Attack on the Family: And the European Response

By Notizie ProVita and Roberto Fiore

“Never has the institution of the family been put in such jeopardy as it is today. Wars, tyrannical rulers and the reducing of entire peoples into slavery, although never absent from history, have damaged or even destroyed individual families, but the institution itself had never been touched.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Logik
• Release date: May 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9789188667489

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Attack-cover.jpg

The attack on the family

the attack on the family

and the european response

Notizia Provita

introduction by

Roberto Fiore

First Edition Published 2016

Cover Design: Andreas Nilsson

ISBN: 978-91-88667-48-9

©2019 Logik Förlag

Box 22120, 250 23 Helsingborg, Sweden

www.logik.se | www.logikpub.com

[e-mail]

INTRODUCTION

This book is motivated by an emergency: Never has the institution of the family been put in such jeopardy as it is today.

Wars, tyrannical rulers and the reducing of entire peoples into slavery, although never absent from history, had damaged or even destroyed individual families, but the institution itself had never been touched.

Earthquakes, famines, epidemics, natural disasters and wars have decimated the greatest civilisations and brought destruction to entire cities. Yet the idea of wiping out the family - that little engine which is present in every corner of the world, ever ready to rebuild everything and return a shattered society to a newfound normalcy - had never emerged.

Yet a violent and unprecedented attack on the family is clearly visible today, denoting a radical agenda and clarity of purpose never known before. It calls into question the first element, the biological one, denying the immutable evidence of nature. Is a person’s sex objective or subjective? Is it better to replace the word sex with term gender? And again: is gender something of which there are two, one hundred or an infinite number? Can two men or two women have a child?

These proposals - which never even existed at any time in human history until just a few decades ago - now seem to herald a new world, a dystopia which, besides being bad science fiction, has another flaw: it cannot exist, except using artificial fertilisation, and thus inhuman and Orwellian style brainwashing.

Behind this nightmare of our times hides the ultimate goal of this war on the family: the eradication of the human race.

The story, rather than setting out towards a possible earthly paradise as Utopian Marxism and Communism demanded, lands hopelessly washed up, on an arid and barren desert shore, where we witness the ritual silence and sad euthanasia of humanity.

Is this the terminus of the hallucinatory trip that large schools of subversive philosophy and certain pseudo-religious sectarianism foreshadowed with the revolution of ’68 and the subsequent explosion in the ’80s of the gay scene, paradoxically coinciding with the emergence of AIDS? It was like saying: it doesn’t matter if we die, we are in the end times, and this lifestyle is the heart of the challenge to Heaven.

I remember it well, because I was living in London in the years of this phenomenon’s explosion and I could not help but see the sad gait of thousands of people heading towards a foretold death. Accompanied and supported by powerful forces, this large, nefarious and totally deliberate distortion of culture and tradition severed links with the central figures and foundations of society: the father, the mother, the marital relationship and the education of children according to that same traditional view of the family model that guarantees their realisation.

This cultural subversion has not appeared in much of the world and is largely confined to the Western liberal society in which it spawned. But so powerful are the efforts of a fundamentally anti-Christian elite - backed by such enormous power within the media and academia that it can force anti-family choices by governments - that real danger looms for the future.

We could say - it has already happened and will continue to happen - that some international financial powers seem to relax their financial parameters for countries accepting so-called civil unions and their right to adopt children. We have seen, for example, how persistently the Italian Renzi regime has pushed civil unions and how pressure led the Greek government, formerly adverse, to pass overnight the legalisation of civil unions.

But, faced with this bleak scenario, we are also witnessing great and courageous expressions of popular resistance for the family and for natural and Christian values. The Manif Pour Tous in France saw a true popular uprising, by people thoroughly betrayed by the political parties and stubbornly ready to do battle. The great events of Family Day in Rome as well as all the important laws passed in Eastern Europe, the defeated referendum in Slovenia, in Croatia or in certain States of the US and the recent possible emergence of a referendum in Italy, give more than a little hope.

So too do the growing trend, particularly in central and eastern Europe, towards positive measures to encourage families and to boost the birthrate to counter the ‘demographic winter’ which is emerging over the entire advance world as the anti-family policies of the global elite really begins to bite. Yes, there are signs of hope, but the final word is far from being written.

The aim of this book is to highlight the absurd, artificial and dangerous plan of the small but powerful, anti-human lobby which intends to drag civilisation down into a suicidal act of self-destruction. But it is also a fitting tribute to the resistance put in place by governments still informed by good philosophy, by sound doctrine and common sense, by hundreds of thousands of patriotic militants and Christians and, above all, to which G.K. Chesterton called the Brave new family.

The real heroes now are the millions of young people, without jobs and future security, choosing to start a family, uniting it firmly through a covenant between a man and a woman for the procreation and love of children. Victory, and the future, belongs to them.

Roberto Fiore

President, Alliance for Peace and Freedom

THE FAMILY, NATURAL SOCIETY AND THE FOUNDATION OF CIVILISATION

In recent decades, European states have promoted and implemented policies designed to undermine the institution of the family, as it has always been understood. All this, mind you, is not just the result of free choices made by individual national governments; it is also the consequence of deliberate pressure from liberals and the left. But before examining these attacks, it would be good to understand what we mean by ‘family’ and what are the origins of today’s policies adverse to it.

