Fathers for Life
Walter Schneider

Tomorrow we celebrate Remembrance Day in Canada and in other countries of the Commonwealth, a day to remember those who died fighting for home and country, or, as the case may be, for King and country or, as needed, for the motherland (e. g.: Russia) or for the fatherland (e. g.: Germany).

Yes, even in Germany there is such a thing as Remembrance Day. It was declared as an official day of celebration in 1816, by order of the Prussian King Frederic William III. He designated the last Sunday preceding the first Advent to be a day of remembrance of those who deceased during the preceding year. It is popularly called Totensonntag (Sunday of the Dead).

Remembrance Day or Sunday of the Dead, we mourn those who died, regardless of their sex, and the memory of war never leaves those who actively participated in one or often in more than one, either as soldiers or as civilians who lived through war. Officially though, Germany does not engage much in the military ceremonies and show of regalia that are a major part of Remembrance-Day-like activities in English-speaking countries. There are other differences.

Germany gave a military emphasis to the Sunday of the Dead only when its totalitarian regimes were actively engaged in war, necessarily so, because it lost the lives of many millions of soldiers during those wars. After all, the Sunday of the Dead is in remembrance of those who died during the year gone by, and during a given past year in war, the vast majority of the dead were soldiers.

Although the Sunday of the Dead is and always was gender-neutral, Remembrance Day once rightfully wasn’t but now is gender-neutral, too. That is curious but politically correct.

Nevertheless, objectively, it always was and still is so, that soldiers who died in war were and still are almost without exception men. The alleged advance of the equality of the sexes does not yet and probably never will extend to have women soldiers die in numbers that even remotely approach the number of men soldiers who die in war; not even in Israel. Men are expendable, women are to be protected. It always was and always will remain so, notwithstanding all feminist claims to the contrary.

I don’t want to write here about those thoughts for too long, as I did so already some years ago and recently expanded on them a little more in [1] To Preserve and Protect, an essay on the changing role of women in war, on the economics and roots of war, and on the male sacrificial premium.

[1] To Preserve and Protect recently rose to prominence on the website of Fathers for Life and on the Internet. It presently attracts about one tenth of the visitors who come daily to the website. It ranks in 18th place of 330,000 entries on the search-return list for a google-search for “to preserve and protect”. [As of Nov. 14, 2007, that was in 5th place of about 718,000]

Curiously, almost exclusively only the first page of the set of five pages is being visited, but most of the visitors to that page stayed long enough to read all of it. That is not because most people actually read the page. It is because people are more interested in pictures than they are in words. The picture at the right is the one that drew all of the attention. Let no one have any illusions that the attention that picture got by hundreds of visitors a day will last throughout the whole year.

The attention the picture received began on Nov. 3 and will end a few days after Remembrance Day. In comparison, women attract far more attention than dead men who died by the millions for home and country will.

The picture of the anorexic body builder that is shown here attracts many more visitors each day than the soldiers’ graves do, and it attracts that attention - ever-increasing amounts of it - every day, 365 days a year, year after year.

It is too bad for those who took the trouble to read only the first page of [3] To Preserve and Protect at F4L. Whether they are feminists or not, they missed out on some very surprising truths about war.

Yes, men and women do live in very different realities, and, no, women do not get the short end of the stick, but women do claim to be the victims.  Are they?  Really?