A decade ago, I was speaking in Switzerland before a presumed friendly audience of psychologists, teachers, and physicians.  My topic was the family as “the natural and fundamental…unit of society,” a phrase found in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which seemed to be safe ground.  In this talk, I made a positive reference to family policy involving state support for traditional marriages and children.  As the question time started, though, a clearly agitated woman rose and asked me how I could endorse such an approach.  “These are Nazi ideas,” she declared.

Indeed, this fearful perception of “family policy” as fascist in inspiration is widespread in Europe.  As a friend of mine who sits in Sweden’s Parliament explains: “To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi.”  This attitude has, I believe, crippled contemporary European efforts to confront the continent’s “birth dearth” and the gloomy 21^st Century reality of depopulation.  At the same time, the current push throughout the Western world for “same-sex marriage” rests on a often heard, similar argument.  To oppose the “gay right” to marry is also to align oneself with the Nazis who persecuted homosexuals in the death camps of World War II.

My argument today is that these views have the facts largely reversed.  Rather than seeking stronger families, Nazi policy aimed at destroying family autonomy.  Rather than affirming the traditional roles of husband and wife, of mother and father, Naziism sought a radical change in gender roles.  Moreover, the relationship between Naziism and homosexuality turns out to have been more complex than commonly supposed.  More broadly, I will show why other totalitarian regimes have also sought to destroy marriage, both the “hard” regimes of the Soviet Union and Communist China and the “soft” totalitarianism of modern Democratic Socialism.  And finally, I will explain why the true role of traditional marriage and family is that of standing for liberty.

THE NAZI FAMILY SYSTEM

Turning to Germany, it is true that shortly after taking power in 1933, the National Socialist German Workers Party—or the Nazis—implemented a vast marriage incentive program.  This included an interest-free loan to newlyweds of 1,000 Reich Marks (worth about a fifth of an average worker’s annual salary), provided that the new wives would not work and that the couples could prove that they had no immediate Jewish ancestors.  The money could be used only for the purchase of household goods, and 25 percent of the loan’s principle would be forgiven on the birth of each child.  The government also imposed a “bachelor tax” on the unmarried, rising to 5 percent of income.  Moreover, the income tax allowed a deduction of 15 percent per child; parents with six or more children paid no income tax at all.  The state outlawed birth control devices and stiffened penalties on abortionists.  Gertrude Scholtz-Klink became Reichsfrauenführerin, or leader of all Nazi Women, in 1934 [and I assure the reader that Scholtz-Klink is her real name, not some parody of television’s Hogan’s Heroes].  She developed other programs to encourage early marriage, homemaking wives, and motherhood.  This is the “Nazi family policy” scorned by many Europeans today.

And yet, just beneath the surface lay a very different agenda, one that would emerge only with time.  Anti-Semitism would be the only common plank.  The best source here, in my opinion, is the 1987 book, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, The Family, and Nazi Politics.  Authored by the feminist historian Claudia Koonz, the book opens with a summary of her astonishing interview with Frau Scholtz-Klink.  It turns out that this top woman Nazi was still very much alive in 1981, when Koonz was doing her research.  And Frau Scholtz-Klink was still very much a Nazi. While other top Nazi officials, after falling to the Allies in 1945, faced either a trial at Nuremberg or active deNazification, female Nazi leaders were simply ignored, left to go their own ways.   Frau Scholtz-Klink told her stunned feminist American guest that she “had grown up in an anti-Semitic family, so the ideas did not seem so unusual.”  Other comments included: “Göring, Rosenberg, Hitler, Himmler…You can’t imagine what gentlemen they all were;” and “If you could have seen the women of Berlin defending their city with their lives against the Russians, then you would believe how deeply German women loved our Führer.”[1] 

Koonz’s subsequent investigation reveals the truths of Nazi family policy.  As the historian summarizes: “Far from honoring the family, Scholtz-Klink used it as an invasion route into ordinary people’s ethical choices, emotional commitments, and social priorities.”  Where traditionalist German women “viewed the family as an emotional ‘space’ and bulwark against the invasion of public life,” Nazi women used the family to give the party “access to every German’s most personal values and decisions.”[2] 

