D-Day, Father’s Day, Good Women, and Feminist Guilt

June 16, 2002

by Bruce Walker

Within two weeks, Americans will have had occasion to recall two important dates: June 6th, the anniversary of the D-Day, that boldest challenge of free men against totalitarians in human history; and Father’s Day, the day in which society recalls the importance of fathers in human society and each of us has one day to thank our fathers for the goodness they have brought into our lives.

Both days make feminists squirm in bitterness and boredom. The rest of the year is filled with holidays and anniversaries that provide convenient forums to punch, curse and spit upon men. This drumbeat of hate keeps the lockstep Stormtroopers of feminism with undistracted minds and uniform movements.

When America focuses reverently upon Operation Overlord or lovingly on Father’s Day, these sentiments are comparable to the rage that Nazi Schutzstaffel would feel if Germans in 1933 had been invited to light the Shamash on the first day of the Chanukah or to join in celebrating Pesach.

The dogma of that most resilient form of Nazism which we refer to by the silly term "Feminism" accepts as metaphysical truth (masquerading in pseudoscientific dress) the comical and evil notion that men are naturally evil. The selection of men, Jews, kulaks or some other group of people who have not actually chosen their heritage as pariah is the dark core of all the different virulent strains of liberalism.

Liberal monsters like Adolph Hitler, Betty Friedan, and Joseph Stalin do not look at people as people - each choosing moral or immoral lives, each given by his God a conscience to know right from wrong and a soul to connect him with the source of all goodness - but as material creatures, who are congenitally good or bad.

Chanukah is, of course, a Jewish holiday that celebrates the rights of all peoples to live in religious freedom. Pesach, or Passover, is the Jewish celebration of the rights of all peoples to live somewhere in the world as free men and women. More than any other two Jewish holidays, Chanukah and Passover would cause the Jew-baiters of the National Socialist German Workers Party to choke on their own venom: both recall that Jews and Judaism have helped advance universal and noble ideals, which have benefitted all mankind.

Such facts confront Nazis and other liberals with an unacceptable paradox. Jews, according to Nazi theology, and men, according to feminist catechisms, never produce anything righteous or pure. Despite the obvious contribution of Jews to Germany, Hitler maintained that Martin Buber was incapable of advancing ethical discussion and Einstein was incapable of revealing any of God’s structure of Creation.

Feminists have the same problem. On June 6th, fifty-eight years ago, men committed to freedom for all men and for all women everyone in the world fought through blood, vomit, barbed wire, bullets, shrapnel and cadavers of their buddies to push back one of the best and most wicked armies in human history. The real hell of Normandy is inconceivable to anyone today: all the grimness of the World Trade Center is nothing compared to Normandy. No man who lived through that has ever forgotten those hours in which the sea turned red and the only paths left in their last few hours of life was which of several possible lonely, ghastly, lingering deaths awaited them.

We owe these men - along with all the men who fought in the green jungle torment of Guadalcanal or flew suicidal attacks at Midway or flew tours of bombing missions over Europe that almost guaranteed death or horrible injury - everything. Because of what they did, we live free, peaceful, prosperous lives.

These men who were the champions of all peoples everywhere were also overwhelmingly volunteers. Like the firemen at the World Trade Center or those brave men on September 11th who famously charged bin Laden’s thugs with an unforgettable farewell to family and to life, and a stirring "Let’s roll!" - those men on Omaha Beach or Anzio or Iwo Jima chose to place their bodies between merciless evil and the human race.

We owe them everything, but feminists cannot endure thanking them for anything. Deep gratitude to men is a rational anomaly that the Nazis of NOW cannot explain and so must simply ignore. It is just the same with honoring the vital role of fathers in the lives of children. "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." So it is with the SS of Sisterhood.

Any hint of good men is some sort of clever male ruse. All the vast statistical evidence that two parent homes are the greatest single indicator of happy, healthy and honorable children is obviously flawed. All the experiences of mankind over thousands of years which record the need of children for fathers as well as mothers is patriarchal propaganda, designed to woo women from their natural instincts to build homes, bring children into these homes, and be happy alone.

