I think I need to stop reading about demographics in Europe for a while before I lose my temper completely. Why? Well, let's see, where to start
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Um. I'm confused. What on earth are these idiots arguing is the reason for low birthrates? (And are they saying low birthrates is a good or a bad thing? Because when people are arguing things badly, usually there's an agenda...)
I haven't run across a definitive reason given. Usually it's put down to a matter of culture, primarily, with references to pollution decreasing fertility - I was reading way too much stuff in short succession. (And a bad thing. Or, at any rate, "a concern". Often the higher birthrates in more southerly parts of the world are mentioned by way of contrast.)
You ARE correct, a low birth rate couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with 5-6 million people being mass murdered OH NO not at ALL (*sarcasm*).
and shit man, if you SURVIVED the mass murders, how eager would you be to bring children into the world just so it could happen to them? I can totally understand the reticence there.
And five to six million is the figure for the Jewish population in isolation! It leaves out a huge section of the people killed as a part of Hitler's other genocidal vendettas, or in the firestorm bombings. And it does also leave out that a lot of Jewish survivors very understandably opted to take the assistance,that would allow them to move to Israel, or to the States. That is a lot of people. Probably civilian deaths in Europe in World War II come out to - Man, I'm not sure. But over fifteen million, and probably considerably higher.
Yeah, I suspect it did take a lot of people that way. A lot more seem to have gone the Build a New World With Love route, but it's really hard to do that when you're living in a bombed out city/your village was torched as one army or other retreated/there's a general administrative vacuum/despite the end of the war, people are still fighting in your area. (See: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine. In Estonia partisan resistance continued until 1978.)
Given how many people Russia in particular lost in WWII (~26.6 million, both civilian and military, and that's more than 14% of the 1939 population), combined with the present state of its economy (which has to do with WWII and communism and the semi-failure of democratization, among other things), which essentially requires women to work outside the home for families to survive and forces people to limit family sizes for financial reasons--I'm not surprised their birth rate is so low and government attempts to pay people to have more kids haven't reversed that. It's just not going to happen unless people can make more money, enough to support having more kids. Pollution and culture are not the problem!
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How can anyone write about Europe/humans in general and ignore warfare?????
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I have no idea. I'm inclined to blame 19th eugenicists and their messed up ideas about "racial vigor". Those poisoned the cultural water pretty badly.
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*blinks and is bewildered*
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and shit man, if you SURVIVED the mass murders, how eager would you be to bring children into the world just so it could happen to them? I can totally understand the reticence there.
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Yeah, I suspect it did take a lot of people that way. A lot more seem to have gone the Build a New World With Love route, but it's really hard to do that when you're living in a bombed out city/your village was torched as one army or other retreated/there's a general administrative vacuum/despite the end of the war, people are still fighting in your area. (See: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine. In Estonia partisan resistance continued until 1978.)
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History: it has long-term effects.
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