The Nazi Party actually cared nothing about the “happy home.”  Indeed, one goal was to destroy family autonomy, among party members and enemies of the party alike.  As Koonz explains:

Nazi policy aimed at eroding family ties among victims and also among its own ‘Aryan’ followers.  In both cases, the goal was the same: to break down individual identity and to render people susceptible to whatever plans Hitler announced: eugenic breeding schemes for the chosen ‘Aryans’ and genocide for the selected.  Nazi guards [in the death camps] sent ‘men to the left’ and ‘women to the right’ for the same reasons they sent girls to the BDM [League of German Girls] and ‘Aryan’ boys to The Hitler Youth…[C]ontrary to rhetoric praising the ‘strong family,’ [they divided up German society] to weaken family bonding and enhance total loyalty to the Führer.[3]

Indeed, authentic defenders of the family in Germany often stood as quiet opponents of the Nazi regime.  For example, in the early 1930’s, the largest woman’s group in Germany was the Bund Deutsche Frauen (or The Federation of German Women’s Organizations), embracing 500,000 members.  The group, which had both Christian and Jewish members, held that “woman is the born guardian of human life,” committed itself to the defense of infant life, and supported a family wage for fathers so that the employed mother might “quit her job and devote all her energies to motherhood.”  When ordered in May 1933 to submit to Nazification, the Federation voted instead to shut down.  Even the rise in Germany’s marriage rate during the 1930’s may have had nothing to do with Nazi policy.  To the contrary, there is evidence that marriage had actually become an anti-Nazi act.  As Koonz conjectures: “Germans who drove the marriage rates upward may well have sought an escape from participation in the Nazified public square.”[4]

Indeed, as the Nazi regime unfolded, it became clear that marriage was slated for elimination.  Koonz again: “The war accelerated Hitler’s determination to establish an entirely new social order based on race and sex, with the ideal couple at its core: not a husband and wife, but a soldier and his mother, obedient to Hitler, the patriarch über alles.”  The regime wanted racially-pure babies, not frolicking, independent families, and the model for the new order was the Lebensborn home.  In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler had described his vision of a nation guided by elite, black-uniformed troops obedient to the Führer alone and living in their own world.  Heinrich Himmler created this elite as the SS and he urged his troops “to father as many children as possible without marrying.”  Women would live as brood mothers in eugenic convents (Zuchtkloster), served by pure-blooded Aryan SS stud-males (Ehehelfer).  As Himmler explained in October, 1939:

The greatest gift for the widow of a man killed in battle is always the child of the man she has loved.  SS men and mothers of these children…show that you are ready, through your faith in the Führer and for the sake of the life of our blood and people, to regenerate life for Germany, just as bravely as you know how to fight and die for Germany.”[5]

By early 1945, over 11,000 children sired by SS troops lived in Lebensborn homes; Himmler called them his greatest gift to the German nation. 

Beneath this quest for children, though, lay a darker reality, at which Koonz only hints.  Referring to Himmler’s command to the SS ranks that they sire out-of-wedlock children, she concludes:

The order exposed the underlying axiom of all Nazi policy on the Woman Question: Women performed only one function, breeding the children who would be raised by the Reich as the soldiers and mothers of the next generation….Promiscuity within an elite movement, like chastity in a religious order, maintains men’s loyalty to a masculine corps and inhibits the formation of deep ties to women and children.[6]

“A COMMON VICE”?

