Murat Altuglu

In 2012, the Merkel government introduced an infant support scheme, called the Betreuungsgeld. The aim of it was to assist families in taking care of their child between the ages of one and three.

The reader outside Germany might come to the conclusion that this propitious policy would have received universal acclaim in Germany. What is more natural than to support a mother looking after her child?

Well, one must not know that the German elite is dominated by leftist, and that the moral decay of this elite is at terminal stage. From the very beginning, this ostensibly benevolent bill was viciously attacked by the German state and private media and the leftist parties, particularly the Greens and the SPD, and even from within the CDU. One can visit the respective media websites and just type in Betreuungsgeld and click search.

One will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of negative and demagogic attacks on supporting families who look after their children at home. In the words of the secretary-general of the SPD, this type of support for families is “bonkers.” (An expression that is quite revealing on the intellectual exiguity of the secretary-general of Germany’s second largest party.)

Despite this public lynching – to use a most apposite metaphor – of the bill, the Merkel government was reelected, and the opposition lost. Thus the Greens and the SPD lost the opportunity to kill this bill democratically.

Hence, the German left had to resort to its secret weapon; the German constitutional court, which ruled the child support scheme unconstitutional.

More important to discuss than the legalistic fiat of the German constitutional court is the prevalent mindset in Germany that taking care of one’s child at home is something bad. The ruling merely exemplifies to what extent the democratic process is interjected and circumvented. Thus a few sentences on the ruling have to suffice.

Now, the ruling of the constitutional court is not a legal but a political ruling. If a family receives 150 Euros per month for a child, is at the discretion of the elected and accountable legislators, who have the so called power of the purse. The Federal government provides all kinds of subsidies to specific groups.

Reading the briefs of the Bavarian state government and the Federal government, arguments are provided for why it is OK for the Federal government to support families.

Yet if the ruling of the court is read, not a single argument against the child support subsidy is given. Instead, behind the typical verbal virtuosity and obscurantist language of the intellectual elite is the simple admission hidden: ‘It ain’t gonna happen, ‘cause I say so.’ http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/DE/2015/07/fs20150721_1bvf000213.html

That the decision was nothing else than sheer abuse of power by overriding the legislative act of the Bundestag, was inadvertently admitted in a Freudian slip by a journalist in the state media: The judiciary “made politics.” http://www.tagesschau.de/kommentar/kommentar-csu-betreuungsgeld-101.html

Consequently, the government can give incentives to send infants to state run daycare, but it is verboten to give incentives to look after your child in your own home. If someone can find common sense in this, please drop me a line.

Why then this aversion, in fact hysteria at the idea of having a normal family relationship, especially that between a mother and a child?

Now, it is not possible to answer this question within the boundaries of a blog-article. A magnum opus of the type of Erich Fromm and Sigmund Freud is necessary to address the psychological underpinnings of this moral decay. Thus I have to confine myself to a few preliminary answers.

The axiomatic cause for the moral breakdown among the German intelligentsia is a cultural, particularly religious disintegration in German society, and especially – yet not exclusively – among the left.

William II, the last German emperor, had expressed his worries that “his” people should remain a Christian people and not slide into atheism. But this is exactly what happened over the last hundred years.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the elite in Germany was transformed. This was accompanied by a socialist-collectivist re-education of the masses. Through a nationalist socialism in the 30s and 40s, a Soviet-type socialism in East Germany, and a cultural Marxism beginning in the 60s in West Germany, all had part in altering German society, i.e. the German family.

Today’s political, educational, cultural, and media elite is the outcome of this (ongoing) process of extirpating family values. Hence, a minister for education in a West German state is able to utter a sentence like: “No mother can offer to her child what a daycare center can.” (It was Vera Reiß, SPD, from Rhineland-Palatinate, not that the person matters.)

This statement is not exemplary for the lack of morals of one person, but is symptomatic for an entire stratum of German society.

A person, who is capable of uttering such nonsense, is not shunned but promoted in public life.

A body of people must have said: “Hey, let’s put her in a leading position within the party.”

A body of people must have said: “Hey, let’s make her a candidate for state parliament.”

A body of people must have said: “Hey, let’s vote for a party that makes her a candidate for public office.”

A body of people must have said: “Hey, let’s make her a minister of education.”

Thus, what we are confronted with are not simply individual anomalies but a systemic change and decline of moral values.

I recommend reading T.S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture, to find excellent explanations for the cultural transformation mentioned here. While Eliot was addressing events in English society, his insights are more than applicable to the German case, too.

The socialist and collectivist remaking of society, in any of the three versions mentioned above, requires to reduce the value of the family (and by default of faith), and replace it with different “values.”

With religious zeal (and the ideology of the left is nothing but a god-less religion in its own way) is the left enforcing its ideology. The left cannot and does not allow any deviation from its belief system. This is why the family support scheme was doomed from the start – it went against one of the precepts of the left – thou shall not raise thy child, but rather the state.