Celebrating Families. Who is the Evil Empire Now?

By Eric Ross, Ph.D.

When Harry Crouch, NCFM President, asked NCFM members to find examples of celebration of family, men, and parenthood, I replied almost immediately with a rather sarcastic note. It was about what many American fathers know as their sad reality:

““Good luck finding celebration of families, let alone men, in the Good Ole' USA. It is so off-the-scale politically incorrect to praise families, let alone fathers, that I would be surprised if any such celebrations were officially recognized or acknowledged at the town level, let alone county or state. The opposite is true: It is quite all right in the USA to bash the institution of the family, and to malign, humiliate and denigrate fathers in particular.”  

Badass Putin, playing with dolphins. 

In contrast, if we were to turn our attention to Russia, which emerged in 1993 from the defunct Soviet Union, you will notice that general attitudes and morays there towards parenthood and children are quite refreshingly different. In its struggles to embrace again its democratic traditions, forgotten during the 76 years of Soviet Power, Russia has established several holidays, when the entire country celebrates families.  Thus, Russia celebrates July 8 as a National Holiday, the Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness, a day when people of Russia spend time with their extended family – parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren.

Badass Putin

“A family is not just husband and wife, but also Granddad and Grandma and, most importantly, kids,” said President Dmitry Medvedev via his Twitter account, from Kremlin, Russia in July 2010. [Fn-1]


Compare this with Barack Obama speech on Fathers Day in 2008: “… We'll admit that what [sic] too many fathers also are is [sic] missing - missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.”[Fn-2]   – Really? Or with his phony “folksy” quip on 2010 Fathers Day: “Too many of our men brag about doing the stuff they're supposed to do. They say, 'I'm not in jail!' Well, you're not supposed to be in jail!’” [Fn-3]


Just when President Barack Obama got to chastising America’s fathers in 2008, Russia established its Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness, as a national holiday, which follows  the old Russian religious tradition of St. Peter and St. Fevronia of Murom, the patron saints of family and marriage. The Russian Orthodox Church sanctified this ancient Russian couple into Sainthood in the 16th Century. The two reportedly had their arguments and a share of differences, he – a prince, she – a peasant girl, but when they wed in the 13th century, it was on the condition of being equals in marriage. The legend has it that the couple’s love was so strong that the two died on the same day and were found in the same grave, even despite being buried in separate plots. Even death could not part them. [Fn-5]

As President Medvedev and wife stand together in the Chist the 
Saviour's Cathedral, Prime Minster's Putin wife is absent, 
following rumors of the birth of his illegitimate son with 
Alina Kabaeva.

In establishing this holiday, the Russian government wished to revive traditional moral values, and to emphasize the importance of the family, especially for the upbringing of healthy and happy children. [Fn-5a] At the annual official ceremony in Kremlin on the Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness, Russia’s then first lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, awarded Love and Fidelity Medals to couples who have stayed married for 25 years or longer.  About 5,000 medals were awarded to Russian citizens and 400 medals – to couples all over the world: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Germany and Great Britain. [Fn-6]

Putin, Jr.?  Or not? 

Vladimir Putin declared 2008 the Year of the Family. But his zeal to promote family (and higher birth rates) went perhaps too far when a new holiday called “Family Contact Day”, on September 12, encouraged Russians to stay home and engage in marital intimacy in the hope of producing babies by Russia Day − June 12.


See RT TV’s clip titled “Russia celebrates day of love, family and fidelity” here.


Sure, we can crack jokes about Russia’s Family Contact Day, when the nation is given a day off work to get busy making babies. But think about it: While we crack jokes on comparing medals for the vicissitudes of twenty five (25) years of marriage to those awarded for gallantry in war, the mere existence of such a medal shows at least the intent by the government to promote respect for marriage and family, even if skeptics might criticize it. 

All this and brains, too: Many Russians 
feel they can't blame Vladimir Putin for 
allegedly succumbing to the charms of 
Alina Kabaeva, an ethnic Tatar, born 
May 12, 1983), an Honored All-Russia 
Master of  Sports, retired rhythmic 
gymnast, a State Duma deputy from 
the United Russia party.

