History Debunked Suggests We Need Nazi ‘Heroic Mother’ Policies to Halt Demographic Decline

This is a response to a video Simon Webb put up some days ago. I meant to review it earlier, but there’s only so much fascism you can take, especially in today’s miserable economic situation and the Tories telling one lie after another. Webb’s video was prompted by a speech from the Japanese premier declaring that there was an existential crisis facing the Japanese the people. If they didn’t have more babies, they would die out. Webb notes that in the Beeb report about this, they stated that it could be solved by the Japanese importing people like other countries, but that the Japanese were firmly against this.

The Japanese have been worried about this for a very long time. Back in the 1990s the-then Japanese prime minister announced that if the country didn’t halt its declining birth rate, then they would be extinct in a thousand years’ time. That really is looking at the long term picture. To solve this problem, successive Japanese governments have suggested and embarked on various policies. One was that husbands should spend more time with their families in order to develop a closer relationship with their wives, with the unspoken implication that this would lead to more babies on the way. This provoked sharp criticism from one housewife, who complained that marital relations wouldn’t improve simply because the husband was at home more. The Japanese government has also set up a state dating agency to bring men and women together.

I suspect Japan’s demographic problems are partly due to particularly Japanese problems. There is, or was, a high rate of divorce among Japanese pensioners. This is caused by the Japanese work ethic, in which men work all the hours that God sends in order to support their families and make their country prosperous. The result is that they barely see their wives and families. When they retire, they find out that they have nothing in common and divorce. It’s a theme that was reflected in Japanese business novels. These featured loyal, hardworking sararimen, whose lives fall apart. They’re laid off by the companies they’ve loyally served and their families break up until they end up left behind running a small shop somewhere, lamenting that they’ve missed out on seeing their children grow up.

There’s also a trend among young Japanese not to date and have children. There was a Radio 4 programme, which I sadly missed, discussing this issue. It reported that this aversion was so severe that many young people even find the act of love itself repulsive. I wondered if this was a reaction to Japanese sex education and whatever Japanese youth is taught about sex outside marriage. If the attitudes against it are too harsh and the insistence on purity so strong, then it’s possible that this could lead to some impressionable people developing such a strong revulsion to sex. I remember from my schooldays that the sex education we were exposed to, with its clinical description of physical development and reproduction, as well as fears about the rising divorce rate, could almost have been calculated to put kids off sex. I also wonder if it’s due to the unavailability of contraception in Japan. This isn’t due to moral scruples, as in Roman Catholic Ireland. It was demanded by the Japanese medical complex, in order to protect the doctors that made money from performing abortions. Buddhism and Shinto have a series of three gods or kami, who preside over the souls of dead children. According to the anthropologist Dr Nigel Barley in his study of cultural attitudes to death and the dead across the world, Dancing with the Dead, the shrine to these gods are particularly supported by women, who’ve had abortions. I’m not criticising women’s right to abortions here, just noting that in previous decades over here the lack of contraception and the strong societal disapproval to births out of wedlock was a very strong disincentive to people, and especially women, having premarital sex.

In fact birth rates are declining across the world, mostly significantly in the developed west, but also elsewhere. One demographer interviewed a few decades ago in New Scientist predicted that in the middle years of this century the world would suffer a demographic crash. This is in stark contradiction with the 70s fears about the population explosion and ‘population bomb’. In many European countries the birth rate is below the level of population replacement.

Webb suggested that we might try to copy the Nazis, who gave medals to women who had large families. There were different medals award according to how many children they had. In fact, all the totalitarian states had similar policies. The Russians had their Heroic Mother awards, duly covered by Pravda, and Musso had a similar policy in his ‘Battle for Births’ campaign. If reproduction is a battle, it means people are doing it wrong. And if it’s a real physical battle, then it’s rape. But I think Musso meant it metaphorically, as everything was a battle in Fascist Italy. The campaign to increase cereal yield in agriculture was labelled ‘the Battle for Grain’. But Musso included in his policies to increase the birth rate various welfare benefits to make it easier and support women, who chose to have large families.

