KILROY writes:

This is a poster advertising the Australian military which appears on the side of a kiosk at Martin Place in Sydney. It struck me as odd that motherhood and military service were somehow equated as difficult on the same level, as if there is no distinction between the ultimate service to humanity that a women can embrace by giving life, and the ultimate sacrifice of men on the field of battle in defending it. Both are sacrifices, and both are selfless. But there is a difference on a fundamental level that makes posters like this just look ridiculous. I find it hard to articulate what that difference is though, and in moments like these I feel that even I have been affected by liberalism – after all, I cannot find the words to express something that appears to be axiomatic, as if liberalism has purged the lexicon of common sense.

Laura writes:

That is one of the most absurd ads I have ever seen. Not only are both motherhood and military service sacrifices, they are mutually exclusive sacrifices. They are opposed in essential ways. It is a mother’s obligation to preserve herself. It is a soldier’s obligation to risk himself. The death of a father is a terrible blow, but the death of a mother is on a different level. Also, how many women going into the army are actually going to be officers? This exaggeration is the sort of flattery and deliberate exaggeration that draws women with dreams of money and glory into dead-end careers away from their families.

This poster declares that children don’t count. It also denies that a woman soldier is in any way an inferior soldier. A woman soldier, especially an officer, unless she is in the lower ranks of administration, is a person out of her element and a hindrance to a military ethic no matter how talented, patriotic and capable she is.

The birth rate of the West plummets while our military services plead with women in their childbearing years to sign up. This is cultural suicide and extreme stupidity. I really think this ad is not intended to recruit women officers, but lower rank drudges. Still what does it say about a country that admits to approving of women as military leaders? It’s already expiring and surrendering.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It is straightforwardly immoral to produce propaganda posters encouraging young women to believe that they can be effective mothers and army officers simultaneously, and downright monstrous to tell them that women in such circumstances are “lucky.” For heaven’s sake, what does an unlucky woman look like? The only thing worse would be to show a child making a claim to being “lucky” for having an absent mother in a war zone overseas—which is already being obliquely suggested every day in soft focus news reports and the like.

If I was a propagandist for a Muslim terrorist organization in Afghanistan, I’d simply reproduce that poster and print the word FREEDOM over the mast in bold red-white-and-blue letters. I can’t imagine a worse advertisement for “Western liberal democracy” than that inhuman advertisement.

Laura writes:

Good point. If this woman is lucky, what is unlucky? 

Please follow and like us: