Remembrance : The status of men

Remembrance : The status of men — Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, a day to pay tribute to our fallen heroes and the sacrifices men make in war.

Well, at least that is the way it used to be.  Today we are more politically correct and create, rightfully so, also compassion for fallen men’s (and a handful of fallen women’s) surviving loved ones and families.

This morning, a bit rushed for time, because I had to go to the Remembrance Day ceremonies in honour of Canada’s fallen heroes, victims of the wars required to preserve Canada’s freedom in two world wars, but also almost forgotten ones, the Boor War, the Korean War and now the war in Afghanistan in which more Canadian men (and a handful of women) left their lives as sacrifices for the same reason, I had responded to a Canadian journalist.  She had informed me of a paper on The Status of Men, by Andrea Mrozek, Manager of Research and Communication, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.

The journalist, a long-term pro-family and pro-male advocate and writer, had written, “Walter are you already on this list? This was written by a friend I worked with at…. Very impressive.”

I was not quite that much impressed by the paper, although the paper is a fair outline of the plight of men and its impact on families and society.  Before I explain why that is and state what I wrote back to her, let me tell you what happened at the local watering hole, Nightmoves, the Bruderheim bar where I stopped in after the Remembrance Day ceremonies were over, to warm up.

It had been cold, and, because the sun had been shining before I left, I had thought that I would not have to put on my parka.  That had been a mistake I will not soon make again.

It was cold, I got cold, chilled to the bone, and I needed a brandy and a coffee to try and warm up. That worked, and I was glad it did. I needed it.  A few acquaintances were there, having breakfast and also warming up before they were to resume their attempts to hunt deer and moose in the area.

“Where is your wife,” they asked, and “why did you not bring her?” I explained that the missus went to Edmonton, with one of her girlfriends, to the farm fair, although I could not think for the life of me why her girlfriend would want to go there, unless she wanted to go shopping for a prospective husband, because she surely was no longer in the farming business, having done her best to sell off already most of the farmland that her husband — deceased for a few years, long before it was his wife’s turn to go, as husbands are likely to do for various reasons (e. g.: such as being forced to fight in military actions here and there) — had done his best to acquire for the safety and security of his family.

I told them that I thought that at her age, about 65, she would face tough competition. In the age-group 65 and over, there is one man for every two women. The hunters said that they had never thought of it that way, and that I made reaching old age quite an attractive proposition for men. I said that they were quite right, but that, even though the risk for men of losing it all is quite high, things would progressively get better for surviving men, the older a man gets. “Think of it,” I said, “all the fun you can have! At age 85 and over, the ratio of men to women is about 1 : 5, and at age 95 it is about 1 : 10. Women could be falling all over for you. You would no longer have to look for them. They would come looking for you, although by that time you would probably have forgotten even the memory of what the chase is all about.”

Still, here now is what I wrote back to the Canadian journalist, in memory of the sacrifices men make, in Canada and elsewhere. I told the journalist,

I am not sure what list you are referring to, but I read the abstract of “The Status of Men“, its summary, and small portions of the full report. I will have to leave the reading of all of it until much later today. As of now I cannot comment intelligently on the whole report, but I must assume, from what I read so far, that the author accurately summarized her perspective on the issue of the declining status of men. My commentary is based on that assumption.

I am not all that impressed by the paper; but is it perhaps a step into the right direction? I wonder. I am a bit rushed and have not yet given several readings to what I wrote here. So, consider this a first draft that needs some refinements, although what those should be is not immediately apparent. Perhaps you have a few ideas on that. I would gladly discuss those this with you, provided we can do it at Dads & Things, where I will post the following.

As a subject for concern, we should neither be overly concerned about the status of men nor about the status of women. The latter is a term that was brought into prominence through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [considered to be the fathers of modern communism]. It was used to help “liberate” women, to bring them into the work force and to help bring about the destruction of the traditional nuclear family, for which purpose modern feminism rose (all along opposing the incumbent pro-family feminism that had prevailed since the early 1800s) to promote that and the consequential marginalization of men.

It somewhat underscores the reality of those objectives when one considers that while women became “liberated” and expanded their power from the home domain (which they without a doubt already firmly dominated) to the work domain and continued and intensified their domination of public life (enabled by male politicians who recognized the opportunities presented to them through women’s suffrage), men became more firmly enslaved.

It is ironic that during the initial period of women’s liberation, men were forced like slaves to die in record numbers in the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind, while their surviving widows and children were forced to live miserable lives, often and largely on the dole; but the politicians had achieved their goal, female liberation and domination, while the tax burden for income earners — mostly men — rose rapidly and enormously to enable the State to pay for it all. [Preceding link inserted 2010 11 25 –WHS]

Pieta, by Michelangelo
“War is good business – Invest your son” —Allen Ginsberg

While formerly it was that men were still openly and deeply mourned by their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, today’s women see nothing wrong with men’s enormous sacrifices, for the simple reason that radical feminists indoctrinated them into firmly accepting the belief that no sacrifice by men is large enough to atone for the alleged oppression of women throughout the history of mankind (of course, history as invented and revised by feminists). There is of course another reason why the large losses of men are no longer so keenly felt. Father State jumped into the breach that was left by men and fathers who were expunged from their families, providing his benevolence so easily funded by the much greater contributions of men (70 percent of all such contributions) to social safety nets whose benefits are handed out primarily to women (70 percent of all such benefits). That alone is socialism in action: from those able to give to those in need — and men industriously give, slaving away as always, now for Father State instead of for their families from which they were and are being expunged.

