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10 Mar 08
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Standing For Liberty: Marriage, Virtue and the Political State - June 16, 2004
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by: Dr. Allan C. Carlson, Ph. D.
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As a friend of mine who sits in Sweden's Parliament explains: "To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi."
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These views have the facts largely reversed. Rather than seeking stronger families, Nazi policy aimed at destroying family autonomy. Rather than affirming the traditional roles of husband and wife, of mother and father, Nazism sought a radical change in gender roles. Moreover, the relationship between Nazism and homosexuality turns out to have been more complex than commonly supposed. More broadly, other totalitarian regimes have also sought to destroy marriage, both the "hard" regimes of the Soviet Union and Communist China and the "soft" totalitarianism of modern democratic socialism, because the true role of traditional marriage and family is that of standing for liberty.
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And yet, just beneath the surface lay a very different agenda, one that would emerge only with time. Anti-Semitism would be the only common plank. The best source here, in my opinion, is the 1987 book, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. Authored by the feminist historian Claudia Koonz, the book opens with a summary of her astonishing interview with Frau Scholtz-Klink. It turns out that this top Nazi was still very much alive in 1981, when Koonz was doing her research. And Frau Scholtz-Klink was still very much a Nazi. While other top Nazi officials, after falling to the Allies in 1945, faced either a trial at Nuremberg or active de-Nazification, female Nazi leaders were simply ignored, left to go their own ways. Frau Scholtz-Klink told her stunned feminist American guest that she "had grown up in an anti-Semitic family, so the ideas did not seem so unusual." Other comments included: "Gvring, Rosenberg, Hitler, Himmler...You can't imagine what gentlemen they all were," and, "If you could have seen the women of Berlin defending their city with their lives against the Russians, then you would believe how deeply German women loved our F|hrer."[1]
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As the historian summarizes: "Far from honoring the family, Scholtz-Klink used it as an invasion route into ordinary people's ethical choices, emotional commitments, and social priorities." Where traditionalist German women "viewed the family as an emotional 'space' and bulwark against the invasion of public life," Nazi women used the family to give the party "access to every German's most personal values and decisions."[2]
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The Nazi Party actually cared nothing about the "happy home." Indeed, one goal was to destroy family autonomy among party members and enemies of the party alike. As Koonz explains:
Nazi policy aimed at eroding family ties among victims and also among its own 'Aryan' followers. In both cases, the goal was the same: to break down individual identity and to render people susceptible to whatever plans Hitler announced: eugenic breeding schemes for the chosen 'Aryans' and genocide for the selected. Nazi guards [in the death camps] sent 'men to the left' and 'women to the right' for the same reasons they sent girls to the BDM [League of German Girls] and 'Aryan' boys to the Hitler Youth...[C]ontrary to rhetoric praising the 'strong family,' [they divided up German society] to weaken family bonding and enhance total loyalty to the F|hrer.[3] -
"The war accelerated Hitler's determination to establish an entirely new social order based on race and sex, with the ideal couple at its core: not a husband and wife, but a soldier and his mother, obedient to Hitler, the patriarch |ber alles." The regime wanted racially pure babies, not frolicking, independent families, and the model for the new order was the Lebensborn home. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler had described his vision of a nation guided by elite, black-uniformed troops obedient to the F|hrer alone and living in their own world. Heinrich Himmler created this elite as the SS, and he urged his troops "to father as many children as possible without marrying." Women would live as brood mothers in eugenic convents (Zuchtkloster), served by pure-blooded Aryan SS stud-males (Ehehelfer).
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Referring to Himmler's command to the SS ranks that they sire out-of-wedlock children, she concludes:
The order exposed the underlying axiom of all Nazi policy on the Woman Question:Women performed only one function, breeding the children who would be raised by the Reich as the soldiers and mothers of the next generation....Promiscuity within an elite movement, like chastity in a religious order, maintains men's loyalty to a masculine corps and inhibits the formation of deep ties to women and children.[6] -
In 1995, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams published the book, The Pink Swastika. Inspired by the 1945 work of Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice,[8] Lively and Abrams describe "the homoerotic" foundations of Nazi militarism. Their thesis is that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists."[9]
This book generated howls of protest from the contemporary "gay community," including several websites designed solely to refute its argument. And the book does have a number of real limitations. Neither author appears to have had professional training as an historian, and their conclusions frequently jump well ahead of the facts. Most of their sources are secondary in nature; that is, the authors have not reviewed the primary documents. And the volume is published by an obscure press without the full tools of scholarship.
All the same, Lively and Abrams pull together a good deal of material, some familiar to this historian and some new. Independently confirmed, their case rings at least partially true.
For example, they trace the common roots of the early German "homosexual rights" campaign and the early Nazi Party to a hyper-masculinized nationalism, circa 1900. In 1896, for example, Adolf Brand founded Der Eigene (which could be translated as the "Self-Aware," or the "Self-Owner"). It was the world's first serious homosexual journal. By the late 1920s, it claimed an astonishing 150,000 subscribers. Critical of a "feminized" male homosexuality, Brand called for a hyper-masculinity, complete with man-boy love. As he wrote in a promotional pitch for "The Self-Aware": "[Der Eigene is for men who] thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism."[10]
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