At the Vox Popoli blog, where the anti-boomer feeling erupts frequently in the various threads touching on just about any subject, there was this comment, from ‘dfordoom‘ which I thought deserving of reposting in entirety:
“The generation thing is irrelevant. It wasn’t a particular generation that ruined things. It was a small minority and that minority has been busily doing its work of social destruction for a couple of hundred years. The small minority is the intellectuals. The self-elected cultural elite. They’ve been burrowing into the universities, the media, the bureaucracy, the entertainment industry, the art establishment. Anywhere they can influence the culture.
They were a very small minority in the 19th century but they started to multiply in the 20th century with the (exceedingly foolish) expansion of academia. Universities started to churn out thousands of utterly useless arts graduates. Such people knew they were useless. They have always known they are useless. That’s what fuels their hate. They were completely unqualified for gainful employment but they wanted to run the world. And they got themselves into positions where they could influence the culture to such a extent that they could run the world. This kind of entryism has been happening on a large scale since the 1920s.
These parasites are represented in every generation. They started to gain real power in the 70s, which led to the (entirely false) assumption that this had something to do with the Baby Boom. The only connection was that the Boomers grew up in an era when way too many people were going to university and imbibing the cultural poison of the cultural elites. The generations that grew up in the postwar era therefore had a higher percentage of these parasites. But they were still a minority. They still are. That doesn’t matter. A tiny disciplined highly motivated minority can exert enormous power. The Bolsheviks conquered Russia in 1917 despite the fact that they never numbered more than a relative handful of adherents.
Inter-generational squabbling serves the purposes of the elites very well indeed. It distracts attention from what really happened and what is still happening.”
Ï think the above comment is a very good summation of how the ‘generational divide’ was, if not created, at least heightened and exaggerated by certain influential groups in Western society.
The blog entry and comment thread were in response to another piece on the Hawaiian Libertarian blog, in which Keoni Galt gives his own explanation of how the Baby Boom generation was the object of a great deal of manipulation by the newly-ubiquitous mass media: television, the music industry, and the rest of the media, as well as academia.
This of course had the clout of the government behind it implicitly, even during the days of the so-called ‘Witch hunt’ by Joe McCarthy et al. While the government was outwardly ”anti-Communist” during the childhood of the Boomers, other forces within government were already pushing many of the left’s agenda items, openly or covertly, and the Boomers were being fed a diet of cultural Marxist ideas while they were still malleable young people. They were in fact being used as guinea pigs in a sense, as some of the propaganda techniques were untested, but they quickly learned how to use them to good effect with the help of popular media as well as schools.
The boomer generation, as it is now called, was the first to be so thoroughly influenced by means of new psychological techniques, including those of the Tavistock Institute.
The elites by the post-WWII era had in mind the weakening and ultimate destruction of the family unit, and to effect this it would be necessary to heighten generational tensions (which are, after all, somewhat natural) by exaggerating the ‘distinct’ character of the new generations, to distance them from their ‘boring, stodgy’ parents, and, in the case of the Boomers, to give them a sort of Messianic sense of themselves: they would be tasked with the job of Saving The World. From whom? From their stupid, misguided, fascist parents. Parents were declared the enemy. Look at the lyrics of many rock songs of the late sixties, for example ‘The End’ by the Doors.
Boomers were told that it was up to them to Stop War, establish a peaceful one world, as per John Lennon’s ”Imagine” and other such utopian drivel.
There have been allegations that the whole drug culture of the sixties and seventies, which resulted in more than a few ‘drug casualties’ among Boomers and later generations, was engineered and ‘allowed’ to happen, as authorities turned a blind eye to open trafficking of drugs, notably LSD, in some cities. People like Augustus Owsley Stanley (known as “Owsley” to the young counterculturists) liberally handed out drugs openly in San Francisco.
“By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.”
And the government was powerless to stop this? The authorities then, remember, were not as politically corrected then as now. Why did they allow it?
It’s been known for some years, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that the powers-that-be in more than one Western country used LSD on unsuspecting subjects, including psychiatric patients and military men, for the purpose of exploring possible use for mind control through that drug.
Is it not possible, as some suggest, that the biggest group of guinea pigs were the gullible young people on the streets of the Haight, or elsewhere?
All of the above will not change the minds of those who loathe Baby Boomers or blame them for everything that is wrong. But with all the stereotypes of the postwar Baby Boom generation, the fact remains that today they vote more conservatively (opposing mass immigration, for example) than any of the younger cohorts. Each successive generation is more liberal than the previous. That much can be checked out factually.
And to me it’s also evident that most of the people who despise Boomers have followed in the worst of the Boomers’ footsteps. Take recreational drugs? Check. The Gen X and Y-ers are at least as likely as their elders to do drugs, and to support legalization. The younger generations (who are now not so young, like the Gen X-ers) also admire and emulate the worst of the boomers with tolerance of foul language, pornography, and promiscuity. On these issues they are indistinguishable from the far Left for the most part. Maybe they vote for lower taxes or Second Amendment rights but otherwise they live, act, and talk like lefties.
One of the crimes with which Boomers are charged is that they hated their parents, and had no respect for elders. This can be said of every succeeding generation. In this they are just as guilty as the Boomers. In fact the Gen X-ers who are the shrillest voices against Boomers are probably children of Boomers who haven’t got past the Daddy Issues. If one still has Daddy Issues in middle age, that’s a problem. Teenagers go through a phase of thinking themselves wiser, better, more enlightened or ‘evolved’ than their anachronistic, troglodyte parents. As people mature, they get over this, and realize that youth is not as wise as it thinks itself.
If the Boomer critics really abhor the counterculture sixties lifestyle, why do they emulate it and defend it? Why not renounce it and go in the opposite direction? They should really thank the Boomers because the latter pioneered this lifestyle they cling to, and made it mainstream and acceptable. That is their worst crime, but the later generations evidently admire it.
Imitation, it’s said, is the sincerest form of flattery.
The Millennials? They vote the most left-wing of all the generations. Check out the voting statistics. And this group is the most avidly ‘anti-fa’, anti-White, anti-Christian. Exceptions? Sure, there are some; there are exceptions to every rule, but they are just that, exceptions. Isolated cases. Anecdotes don’t counter the overall picture. To argue that they do is to ‘argue’ like a liberal. Lefties always bring up exceptions in order to deny patterns.
My point? The generational hatred, like all the other divisions in our society, is counterproductive. It further splits us, makes us all distrustful of each other, and ultimately weakens us. The comment by ‘dfordoom’ which I quoted above sums it all up; these internecine squabbles and grudges are manipulated by the powers-that-be, and these things suit their purposes wonderfully. We shouldn’t help them by letting ourselves be used.