Since the child’s “real” nature was considered sinful, their free will had to be broken, and beating was the main way to accomplish this. Psychohistorian Aurel Ende’s extensive analysis of German autobiographies was entitled simply “Battering and Neglect” because, as he put it, there was “no bright side” to report about the universal German practice of beating children into obedience. Beating, said one German doctor, must begin early, even in infancy, and “consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep…[for then] one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.” German parents were often described as being in a “righteous rage” during the beatings while they “hammered obedience” into them, and the children often lost consciousness. Schools were beating factories: “At school we were beaten until our skin smoked.” Hitler's father routinely battered him into unconsciousness. Children regularly had to be dragged violently to school screaming, they were so afraid of the daily batterings that were inflicted there, and childhood suicides were frequent in reaction to beatings or such practices as “cold water bathing” that was often practiced to “harden” them. Childhood suicides in Germany were over three times higher than in other European countries.That's some pony he didn't get, eh?
Even the most popular movies before wars featured dangerous women, from The Wizard of Oz with its killing witches before WWII to All About Eve before the Korean War, Cleopatra before Vietnam, Fatal Attraction and Thelma and Louise before the Persian Gulf War and Laura [sp] Croft and Kill Bill at the start of the Iraqi War.It's an... ah... original thinker that lumps The Wizard of Oz and All About Eve together, and Lara Croft dates back to 1996. Glancing over the rest of it (citing a Spy magazine cover as an image of a killer woman? Hitler's mother as Medusa?), I don't see it getting much better. I think that we can all agree that child abuse and war are bad and we should work at stopping both, mmmkay, but it'll take a bit more to link the two than this woo-woo stuff.
That starting a war against nations whose combined power was far superior to that of Germany and Austria was suicidal was obvious to anyone not caught up in the war trance. Early on, the slogan of the Hitler Youth was “We were born to die for Germany,” and Hitler promised that “ten million German youth would experience sacrificial deaths” under his leadership. He often considered suicide himself, saying “Germans do not deserve to live” at the end of the war, and finally issuing orders to destroy Germany as he killed himself. Ultimately, shit-babies deserve death — no more, but also no less, since even in death they fantasied that they were returning to the bosom of their mothers, to their Motherland.So why is Sweden not opting for suicide whereas Germany did? One answer is that they don't have high rates of depression, mania, and other suicide-linked mental problems that are also linked to abusive parenting.
Even children of nobility were beaten daily. Louis XIII was “beaten mercilessly on waking in the morning. He was beaten on the buttocks by his nurse with a birch or a switch. His father whipped him himself when in a rage.”
Héroard's diary of little Louis XIII showed that despite over a dozen nurses and caretakers being assigned to provide for his needs, he was regularly malnourished, even close to death. Even princesses as late as the eighteenth century were regularly reported to be "naked and dying of hunger."
Although occasionally very high boy/girl ratios are found in birth registers [Feuchere's ratio of 162/100 for French nobility in the late middle ages being the highest I have encountered]. more often the birth ratio ranges in the 110-120 area, while the census figures range higher. so that both differential infanticide and later filicide combine to produce the overall imbalance reflected in the raw census figures.
Not only was England in the seventeenth century ahead of the rest of Europe in child care, but it was more particularly the English middle class, from which so many American mothers were drawn, which first achieved these historically new attitudes toward children. At a time when the English nobility still sent their children out to wetnurse, numbers of brave English middle-class mothers, particularly Puritan mothers, who were encouraged to pray with and watch closely over their children, began for the first time in history to face the enormous anxieties of actually relating with empathy to the emotional needs of the infant at their breast.
« Older Mimi & Eunice is a comic by artist Nina Paley ... | "The previous cycling was... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by clarknova at 5:09 AM on May 3, 2011