As it turns out, Nazi promiscuity was apparently not only of the heterosexual kind.  The question of homosexuality in the Nazi Party is a contentious one.  As noted before, the dominant view today is that the Nazis ruthlessly suppressed homosexuals, symbolized by the “pink triangles” worn by accused homosexuals in the death camps.  The contemporary play Bent shows a homosexual prisoner “trading up” his pink triangle for a yellow Jewish star to improve his status in the Camp.  Indisputable facts, such as the flagrant pederastry of Ernst Röhm, founder and leader of the SA Storm Troopers (or “brownshirts”), and his chief lieutenants are explained away as peculiarities of the early Nazi Party, eliminated by the Purge of 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives.”[7]

In 1995, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams published the book, The Pink Swastika.  Inspired by the 1945 work of Samuel Igra, Germany’s National Vice,[8] Lively and Abrams describe “the homoerotic” foundations of Nazi militarism.  Their thesis is that “the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sado-masochists.”[9]

This book generated howls of protest from the contemporary “gay community,” including several websites designed solely to refute its argument.  And the book does have a number of real limitations.  Neither author appears to have had professional training as an historian, and their conclusions frequently jump well ahead of the facts.  Most of their sources are secondary in nature; that is, the authors have not reviewed the primary documents.  And the volume is published by an obscure press without the full tools of scholarship.

All the same, Lively and Abrams pull together a good deal of material: some familiar to this historian; and some new.  Independently confirmed, their case rings at least partially true.

For example, they trace the common roots of the early German “homosexual rights” campaign and the proto Nazi Party to a hyper-masculinized nationalism, circa 1900.  In 1896, for example, Adolf Brand founded Der Eigene (which could be translated as “The Self Aware”).  It was the world’s first serious homosexual journal.  By the late 1920’s, it claimed an astonishing 150,000 subscribers.  Critical of a “feminized” male homosexuality, Brand called for  a hyper masculinity, complete with man/boy love.  As he wrote in a promotional pitch for “The Self-Aware”:

[Der Eigene is for men who] thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism.[10]

The journal was also openly racist, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic.  In 1902, Brand joined with two known pederasts, Wilhelm Jansen and Benedict Friedlander, to form Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (“Community of the Self-Aware”) to promote homosexual rights, including free access to boys.  Friedlander held that heterosexual men, effeminate homosexuals, and women were all inferior beings.  Heterosexual love was but a poor necessity, only to be used for procreation.  Instead, Friedlander asserted the esthetic superiority of pederast relations.  As he wrote in his 1904 book Renaissance des Eros Uranios (“Renaissance of Uranian Erotica”):[11] 

The positive goal…is the revival of Hellenic chivalry and its recognition by society.  By chivalric love we mean in particular close relationships between youth and even more particularly the bonds between men of unequal ages.

As the ‘Gay-Lesbian-BiSexual’ sourcebook, We Are Everywhere [1997], summarizes, the Community of the Self-Aware represented “a heady brew of individualism, anarchism, Nietzschean anti-feminism, glorification of pedophilia, and homosexual elitism.”[12]  In 1920, this Community created the Society for Human Rights, Wiemar Germany’s leading “homosexual rights” organization, one resting on the same “heady brew.” 

In 1907, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels—a former Cistercian monk expelled from this Catholic monastic Order for “carnal and worldly desires” [common euphemisms for homosexual acts]—raised the first Swastika flag.  It flew over the castle which housed his Ordo Novi Templi, the “Order of the New Temple.”  He chose the Swastika for its association with the ancient Germanic God, Wotan.  Lanz claimed to have restored the old Knights Templar, emphasizing the occult and strange sexual rituals where “perfection is gained by satisfying all of one’s desires.”  His journal, Ostara, was named for Wotan’s female counterpart.  Lanz despised women, writing: “the soul of the woman has something pre-human, something demonic, something enigmatic about it.”  Articles in Ostara carried titles such as: “The Dangers of Women’s Rights and the Necessity of a Masculine Morality of Masters.”  As revealed by his own book Mein Kampf, young Adolf Hitler was an avid reader of Ostara.  Here, he found a racial theory of history proclaiming the holiness of “the one creative race, the Aryans”; a call for a racial elite led by a quasi-religious military leader; a plan for “Aryan” breeding farms; and a proposal [by Lanz] that “unsatisfactory” racial types be eliminated by abortion, sterilization, starvation, and forced labor.  All of these ideas would later find fruition in the emergent SS State. 