Webb has been followed in this by Laurence Fox, who gave a sermon on GB News yesterday, about his instinct that society was coming to an end because of the low birth rate in the west. This was breaking the social link Edmund Burke had said existed between the past, present and future generations. Of course, as a man of the right he has no sympathy for people demanding expanded welfare rights, accusing them of being ‘entitled’. They’re not. They’re people on the breadline demanding not expanded welfare provision, but proper welfare provision restored to adequate levels.

Plastic priest Calvin Robinson similarly discussed demographic decline in another piece for GB News. He was much more open about the provision of proper welfare support for families, arguing that Britain should follow the lead of Poland and Hungary. And then comes the element of racism. Because if we did this, like those countries we would not have to import people from outside.

And this is part of the problem.

Underneath these fears of demographic decline is the particular fear of White demographic decline. Other ethnic groups have larger families. Hence the stupid, malign conspiracy theories about ‘Eurabia’, that Muslims would outbreed Whites in the west and so eventually take over society. The French National Front let the cat out of the bag in the 90s. This was the mayor of one of the southern French cities, who had set up a system of welfare payments to encourage his citizens to have more babies. Except that this was a racist policy that applied only to Whites. Blacks, Asians and Muslims not allowed.

It’s why such a system would also have severe problems being introduced over here. And rightly so, as while I dare say that some members of ethnic groups don’t want to integrate or adopt British culture, others identify very strongly with it and see themselves as English, Welsh, Scots whatever. Such people shouldn’t be excluded from receiving these welfare payments simply because of the colour of their skin, whatever else one thinks of race relations and immigration.

Of course, the right blames the demographic crisis squarely on feminism and the way modern women are encouraged to pursue careers rather than raise families. Hence the Lotus Eaters put up a piece commenting on a report that half of all women are childless at thirty. To be fair, some left-wing feminists have also complained that feminism, for all its good intentions, has also denigrated the vital role of motherhood in society. But traditional attitudes towards gender roles may be part of the problem. In the New Scientist article I talked about earlier, it was noted that the countries with lowest birth rates had the most traditional attitudes towards childrearing, in which it was seen as primarily the responsibility of the mothers. This extended across cultures, from Italy in Europe to Japan. The countries which had the highest birth rates in the west were the Nordic countries, where men were being encouraged to help their wives with domestic chores and raising the sprogs.

That, and welfare policies designed to help working parents, seem far better solutions to the crisis than simply doling out medals based on the attitudes of totalitarian regimes.

Danny Cohen, the BBC, and the Anti-Semitism Allegations

Mike has put up several pieces on the anti-Semitism allegations. In one of them, he particularly criticised Newsnight for its spurious debate about them. On it, Evan Davies, who has also written a book detailing his neo-liberal, right-wing views, interviewed a number of people about the allegations. All of them believed that the allegations were correct. Not one of the challenged the idea that Labour was anti-Semitic.

One of the people on the panel was Danny Cohen. Now, if this is the same person I’m talking about, then it’s highly questionable whether he should have been on the programme at all, as he is hardly an unbiased, independent speaker. There was a Danny Cohen, who was formerly one of the leading managers – he may have been one of the controllers – of the BBC, before resigning and going to Israel. He also issued a statement that Britain and Europe were unsafe for Jews, and that they should also move to Israel. If that Danny Cohen, was the same Danny Cohen as the man who appeared on Davies’ programme, then he already has very strong biases, of which the viewer should be informed and which deserved to be questioned themselves.

