dedicated to Sigrid Hunke
The image of the woman (as enchantress of life, as the sacred preserver of identity, heritage, and ancestry) slowly but inevitably gives way to the ethnocidal image of the maternity-averse European. The internationally recognised sociologist Pierre Chaunu sounded the alarm: ‘We are on the brink of the abyss!’ The black sun of declining birth rates is now our fate in a society infatuated with the ‘shell of things’ (Saint-Exupéry). In the wake of Simone de Beauvoir, she can only express indifference or aversion to this burden of a child that delays the purchase of new furniture, a new car or the mandatory video system, even jeopardising winter sports vacations. The dreadful poverty of a people who walk their dogs instead of pushing empty strollers, converse with their green parrots or smile at their golden fish. The terrible emptiness of these homes that resound with the song of canaries in their cages, but no longer know the laughter and crying of children. The ugliness of a people whose waistline no longer reveals the swelling of life’s secrets but the obesity of a society that perishes in voluntary maternity crisis.
Europe, and especially Germany – the record holder in demographic suicide with a birth rate of 1.3 (while the minimum rate for fully replacing the current generation is 2.2) – is gradually sinking wounded into old age, shrinking due to the voluntary childlessness of our women. No problem! Karl-Otto Hondrich, a professor of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, found the miracle cure in a drawer of his paid imagination. ‘The last chance for societal rejuvenation is salvation from outside’, said the brilliant sociologist to Der Spiegel. Even better: ‘The contribution that quasi-immigration of asylum seekers and guest workers makes to solving our depopulation problem is decisive!’ Mr Hondrich certainly values the identity of his fellow citizens very little; that of foreigners hardly concerns him anymore.
The decline in population due to a limited birth rate is not new. The Greeks had to deal with it as well. According to Spengler, Polybius lamented it as the fate of Greece. It took on catastrophic proportions in Rome ‘despite the desperate marriage and child legislation of Augustus, whose lex de maritandis ordinibus was more shocking to society than the defeat of Varus’. (The Decline of the West, Vol. II) It was also one of the reasons why the Maya population disappeared shortly after the Spanish conquest, whose ‘brutality… would have been ineffective against a young and fertile culture people, if the internal extinction had not already begun’ (ibid.).
The causes of depopulation coincide with the environment in which they took root, in other words, with our society, which feeds on the breast of egalitarianism, the religion of human rights, liberalism, and universalism. The egalitarian ideology, the doctrine of equality, has gradually become the focal point of European consciousness, institutionalised thinking of public opinion, academic discourse, political propaganda, Judaeo-Christian message, and educational argumentation. It influences all media.
Of all its carriers, liberalism – a cocktail of humanitarian rationalism, cosmopolitan messianism, and mercantilist-utilitarian-individualist views – undoubtedly led us most effectively into the age of darkness, whose first signs Hermann von Keyserling already recognised in his famous treatise on America in 1930. The philosopher explicitly warned Europe about the America-centered totalitarianism of depersonalising over-mechanisation and the commercial, i.e. liberal-capitalist ideology that was raised to the common denominator of all values. He already saw the disastrous consequences of the deculturising one-world ideology, the like-mindedness age of intellectual uniformity and collective humanity, the neo-primitive age of all raw ideals of hyper-consumption, standardisation, uniform rhythms, material dominance, and economic demonism. With rare acumen, he predicted the termite age; Europe, however, remained hopelessly deaf to his warnings. Meanwhile, the liberalist system has reached global proportions. Liberalism has a significant share in the decline in birth rates, among other things, because it has taken advantage of the overwhelming influence of the media. ‘The television message’, notes sociologist Jean Baudrillard, ‘is not to be found in the images transmitted by television; it is to be found rather in the new forms of relationship and perception that it propagates, as well as in the transformation of traditional family and group structures.’ (La société de consommation, 1970)
Mediatisation is a parody of the world. According to Arnold Gehlen, humans experience our time almost secondhand through it, seeing the world pass by on their screens from everywhere and nowhere. The mass media neutralise the ‘experienced, unique, eventful essence of the world’, writes Baudrillard. Mediatisation is ultimately ‘the totalitarian message of a consumer society’. Thus, the sign empties meaning. Our society increasingly forgets those values, such as motherhood, that give life a higher meaning, becoming more indifferent to the cultural and historical heritage that each people is called to manage within a particular political design. In a world that has become a ‘sign system’, value-displacing mass consumption led to deculturation. The abundance of information dis-informed and domesticated our contemporaries; they can no longer distinguish between the essential and the superfluous, stunned by all the mediatic rubbish inflated by a tangle of useless images and insignificant speeches. The atomisation of society into individuals also reversed priorities: weather forecasts became more important than the most alarming demographic forecasts, as excursions and holidays are to be evaluated as inevitable attempts to escape from an increasingly suffocating social and professional life. The fluctuations of the dollar/the Golden Calf, the statistical stock market of our tolerations and defeats, influence the decline in birth rates, the demographic spiral of our suicide, at the margins.
Conclusion: Egalitarianism strives to criminalise ethnic, cultural, and even sexual (neofeminism) differences, to enforce the absurd notion that people are identical, to catechise the liberal theory of ‘better advantage’, to worship profit, and this became a hit: Europeans believed in it at the cost of an infectious existential discomfort that sociologists call the ‘coefficient of future loss’. Suffering in a society that knows no other historical project than early retirement, the 35-hour week, vacation distribution, or the next magical election circus, suffering in the future world dedicated to uni-culture, uni-people, uni-history, and unisex, increasingly obsessed with the spectre of their decadence and levelling, our contemporaries are less and less concerned with securing their offspring and standing up for their culture. Finally, we must highlight the severe crisis between the European man and the European woman, exacerbated by the transformations of neofeminism. This crisis is due, among other things, to the continued criminalisation of women in the collective unconscious of our people by Judaeo-Christianity. Only if man and woman have rooted again in their respective natural identities will they rekindle their mutual fervour, ‘which only gives and never plunders, for fervour requires neither property nor presence’ (Saint-Exupéry).
In this disenchanted world, fatalism and gloom are easy temptations. However, the demographic fate is inexorably linked to the egalitarian fate. In other words, only by overcoming this – through the reconquest of our identities, our culture, our reasons for existence, through the recreation of meaning in signs, things, and actions – will we conquer it.
Nature invented species so peoples can shape their biological and cultural destinies differently. It did not anticipate the panmixia of the wizards of egalitarianism and their collaborators. Robert Ardrey wrote that humans, tragic products of the Pleistocene, ‘were created for drama’. As ‘weather-hardened animals, children of catastrophe’, we show that ‘man does his best when times are at their worst’.
The woman holds the keys to our destiny. She should burn her male frippery and put on the shining garment of motherhood again. Since she did not value her essence, she lost her secret. Perhaps she will be given the incomparable experience of carrying a child again, the time when the woman is closer than ever to ‘feeling a breath of immortality’ (Arianna Stassinopoulos).
Aragon, a lead singer of communism, said that the woman is the future of man. We will not contradict him this time: he has never been closer to the truth.