In 1912, advocates of these strange, fantastical, and cruel notions came together to form the Germanen Society.  In 1917, its Bavarian Chapter became The Thule Society (referring to a supposed northern island refuge of the Lost Race of Atlantis).  Thule Society participants included Dietrich Eckart (the founder of The Nazi Party and Hitler’s mentor) as well as Rudolf Hess (later Hitler’s Vice-Führer).  And in 1919, the Nazi Party grew out of The Thule Society: what Samuel Igra calls “a band of evil men who were united together by a common vice.”[13]

Recent revisionist historians discount the importance of any early ties between a “common vice” and Naziism, citing later Nazi pronouncements against homosexuality and retention of the Weimar Law making homosexuality a crime.  Contemporaries reported otherwise.  As Adolf Brand, editor of The Self-Aware, himself commented in 1930:

Men such as Captain Röhm…are, to our knowledge, no rarity at all in the National Socialist Party.  It rather teems there with homosexuals of all kinds.  And the joy of man in man, which…the Edda [a collection of 13^th Century mythological poems written in Old Norse] frankly extols…as the highest virtue of the Teutons, blossoms around their campfires and is cultivated and fostered by them in a way done in no other male union that is reared on party politics.[14]

Recent historians also make much of the fact that in May, 1933, the Nazis sacked Berlin’s Institute for Sex Research and burned thousands of its books and files.  The Institute’s founder had been Magnus Hirschfield, a non-nationalistic homosexual.  These historians say that its destruction underscores the reality of Nazi persecution.  In fact, the Institute’s assistant director, Ludwig Lenz, has provided another explanation for the action:

We…had a great many Nazis under treatment at the Institute….We knew too much.  It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but]…not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands were sexually normal….[W]e possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical records.[15]

Lively and Abrams also suggest that the confinement and torment of 15,000 homosexuals in the Death Camps may have had more to do with fabricated accusations and conflicts within the homosexual community than with systematic persecution.[16]  But as I have noted, all this remains a matter of controversy.

In any case, it is safe to conclude that the story about Naziism and homosexuality is far more complicated than we have been led to believe.[17]  As Gabriel Jackson, Professor of History-Emeritus at The University of California-San Diego, concludes: “there is simply no historical doubt about the important role of homosexuals and bisexuals in the upper ranks of the Nazi movement from day one to the end.”[18] It is also safe to conclude that, surface indications aside, Naziism was no friend of the natural, autonomous family; rather, this movement was one of the family’s most vicious foes.  Remember this as you honor our veterans of World War II. 

THE COMMUNIST FAMILY

Communism shared with Naziism a commitment to Left Wing, Darwinian, Evolutionary Socialism.  Yet strangely, where this worldview led the Nazis to advocate militant male supremacy over brood females, it led the Communists to embrace full sexual equality.

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s friend and collaborator, first developed this argument in his 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.  Appealing to the evolution of the family, Engels called for its end as an economic unit, for elimination of the concept of legitimacy, for “the reintroduction of the whole female sex into the public industries,” for the collective care and rearing of children, and for “the full freedom of marriage,” meaning easy and unilateral divorce.[19]

Shortly after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in November, 1917, the Council of Peoples Commissars implemented this “no fault” scheme.  Writing a few years later for the journal Komunistka, Alexandra Kollontai updated Engel’s argument.  Notably, she blamed the frailty of the family in the early 20^th Century on capitalism:

There was a time when the isolated, firmly-knit family, based on a church wedding, was equally necessary to all its members….But over the last hundred years this customary family structure has been falling apart in all the countries where capitalism is dominant.[20]

More forcefully, she emphasized that traditional marriage and family were everywhere headed toward the historical scrapheap, casualties of social-economic evolution:

There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day.  The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity.  The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable….The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective.[21]

Even so, Communists such as Kollontai were not really content to let social evolution or history take its supposed course.  Progress needed to be hurried up; backward attitudes eliminated.  As another Communist, one Madame Smidovich, explained, “To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup; this we did.”[22]  Some parents, “narrow and petty,” failed to see the course of history, and were “only interested in their own offspring.”  There was no room in Communist society for this “proprietary attitude.”  As Kollontai wrote: “The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.”  Accordingly, children must be raised by “qualified educators” so that “the child can grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.”  And then:

In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades.[23]

Indeed, by 1925, the provision of easy, unilateral divorce—“to be obtained at the [simple] request of either partner in a marriage”—had already undermined many Russian families.  As one observer reported in 1926, peasant villages probably suffered the most:

An epidemic of marriages and divorces broke out in the country districts.  Peasants with a respectable married life of forty years and more behind them suddenly decided to leave their wives and remarry.  Peasant boys looked upon marriage as an exciting game and changed wives with the change of seasons.  It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions.[24]

In October, 1925, the Communists took another step to dismantle the family.  The Tzik, or Central Executive Committee, considered a bill that would eliminate all distinctions between registered and unregistered marriages, giving a cohabitating woman the same status and property rights as a legal wife.  Advocates for the measure stressed that this represented a generous extension of marital benefits.  Mr. Kursky, representing The Soviet Commission for Justice, introduced the bill:

He pointed out that whereas, according to the old law, the wife had no rights in the case of an unregistered marriage, the proposed law would give her the rights of a legal wife in holding property and in other matters.  Another new point was that the wife and husband would have an equal right to claim support from the other, if unemployed or incapacitated.[25]

In practice, of course, the bill would have abolished marriage under the ruse of extending marital benefits to new categories of relationships.  Strident opposition to the measure, particularly in rural, peasant locales, slowed its full implementation.  However, peasant families in The Soviet Union soon faced a much more immediate danger from the Communist authorities.

Opposition to the Bolshevik regime had been rising among the peasantry, who constituted the large majority of the Russian and Ukrainian populations.  Many had welcomed the 1917 Revolution as an opportunity to gain clear title to their land, but by 1929 they could see the true aims of the Communists: a destruction of their family-centered way of life.  Like small farmers everywhere, the Russian and Ukrainian free peasantry—called by the Communists the Kulaks—was composed of large and strong families, involving early and lasting marriages, numerous children, vital home economies, deep attachment to private property and local communities, and a fierce distrust of central authority.  In all these ways, they stood athwart the Bolshevik project.  During 1929 alone, 1,300 major anti-Soviet riots and mass demonstrations occurred in the countryside; 3,200 Soviet civil servants were victims of so-called “terrorist attacks” in these rural areas.  The response, according to the definitive Black Book of Communism from Harvard University Press, was “a war declared by the Soviet state on a nation of small holders;” in essence, a war declared on families.[26]

On December 27, 1929, Party Secretary Josef Stalin ordered “the eradication of all Kulak tendencies and the elimination of the Kulaks as a class.”  The State Political Directorate, or GPU, organized the campaign.  Among families that showed “counter-revolutionary activities,” the men were to be executed or put in work camps; their property confiscated; and the women and children deported in cattle cars to Siberia.  Even those loyal to the regime were to be forced off their land, and relocated on collectivized farms.  Since there was no precise definition of a Kulak, most local Soviet committees used “dekulakization” to settle old scores.  “Eat, drink, and be merry for all belongs to us,” became the motto of the Dekulakization Brigades.

The violence was terrible.  On the family side, during 1930 alone, nearly 2.5 million Russian and Ukrainian peasants took part in 14,000 major revolts, riots, and mass demonstrations, defending their way of life and their liberties.  Women, reports say, often took the lead in these protests, particularly when caused by the forced closing of a church.  Another 1,500 Soviet civil servants were killed.  But the Kulaks had few modern weapons; their guns had been confiscated by the authorities during the prior decade.  So in the end, the Soviet Brigades had their way.  Over the next two years, tens of thousands of Kulak fathers were directly executed, and two million Kulaks were deported to Siberia.  In this great disruption, famine settled over the land and another six million died of starvation.  The sight of the dead on village roadsides became routine.  Hundreds of thousands more died during the deportations.[27]

I can pass on one personal account of this Communist war on families.  In my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, I know a Ukrainian woman, Laura, trained as a pediatrician in the old Soviet Union, who now works in this country as a caregiver for the elderly.  She tells the story of her grandparents, who operated a small farm in the Ukraine.  When the war against the Kulaks broke out, the Bolsheviks killed her grandfather for refusing to give over the family’s seed for the next crop year.  Laura’s grandmother and her eight children were herded abroad a cattle-car, for transport to Siberia.  With little food, water, or sanitation, and with disease rampant, seven of the eight children died over the next two weeks.  Eventually, Laura’s grandmother—with her surviving child—managed to escape from the train and find her way home.  That little girl, of course, would grow up to be Laura’s mother. 