Cohen was not alone in making these claims about the security of the Jews in Europe. They’ve been running since 2004 or so. I can remember reading a book review in the Spectator, about a novel by an American author set in the future, in which the remains of European Socialism join with the Islamists in the European parliament to bring about a new holocaust of European Jewry. If memory serves me right, Frederick Raphael was somehow involved with this, though I can’t remember whether he wrote it or just reviewed it approvingly. This is, of course, a gross smear, and comes very much from the Republican Neo-Con Right. Extreme right-wing Republicans like the very swivel-eyed Glenn Beck really do believe that Socialism is the same as Nazism, ’cause, er, the Nazis said they were. They then go on about how if Socialists like Bernie Sanders get into power, they’re going to take away America’s freedom. Beck himself has burst into tears several times on his show, wailing that they’re about to take him away. You can see the same nuttiness with Alex Jones on his Infowars programme. It’s on Youtube, so if you want to see how deranged part of the American political landscape is, you can have a look at it. There’s even a segment where he rants about Obamacare in a Reptile mask. Because Obama is part of the Reptoid alien Illuminati elite. Or something.

There have indeed been increased attacks in Jews. However, the majority of racially motivated attacks since 9/11 have been against Muslims, which disproves the allegation that Jews are more at threat in Europe than other groups. A Palestinian writer in the weekend Financial Times a decade or more ago said that in France, where the French authorities were cracking down on anti-Muslim violence more severely than anti-Semitic crime, it was not because the French state or people hated the Jews. Quite the opposite. In polls, the number of French people, who said that Jews weren’t really French, was very low: about 5%. The numbers who responded that Muslims weren’t really French was much higher, and anti-Arab sentiment in some parts of France was very marked. Yasmin Alibhai-Browne wrote a piece in the Independent several years ago describing her family’s experience of being shunned, ignored and very badly treated during a holiday in France, because she and her children were obviously Asian, despite their father being White. In fairness, she also wrote another piece several years later, saying what a wonderful time she’d had in France and how so much had changed.

In fact, the Zionist lobby has very definite demographic reasons for trying to make Jews feel unwanted and unsafe in Europe, and encouraging them to move to Israel. There’s a controversy there about the relatively higher fertility of the Arab population. Generally, Arab families have more children than Jewish Israelis, and so there’s a fear amongst some Israelis that they will soon be outbred. It’s very similar to the idea of ‘Eurabia’ in the Euro-American anti-Muslim right. In this view, Europe is under siege from Islam. Europeans have much smaller families than Muslims, and so in a few generations the Muslims will have outbred the rest of us, and we will be a minority in our own countries. It’s actually a load of rubbish, but it does have terrible emotive power.

There are other ways in which Israel is being placed in a difficult position through demographic change. The Zionist right, such as Likud, and in particular the ultra-Orthodox Haredis, wish to colonise the occupied West Bank as part of their programme, as they see it, to redeem all of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. They have bitterly attacked those Israelis, who have dared to suggest that it would be much better to withdraw. But this, however, means withdrawing some parts of the Israeli population from certain areas, such as the Negev, which already have a very high Arab population, mostly Bedouin. In the chapter on contemporary Israel in the book The Modern Middle East, edited by Albert Hourani, it states that there is a real possibility that if Israel continues encouraging Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, the resulting loss of population from the Negev and other areas will leave them with majority Arab populations.

This is obviously the very last thing Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist right want. A few years ago Netanyahu was asked whether his government would ever give the right of return to the Palestinian families who fled their homes in Israel in 1947 following the Israeli uprising and war with the Arabs. Netanyahu stated very firmly that he would not, because it would upset the fundamental ethnic character of Israel as the Jewish state.

It therefore seems very clear to me that Cohen’s comment about the rise in hostility to Jews in Europe and his recommendation that they emigrate to Israel, has little to do with the real situation, and everything to do with the need of the Israeli state to find more colonists to bolster their population against the Arabs. Cohen’s appearance with Evan Davies on Newsnight suggests that these manufactured allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party and its leader, are part of this hard-Right Zionist agenda.

Vox Political On the Satirical Response to Fox News’ Ideas about Muslim Birmingham

As the piece I’ve reblogged from Pride’s Purge shows, Fox News has lived down to its reputation for accurate reporting. The channel of ‘fair and balanced reporting’ (copyright R. Murdoch) declared that Birmingham and many other British cities, are now ‘completely Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslims simply don’t go in’. This has produced an outcry across the social media, from the people of those cities. Apparently it’s also news to them that their cities are completely Muslim, and non-Muslims don’t live there or visit. Mike over at Vox Political has some of the highly amusing responses. The article’s ‘Fox News announces Birmingham is a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims’ and it’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/01/11/fox-news-announces-birmingham-is-a-no-go-zone-for-non-muslims/.

And some of them are hilarious. Among some of the best is the joke that’The English City of Ba’ath is dedicated to the overthrow of the state of Israel. (Bernie Banter)’.

Across the North, people are holding up placards saying, ‘Je suis Benny’, (the much-loved character from the soap Crossroads).

Jasper Carrot is the Islamic theocratic rulers of Birmingham.

Mike also reports that there is now a petition calling on the Mayor of Birmingham and other British cities to let Non-Muslims back in. Mike comments on this “[edit: it’s a shame to have to add this bit, because it spoils the joke a bit – but for the avoidance of doubt, this is a satirical petition. I know that Birmingham is a diverse city and that everyone is welcome there as in all other cities in the UK. Fox News’ so-called ‘expert’ apparently does not.]”

‘There is a more sinister aspect to this. It could be suggested that, by making these claims on a major news channel, the Murdoch media is trying to stir up internecine unrest in the United Kingdom. This is, of course, illegal.‘

The Fox News report that so libelled Birmingham follows a series of articles by Right-wing, anti-Islamic journalists like Mark Steyn about the Islamification of European cities. Steyn on his blog has repeatedly commented on the majority Muslim state of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. According to him, the Muslim dominated town council issued an invitation to its non-Muslim inhabitants to convert to Islam. Steyn also believes and promotes the idea of ‘Eurabia’, the prediction that Muslim immigration and higher birth rates will soon result in a Muslim majority Europe.

There’s a geo-political aspect to this, as it looks to me less like an objective prediction of the future for Europe, and more like a piece of Israeli psy-ops designed to promote solidarity between Europe and Israel, and their programme of gradual isolation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, as well as a more generally hostile attitude to the Islamic world. The Arab Israeli birth rate is slightly higher than the Israeli, and there are parts of Israel where already the Arab population is estimated to be the majority, such as the Negev. Moreover, Arabs dominate certain sectors of the economy, such as fruit-picking, where the wages are too low and conditions too poor to be attractive to Israeli workers. There was also a shock when 75 per cent of young Israelis responded ‘Yes’ in a questionnaire to the question, ‘Would you rather live in America, with Christian neighbours who like us, rather than Israel with Muslim neighbours who hate us?’ There is also political tension between the Israeli religious right, who wish to expand the Israeli state so that its borders match those when it was at its greatest extent at the time of the Bible. Other, more pragmatic politicians fear that this would overstretch the population and its resources, and that incorporating these new territories would have to be accompanied with the loss of areas, such as the Negev, with an Arab majority. On these problems facing Israel, see the chapter in the book edited by Albert Hourani on the history and contemporary situation in the Middle East.

It looks to me that the predictions of a coming Muslim-dominated Europe are based very much on the real demographic predicament of Israel. I also believe that the recent statements by various rabbis and Jewish authorities, that Jews are no longer safe in Europe and should move to Israel, are a part of this strategy to exploit the current victimisation of the Jewish population in Europe in order to solve some of Israel’s demographic problems through immigration. I am certainly not complacent about the severe threats to European Jews from the stormtroopers of the Right and militant Islam, especially after the murders of Jews in France and elsewhere. I think, however, that the real threat to their safety is being exaggerated by the militant Zionist Right.

Thus Fox News presents the idea that Muslims have completely dominated several British cities as objective fact, in order to promote the ideas of American exceptionalism. In their view, America and Israel both stand alone against the tide of Muslims threatening to overwhelm the West.

Thatcher, Mussolini and Manipulation of the Economy to Destroy Working Class Opposition

Margaret Thatcher destroyed much of Britain’s manufacturing base, and particularly the coal industry, in order to break the power of the trade unions that had brought down Edward Heath’s government. Kittysjones has recently blogged about the academic report into Thatcher’s ‘calculated immiseration’ of the working class for ideological reasons and the profit of the upper and middle classes. See her post ‘ Tory dogma and hypocrisy: the “big state”, bureaucracy, austerity and “freedom”’ at http://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/tory-dogma-and-hypocrisy-the-big-state-bureaucracy-austerity-and-freedom/.

Mussolini did something similar in Italy. Apart from taking violent action against the Socialist party and the trade unions, who were attacked and their offices wrecked in a concerted campaign of violent intimidation, the Duce also attempted to alter the demographic and class structure of Italian society to halt the increasing emergence of urban opposition. He pursued a deliberate ‘ruralisation’ policy, intended to stem and reverse immigration to the towns from the countryside. He believed that the ideal societies were those of peasant proprietors. These were more fertile than urban societies, and more docile and supportive of autocratic regimes. Sophisticated urbanites, on the other hand, were too clever and too willing to discuss and criticise. And like Margaret Thatcher, the prosperity of the citizens counted for little. Denis Mack Smith in his biography of Musso states:

Prosperity, as he had to confess, was not very high on his list of priorities except for its propaganda value; national strength was far more important. He was expecting a war at any time after 1934 and wanted the country to become self-sufficient in food before then. This was one reason why he hoped Italy would remain mainly agricultural: urbanization was threatening to endanger the food supply of a rapidly growing community. Another hazard was that as people moved to the towns they began to think and talk too much. Peasants, he asserted, were more necessary to fascism than intellectuals or town artisans, both of which latter categories were, as he had to admit, unenthusiastic about his regime if not strongly hostile.

…. the healthiest nations were those based on a population of small proprietors who worked ‘obediently, and preferably in silence’. On the other hand, urban conditions encouraged not only disobedience but a wish for higher wages and greater comfort which, in turn, would result in smaller families, all of which would be profoundly unfascist. To ‘ruralize Italy’ would, he knew, be immensely costly and might take half a century, but it would have to be effected. Less should be spent on improving conditions in the towns because ‘cities are pernicious and parasitic’; even in the countryside, he thought it necessary to restrict improvements in popular housing because better conditions might result in fewer children being born. Such beliefs became an obsession with him. He order the prefects to stop any move away from the land and to use force if necessary. Rome should not become an industrial city but remain the centre of an agricultural region, and many other important towns should be forcibly reduced in size. But he had chosen a hopelessly unequal battle and the towns went on expanding as before. At first he falsified the census returns to conceal this untoward fact, but eventually went into reverse and decided to spend a great deal of money to make Rome into a great centre of industry.

Thus Thatcher, the Tories and the Italian Fascists were determined to sacrifice their countries’ industrial development in the interests of creating their ideal societies, societies which consisted of the poor obeying their social superiors without question, and where critical, urban working and intellectual classes were highly unwelcome.

There is, however, one major difference between the two: Mussolini abandoned this policy when it could not be achieved, and promoted Rome’s industrial development. Maggie and the Tories were successful, and Britain’s manufacturing base has contracted ever since.

The American Right’s Demographic Argument against the European Welfare State and Mussolini’s ‘Battle for Births’

One of the other arguments the American Right has used against the socialised medicine and the welfare state in America is the effect they believe it would have on the American birth rate. European birth rates are falling. Right-wing broadcasters and journalists, like Mark Steyn, have declared that this due to these nations’ extensive welfare policy. With the state to care for them in sickness, unemployment and old age, Europeans are no longer bothering to have the children, who would otherwise support them. This contrasts markedly with the competing nations in the Developing World with their large families. As a result, Europe would face the problems of an aging population, with increased state expenditure on their care and tax burden on the contracting younger population that would be required to pay for it.

This argument has a number of major flaws, not least the fact that birth rates are falling throughout the Developed World, regardless of whether they have a welfare state or not. Japan has been governed more or less continually by the Liberal Democratic Party since the Second World War. This is a Conservative party and there has been little state welfare provision in Japan. Despite this, the Japanese birth rate is also falling, to the point where one of the major Japanese newspapers back in the 1990s declared that if this situation was not reversed, in a thousand years’ time the Japanese people would be extinct. In some European countries this demographic decline appears to have begun long before the modern welfare state. The French and German birth rates appeared to have begun to fall some time around the First World War. The German writers Richard Korherr and Oswald Spengler also saw the declining European birth rate as part of its decadence, and these in turn inspired Mussolini to launch the ‘demographic campaign’ to raise the birth rate. Mussolini turned to the Fascist statistician and demographer, Corrado Gini, for information. Gini declared that the problem was symptomatic of the ‘old age of nations’, and due to the dominance of economics over patriotism. It was caused by the ‘calculated egoism’, ‘sedentary character’ and the growth in working class unrest. Mussolini himself went even further. He declared that it had been demographic decline that had caused the fall of the Roman Empire. Italy needed a high birth rate if it was to become a reinvigorated and dynamic nation. He argued that the low birth rate was the result of corrupt modern urban civilisation and its pernicious influences. This was contrasted with the countryside, where the virtues of peasant life resulted in large families. He therefore launched a campaign to depopulate the cities in favour of the countryside, and ban migration from it to the cities.

While Steyn and the rest of the American Right argue that state intervention and welfare policies are the cause of this decline, Mussolini demanded the exact opposite. The state launched a series of legislation to encourage its citizens to marry and have children. It also increased welfare provision to ensure the health of babies and their mothers. In 1925 it established the Opera Nazionale di Maternita ed Infanzia to ensure the health and welfare of women and their children. In 1929 it passed legislation granting maternity leave and birth insurance for working mothers, as well as a tax on unmarried men. From 1933 it passed further legislation providing for extra pay, and special loans, prizes and subsidies for families with a large number of children. Newlyweds were also to receive special loans from the state. The Italian population did rise during the Fascist period from 38,450,000 to 44,900,000. Historians of Fascist Italy, such as Philip V. Cannistraro, consider it very doubtful whether this was due to the government’s policies, except, perhaps, that increased welfare provision may have lowered infant mortality.

Socialised medicine and the welfare state cannot be used to explain falling birth rates in Europe and the Developed World. Far more likely is the simple fact that living standards have risen since the 19th century. The more educated, affluent sections of the population tend to have fewer children than the poorer, less educated. Living standards have improved, and there are greater leisure opportunities than available than in the Victorian era. In the 19th century much of working class social life revolved around the pub, though participation and involvement in sport, music and popular educational facilities like museums and libraries were also growing. Since then a wider range of commercial goods have become available, along with leisure activities and venues from sports facilities to music, theatre and the cinema. Moreover infant mortality has fallen from the horrific levels of the 19th century, so there isn’t the same necessity for parents to have large numbers of children in the hope that one, at least, might survive.

The converse of this is that the American Right, in their campaign against welfare benefits, Obamacare and decent working conditions are aiming to reduce their people to the kind of harsh poverty found in the modern Developing World and in the 19th century Europe and America, whose laissez-faire policies they idolise.

Sources

‘Demographic Policy’,’Fasci Femminili’ and’Gini, Corrado’ in Philip V. Cannistraro, ed., Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood 1982), pp. 162-4, 202-4, and 246.

Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1920, 2nde Edition (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987.