The question is whether the promotion of the status of men will change and equalize what is an obvious imbalance in the status of women and men. Radical feminism (a.k.a. Marxist or socialist feminism), the currently ruling faction of the feminist movement, always has and will vehemently oppose the elevation of the status of men, while other feminist factions, of whom there are several dozens, are happy to ride along on the feminist band wagon.

The elevation and promotion of the status of men will do little more than to enormously deepen the rift between the sexes and to intensify the war of the sexes.

Here is an excerpt from a commentary I wrote just yesterday morning to put the war of the sexes into the greater context of the re-engineering of civilization. I urge you to follow the link in that to some observations on Igor Shafarevich’s book, The Socialist Phenomenon. It seems that The Socialist Phenomenon is of far greater importance than the IMFC paper on The Status of Men. Alone the foreword by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn makes it worth having a look at the book.

My first marriage had fallen to pieces and ended in separation and divorce in 1975. The consequence of my experiences of the divorce process convinced me to become a fathers-rights activist. On account of that I now operate the most-popular fathers-rights website in Canada, Fathers for Life, but that is also quite popular (at the time one of the top-ranking websites of that sort) on a global basis.

Through the international networking I do in connection with that, I developed early on an interest in the history and evolution of feminism and of the Marxist roots and ideology of radical feminism, feminism’s controlling faction. That led me to explore the history and evolution of socialism and of the tools and programs employed by socialists in the re-engineering of our civilization.

Out of that, beginning in the early 1990s, came my interest in environmentalism and in the hype and hysteria created and used by it to indoctrinate humanity. I set up a website and blog to address that.

As Anthony Watts often explains, it is not necessary to assume that malice is the driving cause of something that we see as corruption, when simple incompetence suffices. Still, I am more inclined to consider that the driving force for our progression towards the global socialist state is nothing more than greed for money, power and control.

I know, I am describing the making and development of a cynic, but I consider Igor Shafarevich and others who stated similar things to be absolutely correct.

Socialism is an ideological force that existed for as long as did civilization, while feminism, a branch of socialism, existed just as long. A society will always tend to evolve into a socialist regime of a totalitarian nature. That was true on a regional basis throughout history. We now have the tools and the audacity to attempt expanding the scope of that progression to encompass the globe. At that level, things will end as they always did, in chaos and a long dark age from which humanity will take a long time to emerge in more conservative manifestations of orderly nations and regimes. However, before that happens it will be necessary for society to develop once more an appreciation for the essential, fundamental building block of a well-functioning society, the traditional nuclear family. That will happen all on its own. It will be a survival mechanism that comes into play when Father State can no longer afford to support his children (that’s beginning to happen right now), and individuals will once more seek and find security at home, within the welfare and safety provided by the immediate family.

Consider a few of the observations presented by Igor Shafarevich,

But while Fourier, with the infantilism so characteristic of him, sees amid “the passions we call vices” nothing more terrible than “passion for sweets and the delights of love,” Freud goes much further. Among the forces to which he attempts to reduce culture and the spiritual life of man, Freud does not bypass either malice or lust for domination, destruction or the death wish. He considers all culture to be based on the suppression of the instincts–the deepest part of the human psyche, which strives to act according to the “pleasure principle.” Unhappiness, in Freud’s view, is a necessary cost for civilization. Happiness does not fall within the range of cultural values. Moral norms, elaborated by that part of the psyche that is of later, cultural, origin, are factors which are destructive and mortally dangerous to the organism. Freud compares morals with products of decay which are manufactured by a cell and then become the cause of its death.(ibid. p. 229)

and

There is certainly nothing that suggests the existence of any kind of limit beyond which socialist principles cannot be applied. It would seem that everything depends only upon the depth of the
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crisis with which mankind may be faced. In this case, one could regard the death of mankind as the final result to which the development of socialism leads. (The Socialist Phenomenon, bottom of p. 274 and top of p. 275)

and

The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism–it constitutes the goal of socialism. (ibid. p. 285)

Shafarevich is right, and I can’t see for the life of me how promoting the elevation of the status of men will address the problem he identifies. It will certainly not do so by focusing on the plight of men and illuminating them as victims, while the welfare of our nation and indeed all of civilization is being ignored through diverting attention away from the fact that all along socialism had as one of its primary objectives: the planned, deliberate destruction of the traditional nuclear family, whereby – with what can be salvaged out of the resulting rubble of the destruction of our civilization – then a greater and better socialist, totalitarian, global regime can be constructed.

Walter Schneider

#RemembranceDay #TheStatusOfMen

See also:

• Men and energy, the foundation of modern civilization
• Remembrance Day 2007
• Remembrance Day 2008
• Remembrance : The status of men (2010)
• Divorce causes escalating suicide rates
• Sheep People Comparisons – Are people sheeple?
• Communism → second-wave feminism → social re-engineering
• Family courts solve divorce applications backlog
• Children of the State