Genticide

Margaret Thatcher famously pegged socialist governance nanny statism. Though the monicker stuck, she might more accurately have termed it wicked step-mother statism, for the way it emasculates a society. In fact, the Soviet system was guilty of nothing less than “genticide,” the systematic destruction of all things manly.

As you might have guessed from previous posts, I love Estonia, the little Baltic enclave that for half a century endured the smothering mothering of Soviet occupation. During the past twenty-five years I’ve journeyed there some two dozen times, most recently last week.

Visiting a nation in reconstruction is a bit like seeing your brother’s kids at Christmas: The changes, the sheer growth, hit you all at once. And so do the disappointments.

Estonia has changed and grown dramatically for the better since 1991, thanks to lots of foreign investment and the simple goodness of free(r) market exchange. But there are disappointments to be sure, chief among them the sorry lot of men and boys, who still have not begun to recover from—and I have agonized over using this term with evangelical readers—the castrating bitch of communism.

Check the statistics of any nation in decline, or of one trying to rise from the pit, and you will see the common characteristic that (a) marriage is in trouble, and (b) manhood, especially head-of-the-house fatherhood, has withered. (Obviously my benchmark is a biblical one, so if you define family or fatherhood differently, you won’t like my observations, and perhaps should click to the left, way left.)

The causes vary, from the spiritual inertia of Hinduism to Stalin’s wholesale slaughters. But the result is the same: Take away a man’s raison d’etre as protector/provider for his wife, and mentor/sage to his children, and you have rendered him less than a man.

Take away manhood, and you kill womanhood, childhood, brotherhood, the whole neighborhood. That’s why this is about men. Sure, women have suffered just as much, maybe more. But shoot the head and you’ve killed a whole body. So I’m writing about heads.

In the case of Estonia (fill in the blank with Latvia, Lithuania, Alaskan Inuits, inner-city Washington, D.C.) civil government replaced men as heads of households, providers, property owners, and as educators of their children. So they wandered aimlessly through half a century, smoking and drinking themselves into earlier and earlier graves.

They’re still wandering.

Oh, there are entrepreneurs, to be sure, talented self-starters who’ve gotten rich and helped society in the process. And there are highly motivated thieves as well, who try and manipulate the system in the arena they know best: Politics. Old oligarchs, masquerading as reformers, they pollute parliaments and hound decent freshmen into compromising on real reform. They have dyed their red coats E.U. green, but it’s the same cloth, with the same oversized pockets.

Today’s Estonia suffers higher than ever suicide rates, and rising tides of drug addiction and STDs, including AIDS. And one member of parliament told me they can’t even measure how many families actually exist in Estonia, since people don’t bother to get married anymore.

It probably will take a generation for the corruption of old ways to die off. That’s how long it took Israel in the wilderness. But there is also the promise of a new generation, born in that same wilderness.

The only example they’ve had thus far is what they were born to: Parents forced to do laps around socialism’s desert, in this case for 50 years, not 40. So they wander too, desperately needing a Joshua or Caleb to follow, to lead them forward. They need spiritual fathers and mothers (but especially fathers) to teach them not just to say their prayers at night. They need mentoring in honest economics, to be taught the nobility of any job well done, to learn that “civil service” is supposed to be both, and how to hold a door open for a woman. They need fathers.

I am not their father. But I can be the uncle who shows up every year to cheer them on, make them laugh, and cause them to dream a little bolder.

God save Estonia.