Compare awarding medals to Russian families who have stayed together, to the celebration of Fathers Day in the USA -- marked by media frenzy, lecturing “dead-beat dads” (most of them unemployed and destitute in an economy permanently disfigured by structural unemployment, worst in the last 40 years.) While the United States of America  marks the “celebration” of Fathers Day by establishing more “domestic violence” programs [Fn-3], and mass-arrests of “deadbeat dads”[Fn-4], it is good to know that at least the former “evil empire” celebrates what people have always loved and cherished – family and parenthood.


Compare Russia’s celebration of the family with the anguish and pain of millions of fathers in the Anglo-Lingua (Anglosphere) world, where fathers have been forcibly removed from the lives of their children by our most wonderful, “social democratic” governments, which have long ago fallen into the lap of feminist fascism. Compare it to fathers who have not been able to see their children for years due to vengeance by their ex-wives and girlfriends, alienating children against their fathers, with the court’s blessing and help.


But in the former “Evil Empire,” the celebration of The Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness, is marked with weddings, concerts, church sermons, merrymaking, bouquets of daisies (which symbolize fidelity) and family feasts.

While the rumor persists, following a 2008
article in a Moscow newspaper, Putin
addressed the article and the rumor in a
press conference with Silvio Berlusconi,
saying, "There is not a single word of
truth" in it. Alina's spokeswoman called
the rumor "nonsense." The public
meanwhile, continues to fantasize.

There is yet another celebration of families in Russia. It honors large families. Families with a large number of children (over four or five) are celebrated nationally, with a once-a-year-televised ceremony in Kremlin, where the President or Prime Minister delivers an address at the annual reception for parents and their children, and awards dozens of parents the medal of "Parents' Glory." Speaking at the ceremony last year, then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that without a strong family, without children, the country had no future. He heartily congratulated and thanked the mums and dads for raising wonderful children.


Russia’s large families are profiled on Russian television and in newspapers, which includes some coverage of what these families do right, such as teaching their children family values: hard work, high academic achievement, excellence in extra-curricular activities, in studying music and art, dance and sports, in taking care of several generations of family members, especially so toddlers.  In this respect, political correctness in Russia is diametrically different from the “values” and political correctness promulgated throughout the U.S. by our government, its political and educational institutions, hell-bent to divide and conquer.

Did Putin have an affair with Kabaeva?
How the hell would you or I know?
Some Russians continue to fantasize.
It's a cheap shot, but can you 
blame them?

Undoubtedly Russia has its share of political mud-slinging, scandals and economic problems. Obtaining a divorce in Russia is easy and usually out of court, so Russia’s divorce rate of 3.36 per 1000 of population is high, giving Russia a dubious distinction of being the third highest divorce rate country in the world, after the United States (highest at 4.95) and Puerto Rico (second place at 4.47 divorces per 1000 of population.) [Fn-7]
The fact remains that Russia’s government policies at least try to uphold the marriage, family and family fidelity, while the United States family laws promote divorce, fighting for access to children and using children as pawns to get more money from the aggrieved non-custodial parent.


American feminist journalists continue to opine that Russia is a "backwater Patriarchal" country, "hypocritical" in celebrating families and children vis-à-vis its high divorce rate (even though the divorce rate in the U.S. is much higher, 150% of the divorce rate in Russia.) Yet, unlike the bureaucratic governmental organization in the U.S., the government of Russia shows genuine concern in its desire to strengthen families. In any respect, the dominant cultural traditions in Russia, as well as its governmental policies, have markedly greater respect for families, parenthood, and childhood than the contemporary American culture, dominated by the cacophonous “discourse” by the male-bashing, gender-feminist "vanguard." A great deal of the American “cultural hegemony” comes from the elite, of whom many would more appropriately belong in an insane asylum, while others are shrewd vultures, gorging themselves off the carcasses of the dying Western Democracies, which they busily “deconstruct.” 

