Great replacements

"Tonight is about reuniting families," Joe Biden wrote last night from Joint Base Andrews, where he and Kamala Harris welcomed Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and Evan Gershkovich home.  We're told that Biden removed his American flag lapel pin and placed it on Whelan, while Gershkovich embraced his mother, Ella Milman.

As a man whose own family history reads like a novel, Biden appreciates family.  The Republicans have decided to fight this campaign by pretending that Democrats hate families and are dominated by "childless cat ladies," but yesterday they undermined their own propaganda.  They prevented passage of a bipartisan Child Tax Credit bill when seven senators, including J.D. Vance, didn't show up to vote.

There is a difference between supporting families and fetishizing them, which is what repressive states always do.  The Vichy regime of Philippe Petain replaced France's Revolutionary motto "Liberty, equality, brotherhood" with the one at the top, "Work, family, country," the better to welcome their German overlords.  Hitler's Reich had plenty of slogans, but the relevant one for German women was "Children, kitchen, church," which is why no women occupied positions of consequence in party or government.  Children above all, with a decoration, the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, for those who produced eight or more (gold), seven (silver) or four (bronze).  A fertility Olympics!

Vladimir Putin would deny using Nazism as a template -- it's a feature of official propaganda that Russia has an obligation to save Ukraine from its "fascist" rulers -- but his plans for Russian women sound awfully familiar.  "Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more," he told an audience of political and religious figures last year.  "We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions."  Russia is underpopulated because of a low birth rate and short life expectancy, exacerbated by an unexpectedly difficult war in Ukraine which costs perhaps a thousand Russian lives a day.  Europe had the same problem in the 1920s after the Great War and the influenza pandemic, and once again the burden is being placed on women.  

Only more so, because Russia is "locked in a civilizational conflict with the West," and Western decadence is now defined by feminism, LGBTQ people and personal freedom in general.  Women are supposed to start families between the ages of 18 and 24, so forget about pursuing higher education or careers.  "Many women in Russia feel fine if they're deputy to someone," says Yekaterina Mizulina, one of several Aunt Lydias quoted in the Washington Post story.  "They don't want to be in charge.  This is our character."  There's a "children's ombudsman," Maria Lvova-Belova, who has "ten children, five of them adopted" (kidnapped from Ukraine, most likely).  And Putin gives a "Heroine Mother" award to women who produce ten or more children.  (Inflation -- Hitler only required eight.)

Creepy, and coming to a Lebensborn near you if the Heritage Foundation and the MAGA cult prevail.  Now it all makes sense -- the assault on abortion rights, contraception and no-fault divorce.  They appeal to sentimentality by pretending to be "pro-life" but the question is, whose life?  Not the semen receptacle whose only purpose is to carry that "innocent child" to term with little or no support from the government or the originator of the semen.  Or else what...prison?  The death penalty?  Again there is precedent -- abortion was a capital crime in the Third Reich.  The guillotine, I believe.  

Sure, America needs workers to pick the crops, work the 7-11s, serve the burgers and all those other "Black jobs" that Americans disdain.  We can force-birth a generation of Epsilons and wait twenty years, or we can welcome the adults who were healthy enough to walk here from Honduras looking for work.  That would require that we stop demonizing them and trying to kill them, sort out "The Border" and accept the fact that Norwegians just don't want to settle here anymore.  As our own ancestors came here even from "shithole countries" like Italy and Russia a century and a half ago.  This panic about not enough babies is just that, panic.  And by the way, why are men who look like Elon Musk and Boris Johnson convinced that the world needs more blurry copies of them?  Buy a mirror and get over yourselves.