Monday, January 09, 2017

German liberals' horror family

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is a leading German newspaper, described as "centre-right" or "liberal-conservative". It is owned by a foundation that is run by a group of CEO's, company owners and corporate lawyers. It is liberal in the larger sense of supporting the liberal order that currently dominates all Western countries.

Last year a weekly magazine of this newspaper took aim at the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the patriotic party in Germany. In attacking the AfD, the magazine ran a story titled "How the AfD would like to live". To illustrate the wickedness of how the AfD would like to live, the following illustration was published:



The intention was to communicate the idea that something is deeply wrong with the AfD, that anyone who wants to live this way must be a person to be avoided or opposed.

Which goes to show how deep the division is right now between liberal Westerners and the rest of us. Because I can't see anything too horrifying about what is portrayed in the illustration. You can argue about the details, but it seems to show a mostly functional family with a masculine father, a feminine mother and enough children to keep things going for the next generation.

So why does the FAZ think we will be repulsed by the picture? I wonder if it has to do with the liberal rejection of a meaningful order that is already created for us and its replacement with the idea that it is the sovereign individual who autonomously creates value through his own choices and acts of self-determination.

In the picture, everyone is plugging into that pre-existing meaningful order: dad is clearly masculine and protective, mum is attractively feminine, and they are raising their own children within the framework of the traditional family rather than making up their own kind of family.

Or maybe liberals are horrified by the idea that this is clearly an independent kind of family. There are roles, hierarchies, commitments and loyalties that bind this family together, in contrast to the alternative in which there is only a vertical relationship between the individual and the state.

Or maybe the family is just too German for German liberals to handle. The family looks stereotypically German; they have a dachshund; and one of the boys is wearing lederhose. But, again, unless you are a globalist liberal, why would you think there was anything wrong with that?

5 comments:

  1. Hi Mark, is there an aspect of Nordicism (Aryan races) in the depiction of the family? That would undermine the "happy snap" attributes you have noted - hitting a raw nerve I would suspect.

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    1. True that the family is depicted as having a typically North European look. Maybe in Germany that signals something politically that it doesn't elsewhere. Or maybe not - I did read some German discussion boards, and the readers on those boards also had no problem with the illustration (except, jokingly, some Germans thought the lederhose a crime against humanity, or the dad's moustache).

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  2. The picture is awesome. Sign me up.

    Yes that is exactly what I want. Why the hatred of Whites and Western civilization??

    One Word: Envy.

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    1. The picture is awesome. Sign me up.

      It looks pretty good to me too.

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  3. I'm with Cecil and I suspect I'm not alone; When I saw that picture I immediately found myself wondering why the FAZ was running a piece denouncing a political movement only to have their own front page make that same movement . . . . look pretty damned attractive. The only way you could have improved that pic would have been to add the manly dad's arm over the hot blonde mom's shoulder. Or better yet, around her waist.

    Will the FAZ realize that they might have created something of a recruiting tool for a cause they claim to hate? Seeing this reminded me of a post that Vox Day put on his blog a little while back. To sum it up, Amazon was promoting an original TV series based around an alternate future in which Germany won World War II and conquered the United States. One of their advertisements included a 1950s-style image of a happy white suburban family in an American neighborhood with the husband in a modified Nazi uniform that was captioned with the hashtag #whatifwelost. They would up pulling it early, at least in part because they realized they'd inadvertently created a piece that looked a lot less like their supposed nightmare scenario and more like a snapshot of the rosy future that we were promised but never delivered. If this is losing, how can we make it happen faster?

    You can see Vox's post (and the offending image from the Amazon series) right here: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/05/why-whitegenocide-doesnt-work.html

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