____________________________

Footnotes:


Fn-1: The All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity: 


Fn-2: Obama's Father's Day Speech…


Fn-3: Dad in Chief: Obama Father's Day Speech Launches Parenting Programs


Fn-4: Deadbeat dads arrested on Father's Day


            No Happy Father’s Day for ‘deadbeat dads’

            F & F Criticizes NJ ‘Deadbeat’ Roundup in Jersey Journal/NJ.com


Fn-5: A long story of Peter and Fevronia


Fn-5a: Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness as a sign of reviving Christian traditions


Fn-6: Russia marks Family Day

_________________________

Other Notes:

a) If you wish to watch some televised coverage of Russia’s celebrated large families (fluency in Russian required), as an American observer, you will notice a stark contrast to the American cultural attitudes: Russian fathers are praised as the heads of their families, decision-makers and educators of their children. They are praised for passing on the family traditions to the younger generations, unlike American fathers, who are viewed as mere breadwinners (or turned into mere financial slaves, post-divorce.) Here are some examples, of which you could find much more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBFy7Fe6DEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCmJaRA4840
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5LZuUF5CZU

http://www.smolgazeta.ru/public/6688-prezident-vruchil-orden-quotroditelskaya.html

b) You can find more information on Russian and Soviet cultural attitudes towards family and children,  (juxtaposed against those in Nazi Germany and today’s USA) with numerous quotations and citations, at:
http://www.logos-publishing.com/Pavlik-1.htm
http://www.logos-publishing.com/Pavlik-2.htm
http://www.logos-publishing.com/Pavlik-3.htm

and throughout www.logos-publishing.com

c) A Western scholar who demonstrates an expert understanding of the Russian and Soviet culture and attitudes towards children and families is Oxford University professor, Dr. Catriona Kelly http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/fellows/catriona.kelly

Copyright (c) Eric Ross, Ph.D., 2012
This article may be reprinted with or without the graphics, but with full attribution to the author.

Obama, Hitler and Women's Votes

By Eric Ross, Ph.D.

Disclaimer: except for the specific issues discussed in this article, it does not criticize or endorse any of the policies of the two major political camps in the US. The views expressed are strictly those held by the author.
____________________________________________________________

In 2008, Obama was voted into the Office of the President of the United States. Women overall voted overwhelmingly for Obama —  56 percent for, and 43 percent against him; men's votes were split almost equally – 49 percent for, and 48 percent against him. Unmarried women voted for Obama by a massive 70 to 29 percent. With women in the US being the majority – 53 percent of the 2008 national electorate, one can safely say that Obama rode into power on the backs of American women voters.    

There is an interesting historical parallel here, which may appear at first inappropriate: in 1932, Adolf Hitler, the head of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany (NSDAP),  rode to power thanks  to German women overwhelmingly voting for Hitler and the NSDAP ticket. 

One Nation Under Socialism, by Jon
McNaughton, a well-known artist from Utah

As a pragmatist favoring the interests of the community, job creation and the growth of the middle class, I do not subscribe to the Republican dogmatic talking points any more than to dogmatic Democrat talking points,  and would never draw a “controversial” parallel like this…  if it weren’t for Obama’s oratory, which echoes the familiar Nazi-styled, sinister and divisive demagogy. When it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it just ain't a chicken.

Before we draw such a “shocking” parallel with the notorious Leader of the Nazi Germany, it is inappropriate to equate a US politician to Hitler in the scale and scope of evil. After all, Hitler lead the German youth to mass-murder millions of people all over Europe; his dictatorial rule resulted in the destruction of German cities, and in death and suffering for millions of German people.  It is wrong to trivialize the horrors of Nazism and WW-2 by comparing people with whom we disagree, political figures whom we dislike for some reason, to Hitler, when such comparison simply serves to went and denigrate. Yet, when it comes to demagogy, Obama apparently comes from the same school of thought as the notorious Nazi leader, and has mastered and perfected the Führer's oratory, adapting it to today. His strife to polarize America for the benefit of his ill-conceived election strategies is as demagogic as they come. The most recent one was to bait the Republican frugality, abhorrence of fraud and waste, and then to sell to the American people the Republican natural opposition to fraud as a “War on Women”. 

It is a shame that he dishonors the office of the President by polarizing America as part of  his ill-conceived elections strategy, by creating racial strife leading to murders, by  "leadership," which resorts to political demagogy in discussing important national issues. Thus a spotlight on such strong parallels is only fair, appropriate and timely. The Democrat-devised strategy of scaring women voters to vote Democrat with the alleged GOP's “war on women” is actually a “straw woman” argument. The concept of a "straw woman" argument has been around for quite a while, perfected by Hitler, and now employed by Obama, without much finesse. It is making an argument by using a gross misrepresentation of your opponent’s position. Then, the demagogue can easily defeat the "straw woman"  –  the fragrantly misrepresented position of his political rival, and his political rival along with it.