What is the natural family?

First of all we should reiterate the obvious (which now however - apparently – is no longer such), that by the natural family we mean the stable union of a man and a woman for the procreation and care of offspring.

Aristotle teaches that the family is the basis of human society because it is the first form of community that man formed to survive; larger communities, including the city and the state, only followed later. Man is therefore a political animal (zoòn politikòn), a social being destined to live in communities.

If the family is the basis of human society, marriage is the foundation upon which the family is based. The crisis affecting the institution of marriage is evident. Nevertheless, it is precisely from marriage that we must start: Only if we return to a true unity between man and woman, united in marriage, will it be possible to counter the demographic winter in which Western civilization is freezing to death. Only then will it be possible to provide a valid antidote to the developmental emergency that scars the children and young people of today, too often innocent victims of broken families and increasingly bereft of adults as life mentors.

Marriage is not exclusively Christian, some ‘invention’ of the Church. Today, more than ever, it is crucial to reaffirm and emphasise its age-old, natural aspect. In fact, if we go back in time, well before Christ, in Etruria, in Athens, in Rome, in Jerusalem, everywhere... a family is always made up of one man and one woman.

In the words of Cicero it is the principium et urbis et quasi seminarium reipublicae (the foundation of the city, what we might call the seedbed of the nation). After all, without this union between man and woman, humanity would not exist either.

Several centuries before Christ, Aeschylus said that it was thanks to marriage that man had passed from the bestial state to the civilised one. Similarly, the myth of Cecrops, first king of Athens, tells how he put an end to promiscuity and from then every man was coupled to one woman.

The existence of lasting unions between man and woman is also supported by ancient cave engravings, such as those found in Valcamonica (Italy), or by the Etruscan sarcophagi where a single mantle is wrapped around both spouses. Massimo Pallottino (1909-1995), a famous scholar of Etruscan civilisation and the leading Etruscan studies Professor at La Sapienza, University of Rome, explains the presence of this veil as an Eastern influence that would prove that union between man and woman, in ancient times, was present long before any verified or specific civilization.

To the facts set out so far, we can add the discovery, a few years ago, of what has been dubbed the first nuclear family: near Eulau, Saxony, the remains of a married couple with their arms around their two sons were uncovered. The remains of this Neolithic Saxon family date back to 4600 years ago.

Just think of pagan Rome. An engagement was celebrated with an official ceremony and the exchange of a ring (put on the ring finger because, according to Aulus Gellius, there was a very fine nerve, which runs from the ring finger to the heart). For the ancient Romans, marriage was a solemn ceremony, marked by a kind of communion in front of an altar, on which spelt bread was offered to Jupiter. Additionally, it inspired the sacrifice of an animal with a haruspex - a priest trained in such divination - reading the entrails to predict the future.

A woman, married only once, joined the hands of the newlyweds in front of the priests and witnesses, also demonstrating the social function of marriage. All this, at least in the Republican era, took place in a solemn way in order to highlight the importance of the gesture.

Towards the end of the Republican era, however, Roman marriage fell into crisis; it was the prelude to wider social disintegration, generated by the fragility of families and the associated demographic decline. Together these were remote but real causes of the dissolution of Rome and a warning for our times: Historia magistra vitae – History is life’s teacher.

Once the Roman Empire abandoned paganism, the wedding ritual was preserved in its essence and evolved into the Christian custom, save of course for the haruspicy, that is, the sacrificing of animals and reading into the future.

The understanding of the relationship between man and woman has changed to a degree, particularly with the Christian idea that marriage cannot be dissolved and the recognition of the wife as a free individual. But it remains clear to everyone, in line with the words of Modestino (c.III A.D.), that "Nuptiae sunt coniunctio maris et feminae, consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio (marriage is the joining of a man and a woman, the union of a life, the communion between divine law and human").

Even in ancient Greece marriage was always between a man and a woman only. Although the idea of the indissolubility of marriage did not exist in the Greek world, the belief that loyalty was a desirable ideal already existed.

As for the phenomenon of homosexuality, often presented as normal and wide spread at the time, it was still unlike the situation today. If anything, it was the phenomenon of pederasty that was widespread (and to some extent tolerated) as part of the education of the young. But by reading, for example, the Laws of Plato, we learn "the pleasure of men with men and women with women is unnatural, and this act is born of a reckless inability to dominate pleasure."

Liberal propaganda aside, it is clear that in classical Greece homosexuality was not as widespread as people think, and that, most important of all, it was not ‘normalised’. In truth, the ancient Greeks would have never dreamed of advocating same-sex marriage. They had not yet had - for believers - Christian Revelation, but Athens was always the home of the lògos, of human reason.

Clearly the vision that we have of family and marriage today is closely linked to Christian teachings, but in actual fact, as already stated, we have merely elevated and ‘perfected’ what is already present in the human heart. So much so that, from the Code of Justinian to that of Napoleon, despite the historical and political changes over the centuries, the substance of marriage has always remained the same.

From the Christian perspective marriage has taken on an even greater significance as it is a sacrament. Compared to that of the ancients and pagans, Christian marriage has that specific component of indissolubility. This principle, seemingly hard and impractical, can actually be fully understood by reason alone. Everybody wants to love their partner ‘forever’ and knowing