The European has a long interview (in German) by reporter Sebastian Pfeffer with the psychotherapist Jürgen Lemke. He brings to light a very recent era which has disappeared down the memory hole. In the generation of the revolutionaries of 1968 and among the Greens pedophilia was almost “fashionable.”
Lemke: These groups maintained that “Children also have the right to sex with adults and desire it.”
The pedophiles saw themselves as doing children a favor. The revolutionaries who were not themselves pedophiles wanted to get rid of all taboos and restrictions, and did not want to impose any on pedophiles. Children were the victims of the sexual revolution.
Lemke: Eine Mutter, deren Sohn lange bei mir in Therapie war, war in den Siebzigern darauf stolz, dass ein Lehrer sich in ihren Sohn „verliebte“ und Sexualität einforderte. „Mein Unwohlsein darüber“, das sagt sie heute, „habe ich damals verdrängt, weil ich keine rückständige Mutter sein wollte.“ Im Grunde opferte sie den eigenen Sohn für eine Ideologie, die im Namen des Fortschritts das Zusammenleben neu regeln wollte.
“A mother, whose son was in therapy with me a long time, in the 1970s was proud that a teacher ‘loved’ her son and called for sex. She now says ‘At that time I suppressed my discomfort about that because I didn’t want to be an old-fashioned mother.’ Basically she sacrificed her own son for an ideology that in the name of progress desired to order anew the ways of living together.”
The Greens offered pedophiles a political home, but progressives in general accepted pedophilia.
Lemke: So abstrus das heute klingt, aber in allen Schichten der Bevölkerung gab es unter Erwachsenen den unausgesprochenen Konsens, Sex zwischen Kindern und Erwachsenen schade einem Kind nicht. Und wenn ein Kind nicht mitmachen wolle, könne es doch Nein sagen.
„As odd as it now sounds, but in all levels of the populace there was among adults the unspoken assumption that sex between children and adults did no harm the child. And when the child didn’t want to go along with it, he could always say No.”
Pedophiles have a bad rep nowadays, but that was not always the case.
Lemke: Mitte der 90er-Jahre veröffentlichte der renommierte Wissenschaftler Prof. Rüdiger Lautmann ein Buch, in dem er zwischen „guten“ und „schlechten“ Pädophilen unterscheidet. Die guten kümmern sich, fördern Kinder, insbesondere solche aus sozial schwachen Familien. Die schlechten benutzen sie ausschließlich zur Triebbefriedigung. Aus meiner Sicht ein missglückter Versuch, das sich in den Neunzigern wieder negativ einfärbende öffentliche Bild der Pädophilen zu korrigieren. Pädophile beteuern bis heute: „Ich habe aus dem Jungen etwas gemacht, bei den Verhältnissen in seiner Herkunftsfamilie hätte er sein Leben niemals aus eigener Kraft bewältigt. Ich war immer rücksichtsvoll. Wollte er keinen Sex, habe ich sein Nein respektiert.“
In the mid-1990s the renowned scientist Professor Rüdiger Lautmann published a book, in which he distinguished between „good“ and „bad“ pedophiles. The good ones are careful, mentor children, especially those from socially weak families. The bad ones use children exclusively for the satisfaction of their own desires. In my opinion this is a misguided attempt to correct what in the 1990s had again become a one-sided negative public image of pedophiles. Even today pedophiles protest “I made something of this lad; because of the conditions in his family of birth he could never have overcome his life by his own power. I was always considerate. If he didn’t want sex, I respected his No.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green politician one wrote of his experience as a teacher in the glory days of German leftism:
„Mein ständiger Flirt mit den Kindern nahm erotische Züge an. Es ist mir mehrmals passiert, dass einige Kinder meinen Hosenlatz geöffnet und angefangen haben, mich zu streicheln. Das stellte mich vor Probleme. Aber wenn sie darauf bestanden haben, habe ich sie dennoch gestreichelt.“
My constant flirting with the children took an erotic direction. Many times it happened to me, that a child opened my fly and began to stoke me. That gave me a problem. But when they continued, I then also stroked them.
Cohn-Bendit now denies that this ever happened. He now claims he wrote it as a “provocation” – écrasez les bourgeoisie – to shock the philistines – in the best progressive fashion.
(“I wash their bottoms, I tickle them [the children], they tickle me, we canoodle” (Here is the 1982 Interview , mainly in French).
His advocacy of sex with children has not hurt Cohn-Bendit’s career as a Green politician. He got an important honor in 2013:
The media long ignored the progressives’ connection with pedophilia; in fact they covered up for them:
Lemke: Die „taz“ war lange Sprachrohr der Pädophilen. Noch 2007, als ich zusammen mit dem Journalisten Manfred Karremann dessen Buch „Es geschieht am helllichten Tag“ in der Urania in Berlin vorstellte, zündeten Pädophile eine Stinkbombe, brüllten uns nieder und sprengten die Veranstaltung. Von den Medien, die ansonsten die Flöhe husten hören, kam nicht die geringste Reaktion. Noch 2007 wurde Pädophilie auch in den sogenannten seriösen Medien als Kavaliersdelikt behandelt.
TAZ [die Tageszeitung, leading leftist newspaper] was for a longtime the mouthpiece of pedophiles. Even in 2007, when I was with the journalist Manfred Karreman whose book, It Happened in Broad Daylight, was published in Urania in Berlin, the pedophiles set off a stink bomb, shouted us down, and disrupted the meeting. Not the slightest reaction came from the media, which could otherwise hear a flea cough. Even in 2007 pedophilia was treated as a mere peccadillo in the so-called serious media.
TAZ 1973 published this manifesto: “Pedophilia: A Crime without a Victim.”
Lemke also blames the conservatives. For the Church, Kollegenschutz geht vor Opferschutz, the protection of colleagues had precedence over the protection of children.
Pedophilia has become unfashionable because the child-victims of the 1960s and 1970s are now adults and can vote and take legal action.
The revelation of widespread abuse by priests has made pedophilia unfashionable, at least for the moment. However in our Brave New World I am sure that the courts and public will soon notice that puberty is occurring earlier and earlier in both boys and girls, and that they are being denied sexual fulfillment by old-fashioned laws. Incest is the latest cause:
Green Politican Stroebele will allow incest
Also, I have never gotten a clear answer form those who hold that “conscience” trumps all external laws and traditions of society and the Church. Pedophiles think in their conscience that they are doing the right thing; why shouldn’t we respect their conscience? After all the Catholic Theological Society has maintained that Science (It must be true. It’s SCIENCE!) has never shown that any sexual behavior (ANY) is intrinsically and always harmful. We are after all in a Brave New World. where anything goes (as long as you think it is OK). So we can all proceed directly with out sexual projects until society becomes more enlightened. That’s what pedophiles have been saying all along.
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In reply to Jim:
I have documented the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clerics in my book Sacrilege. But sometimes it seems that adult-child sex is viewed as wrong only if the adult is a priest. The clergy too were caught up in the sexual revolution, and there seems to have been a major increase in abuse by priests in the 60s and 70s. But many influential people on the left were trying to normalize adult-child sex at that time.