Hitler, prior to coming to power had not killed anyone. He was a sociopath with a gift for gab, seeking to rise into the status of God by presenting himself as a messianic figure, but few could see that he was insane. Hitler was seen as a gifted, energetic leader of the People and was hailed as the savior of Germany, who re-energized the country. He was admired by Germans and had very influential and very rich sympathizers throughout the world.  Hitler considered Henry Ford his personal friend. Indeed Ford financed NSDAP. Documents discovered in German and American archives after Hitler's defeat in 1945, show that in certain instances, American managers of both Ford and GM plants in Germany went along with the Nazi directives to convert the plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home. Ford and GM combined were producing over 70 percent of the German cars and military trucks at the beginning of the War in 1939. 

Adolf Hitler Giving Speech

Hitler was also popular among the masses of people – the working class and particularly…  among women. They shed tears when he spoke, they fainted, they devoted poems and songs to him, they screamed louder than American girls at mass rock concerts. He was not a politician, a celebrity, but a "messiah". In the eyes of many German citizens, he restored Germany’s national pride. He projected himself as their savior. He ran on the platform of change and hope. Yes, change! 
  
Despite a common misconception that it was “authoritarian men” who brought National Socialist Hitler to power, his rise to power was fully supported by the majority of German women, and only a minority of men. In contrast, his counterpart Stalin, a Bolshevik International Socialist leader of the Soviet Union was shy of his inability to speak proper Russian, and came to power as an intriguing bureaucrat, patiently pitting his more talented political foes against one another. Stalin physically eliminated other contenders to his absolute power within the Bolshevik government, undemocratic to begin with, based on the ideology of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Unlike Stalin, Hitler rose to power through democratic elections, with women’s overwhelming support, once again proving that there is but a small step from Democracy to Fascism. “The NSDAP … was much more attractive to female voters than the German Left in general, and the KPD in particular”.  

Hitler himself thought that key to his success as an orator was in his ability to reduce his audience, both male and female, to "a condition of femininity", in which he could play on their darkest emotions and abandon any attempt to appeal to their reason. In fact, he thought that the masses were already “feminine”. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler postulated that “the masses” of voters are female in nature:

“a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning.” 

From the vast mass of verbiage in Mein Kampf, the passages on propaganda and oratory are virtually the only ones, which the politicians of today find worth noting. More over, Hitler appealed, first and foremost to the least rational people in his voter base:

Joe "The Plagiarizer" Biden,
U.S. VP and a consummate liar

"All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses."

Hitler kept his people deliberately uninformed and liked it that way:

"The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another."  (all quotations above are from Chapter V of Hitler's Mein Kampf.)

 One of the most successful demagogic orators of all time, Hitler’s words on public speaking didn’t fall deaf on Obama’s ears. Both appealed first and foremost to women, and to those voters limited in their capacity to think rationally, those predisposed to “straw woman” arguments, to demagoguery, which plays on their emotions of greed, fear, hatred and mistrust. 
As social fads in history go, pre-WW-2 German women liked or at least did not mind the idea of being pampered by the Nazi hierarchy. In a Nazi state, a German woman would be a reward, the Blau Blume (a Blue Flower, in German Romantic literature). A German woman would be responsible for nothing, but in charge of her household, while her husband is conquering for her the new lands, Lebensraum (killing off their native populations.)  Hitler was the top dog in the Nazi male-supremacist hierarchy, and there is hardly any doubt that the majority of German women of all ages were captivated by his persona. “His animal magnetism” and “messianic” appearance, were canonized and made iconoclastic by his personal film director, the Nazi beauty-and-the-brain, the movie producer Leni Riefenstahl. At mass rallies, women reacted to his presence with complete, utter hysteria, perhaps feeling quite justified in their public display of orgasmic ecstasy “expected of them” due to the pop-culture mythology of women being “emotional creatures.” 