The official accounts from the time are, in some respects, even worse, given their eerie bureaucratic tone.  This one, though, shows a spark of humanity.  It comes from the archives of Novosibirsk:

On 29 and 30 April…two convoys of ‘outdated elements’ were sent to us by train….The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044; 6,114 in all.  The transport conditions were appalling: the little food that was available was inedible, and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces....The result was a daily mortality rate of 35-40 people.  These living conditions, however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino….There were no tools, no grain, and no food.  That is how their new life began.  The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up.  Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter,…they were trapped….On the first day, 295 people were buried….It was not long before the first cases of cannibalism occurred.[28]

Ronald Reagan’s famous—and for the time courageous—phrase, “The Evil Empire,” actually seems to do insufficient justice to a regime that intentionally committed such acts against families.

Communism has warred against marriage and the family in other places, as well.  Communist China, for example, experienced a terrible famine in the 1958-61 period, resulting in a staggering 30 million deaths and another 33 million lost or postponed births: perhaps the greatest politically inspired disaster in human history.  The cause?:  According to two Chinese scholars, simply the suppression of the home-cooked meal.  

The target again was marriage and the rural family.  Specifically, in August and September of 1958, Communist authorities forced 90 percent of rural Chinese households into huge communes, averaging 23,000 members each.    Relative to food the authorities also outlawed family gardens, family orchards, and even family kitchenware.  “Private kitchens, as symbols of selfishness, were destroyed,” write Gene Hsin Chang and Guanzhong James Wen.  The woks and the pots were melted; the law forbade mothers and grandmothers from cooking.  All must eat in communal halls.

The results were depressingly familiar.  In the dining halls, the members of the commune first turned to gluttony.  With no limits on consumption, peasants “in 20 days finished almost all the rice they had, rice that should have lasted six months.”  Within a year, they were reduced to savagery: “[I]n Gansu and Shandong…some people had to eat their dead children’s bodies.”  The famine ended only when the Communists allowed the return of family gardens and home meals.[29]

FAMILY UNDER “THE NEW TOTALITARIANS”

A philosophically related, if physically non-violent, campaign against marriage and family has also been waged by “The New Totalitarians,” historian Roland Huntford’s label for the Social Democrats of Sweden.[30]  This need not have been Sweden’s fate.  Within the early Swedish labor movement, there were advocates for the natural family.  For workers, they sought a “family wage,” a living income for the father and husband that would also support a wife and mother and her children at home.  Welfare policies would also be built around this breadwinner-homemaker-childrich home model.  This was Swedish Social Democratic policy between 1940 and 1967. Relative to the family, it worked reasonably well. 

But egalitarian feminist pressures for change grew during Sweden’s so-called “Red Years,” 1967-1976.[31]  Oddly enough, but with perverse wisdom, these social radicals turned their first attention to tax policy.  The feminist writer Eva Moberg complained that the current tax system, resting on the joint return for married couples and the principle of “income splitting,” condemned educated women to “lifetime imprisonment within the four walls of the home.”  Mathematician Sonja Lyttkens argued that the Swedish tax code had “a large discouraging impact on married women’s labor supply.”[32]  In 1968, a joint report by the Social Democratic Party and the trade union alliance (the LO) concluded that “there are…strong reasons for making the two breadwinner family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance system.”[33]  The next year, the Social Democratic Party issued its “Report on Equality,” prepared by a panel chaired by the arch- feminist Alva Myrdal.  The document concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support.  Benefits previously inherent in married status should be eliminated.”  As part of this legal deconstruction of marriage, the Report called for a tax-policy that abolished the joint return, taxing instead individual earnings without preference for any so-called “form of cohabitation.”[34]

