By a serendipitous quirk of fate (aka divine providence) in 2013, I participated in a World Congress of Families planning committee in Moscow for a major international pro-family conference, which was scheduled to be held at the Kremlin in 2014. That conference was canceled due to the political turmoil surrounding Barack Obama’s 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine and the consequent, fully legitimate Russian annexation of the Crimea.
But for me personally, that trip to Moscow was enormously fruitful. First of all, I befriended Archpriest Dimitry Smirnoff, Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s right-hand man on family policy and was interviewed by him on national Russian television. And, I had the great honor, as a member of this small planning group, of receiving a special guided tour of the Kremlin (since that was expected to be the venue for the conference) and the Orthodox cathedrals of Red Square.
Most significantly, however, as regards the evolution of my knowledge of geo-political history, I befriended young Russian intellectual Pavel Parentiev, who had just completed an in-depth study of family policy during the existence of the Soviet Union. It was from Pavel that I learned that the outbreak of war on the natural family in America in the 1960s was almost a carbon copy of what the Soviet Communists had done in Russia from 1917 to the mid 1920s.
In 1917 the Soviets invented what we call “No Fault Divorce.” In the 1918 Family Code, they codified the right of the state to supersede parental rights in “the best interest of the child” as determined by the State. They also established a government-controlled foster-care system, specifically to undermine the authority of families over children. And they became the world’s first government to fully legalize abortion on demand.
All of this was driven by the two Marxist imperatives that are today recognized as the heart of Cultural Marxism, as summarized in the 1950s by Herbert Marcuse. His remedy for the “crisis” of “the repressive order of procreative sexuality” was “the elimination of the monogamic and patriarchal family.” I had known this for some time, but thanks to Pavel I learned that Marcuse was simply echoing Vladimir Lenin, who wrote in 1919: “True liberation of women, true Communism comes about only when and where the masses rise up … against … small scale households.” [Pavel’s article “A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia, 1917-2013” may be found in The Family in America, Vol. 27, No. 3, Summer 2013.]
Let this sink in. For Marxism to succeed it must destroy the natural family, especially male authority in the family structure: the patriarchal order. And so the Soviets openly admitted that “women’s liberation” – their term – was the No. 1 key to establishing Communism.
So what was happening in family-centered America during this time of radical Communist upheaval in Russia?
What an odd coincidence. America was undergoing it’s own social upheaval over the question of “women’s suffrage,” and on Aug. 18, 1920, women were granted the right to vote through the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. And what became the No. 1 “women’s rights” issue in the 1960s and remains so today? Abortion on demand! Of course, I’m being facetious when I call it a coincidence. It is a direct parallel we should learn from. The devils were fully aware of what they were doing.
In Russia, the disastrous consequence of these policies was almost immediate, and worsened until the relatively recent breakup of the Soviet Union and the change in Russian culture and government. Now Russia is promoting family.
Indeed, in my tour of Russia in 2006 and 2007 I was stunned that relations between men and women – even on university campuses – looked so normal and healthy, like what Americans enjoyed in the 1950s. And at every one of my speeches and lectures to college students on the history and tactics of the LGBT movement, the most common comment I heard in response was “that could never happen here.” Maybe, maybe not. But it does indicate the current mindset. Again, I’m not talking old folks – these were young college students, even those of the theatrical arts college in the most Westernized of all the Russian cities: Saint Petersburg.
Back in the day, the devils who promoted the Soviet “sexual revolution” began to export it as a weapon to destroy the Western world from within. Consequently, and in time, the West’s moral collapse and social chaos ensued.
There’s a lesson to be learned from that long period of stability in America’s experience from the ’20s to the ’50s compared both to the Russians in the ’20s and our own since the 1960s. The lesson is that women having the right to vote is not a problem – so long as they don’t use their vote to harm the very institution real women have always embraced as their primary (not exclusive) source of strength and place of service – their family. The social meltdown only began when Jewish agitators (like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem) began persuading women that true equality with men meant competing against them both in vocational pursuits and more destructively in embracing sexual promiscuity as a social value.
The corollary crises we’ve suffered since we lost so many of our women to the propaganda is the wholesale emasculation of two generations of boys under the tyranny of radical feminism and the dangerous rise of feral masculinity among men without the anchor of marriage-based family. What we really need is a restoration of the patriarchy – but a more balanced form that acknowledges the equal value and complementary function of men and women, and actively maximizes the mutual benefits of the organic family fabric of society.
We need males to be real men and females to be real women again.
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