The proposition that wives need husbands is bad enough, the notion that sons need fathers to keep them on the right track is worse, but the truth that daughters need fathers as much as mothers is unspeakable blasphemy.

Conservatives and other normal people have no problem at all honoring those men who have made the conscious choice to lead worthy lives, just as we have no problem condemning those men who have chosen to waste the flickering consciousness that God has placed in all of us. And we have no problem at all sending flowers on Mother’s Day or recalling with heartfelt thanks the selfless compassion and example of women like Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa.

We normal people also have no problem recognizing the strength and greatness of Margaret Thatcher or appreciating the intelligence and the fine moral examples set by Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney. Reviewing our own lives, we see good people and bad people, and we recognize that the sex of this person is not a factor in how strong or how weak conscience and faith have governed their lives.

We do see, however, what people in every society in human history have seen, and what is not obvious only in totalitarian regimes of thought control, manufactured emotional reactions, lies which are interchangeable with facts, and indifference to the reality outside their self-built prisons: men and women are different.

Natural differences lead naturally to different choices about how men and women lead their lives. Among the intellectually pathetic rat mazes of liberalism, the childish notion that all people are made exactly the same must be the most pitiful comedy. National Socialists, feminists and other liberals have been among the staunchest supporters of nature against humanity.

Why, then, the insistence contempt for men? Why is man acting like man so wrong? The answer lies in the rootless insecurity of all liberals. Men who volunteered to cross the Atlantic Ocean to fight Hitler, those same men maimed by mines on the beaches of D-Day landings, those very men who died on those beaches thinking of their wives, praying for their children, and crying out for their mothers, those men paid a debt which none of us - man or woman - can ever repay.

It is not coincidence that Betty Friedan was raised a revolutionary Marxist schooled well in the principles of envy and resentment. She spewed her libels against half of mankind not from the factory floor but from the posh, perfumed salons of stylish socialists. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were not heroes to her, but villains. So while most of us view each of these men, and all of the many great women in modern history, as imperfect creatures who nonetheless deserve our respect and thanks, the Marxists and Nazis of feminism view the world’s benefactors as the author of their personal inadequacy.

Women who lived through the Second World War and the Korean War saw millions of men carry the battle of righteousness through the gates of darkness - and there was not much these women could do to help. Like a loving husband anxiously waiting for his wife to finish the pain of childbirth, most of these people did what they could, but understood that the struggle was overwhelmingly falling on the shoulders of loved ones alone.

Out of these feelings, American women in our global wars became Rosie the Riveter, volunteered at USO canteens, planted victory gardens, and wrote letters intended to convey in a few censored words and photographs love and concern. When peace came in the early 1950s, these husband and wives picked up their lives, dusted themselves off, elected President Eisenhower, thanked God, and return to the blessed work of the American dream.

This required faith. Many fathers, sons, husbands and brothers came back in body bags or missing arms or legs. Many came back different, and slept through nights stalked by nightmares. These women - these tens of millions of wonderful women, like my mother and like so many people’s mothers - went into their kitchen and in their mixing bowl added thanksgiving, respect, love and a very large dose of their own grit and strength to bring normal, happy lives to America. That was the special gift of these who stayed behind to all of us. If it was corny, then we should recall that corn is a good and nourishing food, and it was served at the first American Thanksgiving.

Weaker women, like weaker men in combat, snapped. Unable to carry their burden when the time came for them to serve America, they did the only thing that they could: these women ignored the blood and sacrifice of men who suffered through carnage preceded by a decade of unemployment and poverty, and these weak women turned savagely against those who had shown them a love which they chose not to return.

What is interesting for those of us with long family lines or those who study history, is how those women who conquered the cold plains of North Dakota, the deserts of Utah or the mountains of Montana did not "blame" men at all, but rather - having worked and struggled and suffered beside them - understood men and were understood by men as critical allies and partners in doing good.

Both of my grandmothers, who died in the 1970s, would have been dumbfounded by the infantile whining of feminists. These two strong women grew up in poverty, working at full time jobs to earn money even as they kept house and cooked with precious few modern appliances. They had significant tasks before them in their lives, and like men and women throughout most of history, my grandmothers had no option except to address them straight on.