For women, Hitler exuded magnetism, which today is comparable only to the mass appeal of a rock star, usually affecting the female part of the audience much more than the male. The adulation of Adolf Hitler was no less electrified, than the teleprompter-guided, demagoguery-infused oratorical events by Barack Hussein Obama.  Hitler was it. A woman whose hand he touched at a political rally, did not wash her hand for many days, so she could kiss it, thus touching her Furher. Doris K., then 14, wrote in her diary, “Everybody screamed like crazy. Mass suggestiveness! The scream became a roar . . . Especially the women were fascinated. Their emotions were strongly touched and so were, without a doubt, unfulfilled sexual wishes and desires.”  

Electoral support for the NSDAP was spread unevenly across the age range, similarly to how enthusiastically younger women voted for Obama. The Nazi Party has often been portrayed as dynamic and youthful, while contrasted with the alleged sclerosis and conservatism of the traditional Right, the 60-year-old geezers who saw Hitler as a danger to democracy and the nation. The youthful, energetic image of the NSDAP was not without a reason:  NSDAP membership was younger than that of other parties; the average age of those joining between 1925 and 1932 was around twenty-nine. It rose to an average of thirty-two in 1932. As with Obama, younger women, factory workers, university students and clerical personnel flocked to NSDAP. 

The youth, the easiest to brainwash voters block

Of the few attempts to explain why German women voted for Hitler in 1932-33, the most popular, the most widely repeated, and generally accepted to this day was that, which explained Hitler’s popularity with women in terms of their supposed inherent irrationality.

Contemporary analysts claimed that women were letting their hearts rule over their heads, “in a female way”. Arguably it was a sexist point of view, as men are probably affected by emotion no less than women.  The first major commentator to advance such "Freudian analysis" was the disillusioned Nazi provincial leader, Hermann Rauschning, who fled to France.  He remarked on the emotional affect which Hitler had on women, having witnessed from an angle close to the Furher’s podium the rapturously rolling, moist, veiled eyes of the females in the audience, which in his mind left no doubt as to the sexual character of their enthusiasm. Other commentators adhered to similar views. Thus, Richard Grunberger wrote: 

“Hitler's monkish persona… engendered a great deal of sexual hysteria among women . . . not least among spinsters, who transmuted their repressed yearnings into lachrymose adoration.”  

According to some contemporary writers, the sexual sublimation, which served as the driving-force of popular, mostly female enthusiasm for Hitler, was not merely one-sided: Hitler, too – they suggested – found an outlet for his frustrated sexuality, a compensation for his lack of a “normal sexual relationship”, in whipping up hysteria of adulation among his female listeners. Thus, Nazi rallies became a “collective debauch”, resembling “the public sexual acts of primitive tribes.” 

We'll just tell the dumb broads that Republicans declared a
War on Women, and that we are here to "protect and defend."

Regardless of whether such "keen observations" by contemporary commentators of 1940's hold any value today, Hitler the politician “systematically adapted himself to the taste of women”, as there was very considerable political capital to be gained. According to his biographers, Hitler exploited and manipulated “specific female qualities, such as capacity for self-surrender or demand for authority and order", to the advantage of his party and himself. 


Devised in 2012, the Democrat political stratagem to corral American women voters into the Democrat barn by alleging Republican "War on Women" is not only “a straw woman” argument denying American women their intelligence, it is a hardly veiled “War on Truth” waged by President Obama and his advisers. As for Obama's "sex appeal" to women, sooner or later, the "beauty" is what comes from within. His divisive racial, gender and class demagoguery is ugly as mortal sin. 

Eight years Later

  ___________________________________________________________________
Sources:

1. Behind Obama's Victory: Women Open Up a Record Marriage Gap. By KENT GARBER November 5, 2008; US News & World Report; http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/11/05/behind-obamas-victory-women-open-up-a-record-marriage-gap
2. Article by Prof. Dick Geary, "Who voted for the Nazis? (electoral history of the National Socialist German Workers Party)". This article first appeared in History Today, October 1998. Dick Geary is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham and the author of Hitler and Nazism (Routledge 1993);
3. Doris K. in Lothar Steinbach, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube. Ehemalige Nationalsozialisten und
Zeitzeugen berichten über ihr Leben im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1983),  85–86.
4. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS; Sautter, 222.
 Erna Benze, “Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft und das Deutsche Frauenwerk,” in Benze and Gräfer, 301.
5. Melita Maschmann, Fazit: Keine Rechtfertigung, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 1964)
6. Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration. By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01.

Copyright (c) Eric Ross, Ph.D. 2012