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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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The set is unrelated to 10 hours a day of studying. That is outside the set and something which they just happen to also do. When people possess the true set of pro-fertility cultural properties, like the Mennonites who do back-breaking labor in South America, or 1930s Germany which had enormous TFR gains due to cultural policy, then they also have more children, without having to study for 10 hours a day. And when Haredi stop studying or stop studying early, they continue having high TFR.

Unfortunately, the only two good proofs of the necessity of pro-fertility cultural elements are religious Jews and the Nazis. This makes it very difficult to persuade normal people to follow your line of argument, because it makes you sound like a genuinely insane person. But consider the Nazis saw a 40% gain of TFR and the shift was highest in urban areas, not rural areas.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366

Preliminary vital statistics for 1934 show that in the Western world there was a general arrest in the decline of the birth-rate which had been going on for a decade or more. In Hungary the birth-rate decreased from 1933 to 1934 less than half as much as it did a year earlier, and in Norway only one-fifth as much. In Poland the rate of 26.5 per 1,000 in 1934 represented no change from 1933, in contrast to a decline of 2.2 from 1932 to 1933. In Great Britain the birth-rate in 1934 is estimated provisionally at I4.8, slightly above the 1933 rate of 14-4, which in turn was well below that of I5.3 in 1932. In the United States the rise from 16.4 in 1933 to 17.1 in 1934 almost brought the birth-rate back to the 1932 figure of I7-3.? These changes are dwarfed, however, by Germany's experience. There the birth-rate was 15.1 in 1932, I4.7 in 1933, and 18.0 in 1934.

According to Nazi leaders, the suppression of abortion, the restrictions on giving birth-control information, and the offering of the various economic inducements have had less effect together on the birth-rate than the psychical revolution which has followed the Nazi rise to political power. They say that formerly the individual was considered the important unit, so it was natural that each person should think he should control his own body and decide the question of parenthood from his own point of view. Under Nazi leadership, however, the predominant importance of the state has been empha-sized. As a result it is claimed that a large proportion of the population already has come to feel that the body belongs only in part to the individual, and that the need of the state for children is the first factor to consider in deciding on the proper size of family.

The Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways rather than to incur the expenses connected with raising a family. This general attitude has been changed, the leaders claim, so that now child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. Even in the schools the youth are being incul- cated with these beliefs. Most important of all the psychical changes, according to the Nazis, has been the reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous regime, and that people were becoming increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere. With the change in policy under the present government Germany has again taken her place as an equal among neighboring nations and has indicated that she will maintain it. This has led to an emotional rebirth of the German people, for the future now appears rosy to them where before it was black. They feel again that theirs is a nation with a mission-one in which it is worth while to raise a family.

In the larger cities the birth-rate of I933 was above that of I932 for the first time in the third quarter, and the differential has steadily become larger up to the last quarter of I934. These turning-points in the birth-rate correspond to changes in the rate of uninterrupted conceptions nine months earlier, for the nation in the quarter following Hitler's accession to power and for the larger cities in the quarter preceding

the twelve states with the higher proportion of Catholics had an increase in birth-rate of 17.3 per cent compared with 21.1 per cent in the other thirteen states. [subtly important stat here; Catholics were less likely to be on board with Nazism, and so if the cultural elements of Nazism increases TFR, then we should expect that Catholics would not see greater gains; they are in a slightly different cultural ecosystem]

On the whole, therefore, it may be said that the forces tending to raise the birth-rate had least effect on Catholics and agricultural people-those least affected in previous years by the forces tending to lower the birth-rate [another subtly important stat. The agricultural were far less likely to be in an area where Nazi propaganda was present and powerful]

Berlin is well in the lead with a I934 birth-rate 48 per cent above that of I933, while at the other extreme Beuthen (in Silesia, very near the Polish border) shows an increase of only I2 percent

The birth rate continued to rise until the advent of war. Now consider that the Nazis, despite loving propaganda, probably had little idea how to create really good pro-motherhood culture, or that most of the larger effects would be delayed to when the indoctrinated come to age. Even their shoddy attempt at increasing TFR through culture worked, and they only got to see the smallest prelude of the TFR gains before extenuating circumstances nullified our chance to measure the gains.

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