applicable to everyone, regardless of their race or creed. So it is with this in mind, that I speak of a woman’s Birth Right or Right to Birth and also her Birth Rite her unique and yet universal way of birthing that is natural to her as well as being natural.
Dear LDTS,
I have mixed feelings towards Hitler’s National Socialism. Being a liassez faire capitalist I am of course diametrically opposed to his economic approach. However in spite of some of his excesses I think he preached a very healthy national pride. If his emphasis on maintaining racial identity had prevailed on the continent, you can be certain that Europe would not today be facing the eradication of its peoples through the velvet genocide of Semitic and African miscegenation and cultural infiltration.
We did not “attack Hitler, and second Stalin.” We never attacked Stalin. In fact Roosevelt and Churchill selected him to be the only one of the Allied powers to be allowed to take over other countries! I would prefer that we had not attacked anybody and just minded our own business. Hitler would easily have been able to take care of Stalin if the United States had not come in against him.
Hitler began by simply wanting to reacquire territories that were traditionally part of the German empire. He was quite justified in seeking to reattach eastern Prussia by annexing the Danzig corridor, where Boshevik Jews were savagely murdering German families. I think he was driven to overreaching ambitions when the whole rest of the world decided to gang up on him. The Second Mein Kampf makes it clear that he never intended to try and subjugate the British Isles.
Heya^^ Just wanted to throw a couple of things out here about existing comments. From the bottom:
Stefan^^ You’re absolutely, 100% correct: and it’s a real shame that people don’t see it as they should. I wonder if there’s a quote floating around that sort of sums up that idea, but I don’t know of one^^;; Anyway, good point.
Richard Brodie^^ Firstly, I’ll start by saying that I very much understand you’re not being pro-nazi. You mean that we should have attacked Stalin first, and then dealt with Hitler? Correct me if I misunderstood.
But in that scenario… Hitler had an -incredible- armed force. In another battle, in another time, we very well might have lost. But here’s where one of my personal mantras comes into play^^ Good or bad, the past has already happened; embrace it, or you’ll never achieve peace.
In other words, we already attacked Hitler first, and Stalin second, and all those people are already dead. At the time, it was impossible to know he was going to throw the rest of Eurasia into Communism; we made the ‘best’ choice with the information available to us.
I’m gonna skip a bit… these all seem like personal squabbles…
Granny^^ You make a lot of interesting points, and they seem logical and well-thought-out: but I’m fixed with this ideal that one of a woman’s birth rights is free choice on how to raise her children^^;; So I think your ideas are nice, but it’s just that they might be one of a series of -choices- a woman makes.
Francis Phillips^^
Ah, and a reference to me, all the way up at comment #6^^ Or… is that me? I… don’t see who else it might be, but… You’ve gone and spelled my name wrong^^;; It’s not “lady”, it’s that other L-word^^ Please spell my name correctly, lest I act on the urge to call you Frank Phil~_^ But I do take your message to heart,and I thank you for your concern. It seems like you care, and that makes me happy.
And that’s all I have to say about that^^
Have a nice day, all^^
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