The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, Part 4

Part V: Rampant Sexism

(Women at Risk: The Dangers and Consequences of a Christian Republic)

By Donatra, Shakti and Katie

Section 1

“Women whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief roll in life to beget children for German warriors. Nietzsche pit the idea this way: “Man shall be trained for war and women for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” He went further in Thus Spake Zarathustra. He exclaims: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”–Which prompted Bertrand Russell to quip, “Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away from him and he knew it, so he kept away from women!”

From: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
Footnote on Page 100
By William L. Shirer
1959, 1960 Simon and Schuster

“Emancipation of women? Hitler said the idea was absurd:

“Talk about the emancipation of women is an invention of Jewish minds. The German woman does not need to be emancipated. She has always possessed what nature has bestowed upon her…Her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. Where would the great world [of men] be if the small world [of women] was not looked after. Providence has confided to women the care of their own world on which the world of men can be built. These two worlds do not stand against each other. They compliment each other, they belong together, as men and women belong together. We hold it wrong for the woman to invade the world of men. We feel it is only natural that both worlds remain separate.”

Was there then any place at all in public life for women in National Socialist Germany? Hitler quickly disabused the women of any such hope.
“For many years,” he said, “we National Socialists have been against women entering public life, which for us seemed unworthy of them.”

From: The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940
Pages 135-136
By William L. Shirer
1984 Little, Brown, and Company

Prologue
By Katie
Katie is a member of the political blog, The Coalition for a Democratic America,

How many people do you know still read the Bible on a regular basis? Not many, I’m betting. Even more difficult, can you name anyone who lives by its principles-other than the obvious things like the ten commandments-? I’m also willing to take a leap and say that you can’t. There are people, though, who wish to take the good book at its word. I know it doesn’t sound scary, but let’s take a look at what those words are and what they mean.

There are those who argue that homosexuality is a sin, according to the Bible. Then there are those who say that’s complete rubbish and a bad interpretation. So who’s right? I think the fact that there’s so much debate over it speaks for itself: maybe we shouldn’t be jumping all over something we can’t prove concretely. Then again, given the track record of those that would insist the Bible does, in fact, outlaw homosexuality, they’re probably exaggerating or misinterpreting the verse on purpose. It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise.
Or what about that pesky issue of women’s rights? We the people finally obtained some semblance of them (at least in America-it seems as though other civilized countries got there way before we did) in 1919 and we’ve been fighting for them ever since. I’m not going to go so far as to say that the women in America are oppressed, because they’re not, but all of this emphasis on “family values” has me wondering. The implication of that statement means a woman at home, raising children and doing laundry, while a man goes off and lives his life. It means sexual slavery and the loss of any kind of control. These are based, in part, on the Bible’s teachings that women are subservient to men.

All anyone needs to know about how scary biblical inerrancy really is can click on the following links and find out.

http://www.onlinebaptist.com/dontclick.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inerrancy

Women at Risk: The Consequences and Dangers of a Christian Republic

by Kelli (Donatra) and Karen (Shakti)

“When you draw near a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones,the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thou shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are the cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Hivites and the Jeb’usites, as the Lord your God commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the Lord your God.”

Deuteronomy
Chapter 20, verses 10 through 18
Revised Standard Edition of The Holy Bible
Published by William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd
If there was ever a reason for not adopting the Holy Bible as the governing document of the United States it is patriarchal passages such as the one that we selected to open this particular post. Seriously, read that passage again. Not only does it reduce women to mere property; it could also serve as a blue print for modern day warfare in the Bush Administration. If that passage doesn’t chill chills down your spine remember this. The radical religious right (we just can’t bring ourselves to call them Christians anymore) believes that every single book, chapter, and verse in the Bible is true and should be used as the blueprint for American government. That may be good news for the sociopaths and pseudo Christians on the far right but it is not good news for those who do not accept a literal interpretation of the Bible and it is even worse worse news for women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals.

In the classic PBS series, The Power of Myth, the late Joseph Campbell submits that matriarchal societies were finished by the year 1750 BC. According to Campbell, when you have hunters and herders you have killers “because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and conquering the areas in which they move. And these invasions (in today’s Middle East) bring in warrior gods, thunderbolt hurlers like Zeus or Yahweh.” True, one might argue that transforming the Virgin Mary into a co redeemer is, in some small manner, a way by which far right wing Catholics can assuage some of the guilt that they must have acquired for their abominable attitudes towards women; and one might also argue that the acceptance of female Saints shows a certain reverence for women; but the fact that remains that women in both, conservative Catholicism and Protestantism are considered little more than property, second class citizens to be dominated by their male superiors. In other words, the Patriarchal Society is alive and well on the far right.

