Challenge: Most Anti-Family State Possible?

[ninebucks]

In OTL, the USSR toyed with some radical anti-family policies but later abandoned them.

Indeed, in most states throughout the 20th Century, the trend has been to idealise the family, and focus on it as the most basic building block of any society.

But how far could this go the other way? Which state would be most likely to work to smash up the family unit, and how successful would they be?

 

[False Dmitri]

The Kibbutzim attempted to raise all children in common in the early years. Children lived most of the week in the communal children's house and got to see their parents only a couple of days each week. This didn't last very long, and it was only on a small scale. But it comes quite close to smashing up the family unit.

 

[W.W.A.F.T.]

considering what the family dynamic was like in China before they came along, the Maoists make a good candidate

 

[Hades]

or maybe pol pot's cambodia OTL.

 

[Petike]

or maybe pol pot's cambodia OTL.

Yep. As if his idea of turning Cambodia into a "marxist feudal despocy" under his "benevolent" rule wasn't insane enough...

 

[catboy637]

Oceania. Or if you hqave that crzy Russian gneral make his own country...

 

[David S Poepoe]

But how far could this go the other way? Which state would be most likely to work to smash up the family unit, and how successful would they be?

Didn't you hear of Hillary Clinton's book 'It Takes a Village'?

There is some arguement to the idea that due to government taxation and just needing to work to get by, that modern society is forcing the destruction of the familty unit since both parents are supported or pressed to have and hold jobs.

 

[AmIndHistoryAuthor]

The Nazi SS had young women whose only job was to get impregnated by SS men. The women couldn't marry, they were supported by the state before, during, and after pregnancy, and their kids were raised by the state. I think something like 20-30,000 kids were born to them.

I'm sure there are probably dystopian PODs that imagine this greatly expanding under a Nazi victory.

 

[catboy637]

That's a good one. Nice job.

 

[Frige]

Didn't you hear of Hillary Clinton's book 'It Takes a Village'?

There is some arguement to the idea that due to government taxation and just needing to work to get by, that modern society is forcing the destruction of the familty unit since both parents are supported or pressed to have and hold jobs.

I think the Western family unit has suffered worse stresses than those of contemporary America...

"The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour."
- The Communist Manifesto

It's a fair point, no?

 

[Peter]

The Nazi SS had young women whose only job was to get impregnated by SS men. The women couldn't marry, they were supported by the state before, during, and after pregnancy, and their kids were raised by the state. I think something like 20-30,000 kids were born to them.

I'm sure there are probably dystopian PODs that imagine this greatly expanding under a Nazi victory.

No.
............

 

[Peter]

As for Marx, he is correct. The left is often accused of being anti-family for trying to relieve the symptoms (by daycare, social help etc), but its not they who create the disease. The idealized family life is in our late times only available for the wealthy. The right-wingers that screams most about the defense of the family, are the very same people destroying it.

 

[catboy637]

Not all right wingers.

 

[SeanPdineen]

Comrade Hoxha is our father

Albania, folks.
Children indoctronated by the state.
He makes Stalin look like a pentcostal about family.
Hoxha did the most anti family, anti faith ideas outhere

 

[MerryPrankster]

Peter,

What's with the "no"?

The Lebensborn program wasn't as totalitarian as Ind remembers it (I think the women involved were paid volunteers), but was still, well, a eugenics-inspired human breeding program.

And to top it off, the Norwegian government hideously abused the children resulting from the program when the Nazis fell, putting them in deliberately abusive homes and the like. The lebensborn now are claiming to have been the victims of genocide.

 

[Hades]

As for Marx, he is correct. The left is often accused of being anti-family for trying to relieve the symptoms (by daycare, social help etc), but its not they who create the disease. The idealized family life is in our late times only available for the wealthy. The right-wingers that screams most about the defense of the family, are the very same people destroying it.

Em, the left proposed destroying the parents' authority. Why is it that they encourage leaving their children outside the parents control?

Are you on opium or something? Marx's ideas have FAILED. Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.

Why is it in every leftist regime, the family unit i destroyed? Pol Pot ring a bell? Mao, Stalin? Why are childrenturged to denounce their parents?

 

[Extrasolar Angel]

The Lebensborn program wasn't as totalitarian as Ind remembers it (I think the women involved were paid volunteers), but was still, well, a eugenics-inspired human breeding program.

Well the other program of Germany during the war involved kidnapping thousands fo children with suspected traces of German blood.

In event of Nazi Germany victory I could envision tens of milions of people treated as herd animals, kept in special slave camps, with women breeding children to be raised as slaves from birth and seperated from mothers. Family would not be part of the "Untermenschen" short brutal lives in plantations, mines, and as hunted pray in forests for Reich's political elite's games.

 

[AmIndHistoryAuthor]

I don't see any difference between how I described the SS program and how others here are describing it.

A couple other examples occur to me.

In Latin America some of the military dictatorships would hand over the children of dissidents who were disappeared to their torturers' families. Basically you'd grow up not knowing your dad was the man who tortured to death your real father.

It was also pretty common to rape dissidents' family members in front of them to break bonds between the family.

Another example that hasn't come up is the use of the breakup of the family as punishment under slavery.

Also "first nights" kinds of practices by both slaveowners over their slaves and nobility over the peasantry. I realize slavery apologists and nobility both maintained it "blessed" the marriages, but it had a huge destructive impact on the family. It was even illegal for slave women and girls to resist rape, potentially punishable by death.

 

[MichaelinPhilly]

Also re slave marriages: slave-owners (I'm talking about the American South) may well have permitted/encouraged slaves to marry, but I doubt those marriages had any legal standing - since the slaves themselves didn't. At any rate, when push came to shove and a slave-owner needed to sell some property, it was quite common for married slave couples to be separately (one sold and the other kept, both sold to different owners....)

 

[Michael Busch]

Consider also the poorhouse systems in Victorian England.