Analysts of modern Sweden are virtually unanimous in labeling this 1971 shift from “joint” to “individual” taxation as the most important policy change affecting Swedish social life during the last 40 years.  Sven Steinmo calls it “the most significant” and “radical” reform of the turbulent 1970’s, because “it meant that the Swedish tax system would ignore family circumstances.”[35]  Through this change, reports Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, the traditional male provider norm was “more or less eradicated.”[36]  The influential feminist author Annika Baude adds:  “If I were to choose one reform which has perhaps done the most to promote equality between the sexes [in Sweden], I would point to the introduction of individual income taxation.”[37]  Using a different interpretive lens, it is fair to conclude that Sweden’s current regime of few and weak marriages, fragile homes, widespread cohabitation, extensive day care, a retreat from children, and universal employment of young mothers derives—to a significant degree—from this one change in tax policy.

MARRIAGE AND LIBERTY

All these stories, from the terrible and violent campaigns against marriage mounted by the Nazis and the Communists to the quiet assault on marriage launched by Sweden’s “Red” Social Democrats, reveal a common truth.  The first target of any totalitarian regime is marriage.  Why?  The great English journalist G.K. Chesterton explains the reason in his provocative 1920 pamphlet, The Superstition of Divorce:

The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state is liberty.  It stands for liberty for the very simple reason…[that] it is the only…institution that is at once necessary and voluntary.  It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state….This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.[38]

Or, as Chesterton explained in his 1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World:

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution.  That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State….The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them.  The man and the woman are one flesh—yes, even when they are not one spirit.  Man is a quadruped.[39]

And that truth still exhibits itself in our time.  For example, The Polish Sociological Review carried a recent article on developments in Uzbekistan during the period of Soviet Communist rule.  The author writes:

[O]nly traditional relationships enabled the people to survive the particularly difficult conditions which prevailed throughout the Soviet period….[W]hile the sovietization of Central Asian society rocked the religious and cultural foundations of the family, its basic…features were preserved.

In many cases, the task of preservation fell to women.  The author again: “I know of families where the father was a teacher of scientific atheism, while the wife said her prayers five times a day and observed ‘ramadan,’ so as to (as she put it) atone for her husband’s sins.”  When the Communists fell, and Uzbekistan regained its freedom, these traditions were still there, so that husbands, wives, and their children could rebuild a nation.[40]

 A second example comes from The People’s Republic of China.  As noted earlier, the Chinese peasantry—collectivized on industrial farms by Mao Tse Tung—suffered terribly for nearly two decades, as the Communists sought to eliminate families as “fundamental habitation and production units.”  But Mao’s death in 1976 brought a shift in policy, leading two years later to the introduction of the so-called “family responsibility system.”  The collective farms were broken up, and families gained the use of land according to their size.  After meeting a quota, farm produce was theirs to consume or sell.  The new system also allowed peasant families to engage in side occupations.

Results between 1978 and 1990 were spectacular.  Farm output climbed sharply, as did rural family wealth and well being.  More importantly, traditional marriage patterns reappeared after decades of suppression, as did a preference for many children.  In the more rural parts of China, three-quarters of women now wanted four-or-more children.  Indeed, this “family responsibility system” subverted in the countryside the post-Mao leadership’s other innovation: namely, the “one child per family” population policy.[41]

Dutch scholars, moreover, have documented that the imposition of Communism on Poland after 1945 did not weaken the family system there.  Instead, the oppressive Communist system actually increased family solidarity:

We [found] that the importance of the family increased, and that—as in Hungary after World War II,…the family increased its role as the cornerstone of society.  Political and social suppression can have unexpected positive effects, like the strengthening of the family.[42]

As Chesterton had predicted, the natural family—“the one anarchist institution”—survived, and even triumphed over totalitarian Communism, one of its great 20^th Century foes.  Oddly enough, the family’s greater challenge may be the “soft” totalitarianisms of the early 21^st Century, now packaged around a militant secular individualism, but still seeking to build a marriage-free, post-family order.

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