Both these truly strong women worked through problems that would cream us modern softies - and send modern feminists in tears to the nearest Oprah program - without a single complaint. With little or no formal education, with no special government programs or rigorous gender quotas, with poverty and uncertainty before them, neither of these women ever had a harsh word to say about men in general or their husbands, who were two noble men indeed.

Both of these women understood during the Second World War and during the Great Depression how particularly awful this all was for men. They accepted that and they appreciated the soldiers who came back and the day laborers during the Depression who spent a decade trying to find a steady job. My grandmothers did not envy the heroism of these men - my grandmothers already knew about heroism from first-hand experience in a thousand different battles - but they did respect it.

The Second World War and the Korean War which followed so after it were unique experiences for Americans. Although millions suffered indirectly, it was the guys who died, who had field hospital amputations in distant lands, who gained a lifetime of nightmares. No American cities were bombed; no serious privations were suffered by our civilian populations; and even the news was long censored because of fear about how mothers and fathers would react to the unimaginable horrors of "Bloody Tarawa" and other battlefields.

Unlike the Civil War and the Revolutionary War, in which American women were right there, very bravely, suffering from battles and occupation, enduring the firsthand sight of war, and even picking up arms (Molly Pitcher, the pregnant cannoneer standing beside her slain soldier husband and firing on the British, is not legend but fact), American women had to be tough and wise in life to empathize with what the boys at Pusan or Anzio were really enduring. Overwhelmingly, American women were that tough and were that wise.

But just as the trauma of the Great War murdered the moral sense of many Germans, so the trauma of fifteen years of depression and war largely borne by others led weak and childish American women to moral suicide. Those weakest Germans blamed die Juden, the Jews, who had fought beside them in the trenches and helped them build a magnificent culture, for all their own inadequacies and similarly weak American women blamed men, who defended liberty and built prosperity, for the sin of a self-sacrifice which these least of women could not match.

As Hitler could not savage Jews for being stupid or unsuccessful or materially inferior, the focus of his attention was on their putative and eternal moral inferiority. Just so feminists can hardly suggest that men are cowardly or weak or unproductive, and so the plane of conflict must be moral. An entire half of the human race - a diverse collection of God’s creatures filled with saints and sadists, indolents and inventors, heroes and cowards - became a new moral class of Untermenchen, or subhumans - moral lepers.

Like all the lies of Nazis, Communists, Fascists, Socialists and other liberals, this lie will finally die an unmourned death. But not before tens of millions have entered the Treblinka, the Karaganda, the Killing Fields of leftist secular orthodoxy.

Happy Father’s Day, dad - who joined the Navy when he was too old and too valuable to the war effort for conscription, so that mom and your kids could be safe and free. Thanks dad and thanks mom, for showing me that men and women can be different and can also be good. Thank all the dads and all the moms - many of whom, like dad, have passed out of this life and into a greater life - who taught us all by your lives how to live.

Thanks my grandmothers for showing in your old fashion ways just what really strong women - what really strong people - look like. Thanks to all those who came before us, all those whose grit and bravery and tenacity almost none of us today can match, for all you gave to us today. The Almighty gave all of us a gift which we can never repay in even the most trifling manner, just as you our ancestors have given us by deed and by example debts we can never repay.

There are two responses that those of us given freely so much by those before us can do. We can sulk - much like a certain ex-president has publically sulked, that he did not have the chance to preside over national horrors - and so model ourselves after feminists, patrician Marxists, Nazis, and other liberals. Or we can say "Thank you. God bless you and keep you. Just as you have done your best, I will try to do mine."

Feminists’ irrational hatred of men is particularly of those men who even a lefty like Tom Brokaw noted was The Greatest Generation. The best of these best were those men who volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor, who fought against two ferocious enemies both an ocean away, and who prevailed at D-Day and at Father’s Day. That makes feminists cringe, and that makes genuine and strong women stand beside the long rows of crosses in France near Normandy shed a tear and whisper "Thanks, guys."

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

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