We have to wake up and admit some basic truths. In so far as the treatment of women is concerned, the Judeo-Christian tradition has a very long and brutal record when it comes to the oppression (and at times, outright slaughter of) women, and a very short, record for the liberation of women. It makes us wonder: might western civilization have been a little different if the matriarchal societies of the Middle East had successfully beaten back the Patriarchal invaders? As Mister Campbell and Mister Moyers wondered in The Power of Myth, might western society have been more gentle, and more compassionate, and more considerate if the prayer of choice began with the words “Our Mother Which art in Heaven?”

Clearly the Holy Text is not a friend of the “the other,” women in particular.

According to the Old Testament, fathers retain strict control over their daughters–to such a degree that they should not be allowed to leave the homes of their fathers until they are married, after which they quite literally become the properties of their husbands. Once married a woman not allowed to leave the home of her husband. According to the Old Testament women are seldom allowed to appear in public places, and when they do they are supposed to be doubled veiled. Women are not allowed to speak to strangers and they are not allowed to testify in court. Moreover women are considered unclean when they learn that they are expecting a child. After they give birth to a male child they are considered unclean for a week. When they give birth to a female child they are considered unclean for two weeks. In the Book of Genesis, men are allowed to have concubines; the concubines having an even lower social position than wives. Fathers are allowed to sell their daughters as servants; women can be stoned to death if they are not virgins on their wedding night; and of course, women were not allowed to inherit property or other forms of wealth. [2]

Save for a few choice exceptions that are automatically ignored by male theocrats, the New Testament is little better. Saint Paul specifically states that “Christ is the head of every man and a husband the head of a wife (1 Corinthians 11:3). Women are commanded to remain silent in the churches and are forbidden to teach Wives are commanded to submit to their husbands, and to learn in quietness and submission, and of course, the New testament wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t remind us that Eve was tempted prior to Adam, an act for which all subsequent women have paid dearly. [3]

“The Christianization of Europe was accompanied by Inquisition, religious persecution that claimed the lives of an estimated nine million, many burned in public squares between the 15th and 17th Centuries, sometimes referred to as the ‘women’s holocaust…’” [4] In the 16th Century witch hunting evolved into a lucrative business ventures, as the assets of a convicted witch were utilized to pay trial costs. Women were banned from the university, and banned from practicing midwifery, in essence buttressing the male dominated medical profession. Traditional herbal therapies, midwifery, and the feminine role as healers gave way to medical monopolies dominated by the Catholic Church, and with them a wave of quackery which included everything from blood letting to the use of leeches. At the same time the Catholic Church, through a celibate male priesthood that wasn’t supposed to know anything about sex, spread the message that sex, was the root of all evil, a message which eventually devolved into another, even more destructive message, namely, that women were the root of all evil. Women, the church insisted, were flawed creations because–you guessed it– of the original temptation in the Garden of Eden. To make the situation worse, during the Thirty Years War, both sides, Protestants and Catholics, managed to slaughter each other whole sale, and still had enough time to torture and burn thousands of so called witches.*

The only problem is this: Some of us are getting a little sick and tired of being blamed for what a mythological figure did in a mythological place; and even if the Bible were literally true, you just have to wonder about a God and sexually frustrated (or should we say insecure?) men who insist on blaming an entire group of people for the mistake of one person.

You would think that by the 21st Century most men would have matured to the point where they are comfortable working with and beside strong women, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Rather we have a situation in which professional misogynists are verbally and politically trying to turn back the clock to Biblical days when women are little more than chattel. And the thing that annoys us the most is that it’s being done in the name of a Christian Republic. Watch carefully the current administration in Washington; watch even more closely the reactionary base of the Republican Party, which, at the very least, can be described in terms of woman hating. You can judge an administrations, parties, and base constituencies by the kinds of policies that it proposes and promulgates and what we’ve been getting from the far right during the last twenty years or more can only be described as theocratic and dangerous. Christian Republic? Hogwash. This is nothing less than religious totalitarianism wrapped in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy to make it more acceptable to an unsuspecting public.

Time and time again the far right revealed its obsession with original sin and the original temptation of Eve through its truly barbaric policies and proposals. Welcome to the bizarre alternative universe of the Theocratic Right where men abandon their wives because women challenge patriarchal values; where wealth disparity among women is a direct result of a woman’s refusal to marry; where women are responsible for men’s behavior; and (we just love this one); where husbands protect women from predatory men while women channel the husband’s sex drive into productive. non predatory directions. This is especially disturbing because it quite literally makes women responsible and dependent on a potentially abusive male.[5] Needless to say that in such a bizarre alternative reality, sex is only for procreation, which of course means that both, contraception and safe, legal abortion must be banned or at least severely restricted. In other words the fetus is sacred, the adult woman is not.

Next time, similarities between Nazi sexism, Biblical Sexism, and Republican sexism

To be continued….

Crossposted at the Coalition for a Democratic America

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