Generational Cycles Coming Home to Devour Us
(expanded from a long comment on cutelildrow's journal over here)
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)
This quote from Santayana (often abbreviated as "Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it") is the essence of why we should be profoundly worried over the degree to which the Millennials have forgotten the Holocaust, and more importantly the causes and effects of World War II.
This is also the essence of the Strauss-Howe Cycles. The kids in that video were born 1990 or later. Their parents were born around 1960-70, their grandparents around 1930-50. Thus, most of them have never had a close personal relationship with anyone who was old enough to personally remember the Interwar Era, and specifically to remember the sort of mistakes that led into World War II.
This goes a long way toward explaining why they can sit with equanimity, watching Obama (and to be fair, other modern Western leaders) repeating in broad strokes the appeasement policy of the 1930's, without grasping that this is not merely a bad idea but a horribly bad idea, which might have horrible personal consequences not only for the leaders but for the Millennials themselves.
Without the knowledge of how appeasement made that war possible and even inevitable, they cannot really believe that appeasement could cause a future global war. Without the knowledge of how an initially-weak Nazi Germany rose From Nobody To Nightmare, they can't see how Muslim Powers might do the same. Without the knowledge of just how horrid were the atrocities committed by the aggressors when they had their chance, they can't believe in such atrocities happening again, and imagine them to be merely hawkish propaganda. And without the knowledge of just how horrid were the atrocities we committed when our backs were up against the walls, and more so when we finally began to win, they look at the mild measures we take today against the Terrorists and they imagine that nothing could be worse.
The irony is that the Millennials feel disconnected from their great-grandparents because of those elders' profound pessimism, distrust, and in some cases hatred of foreigners and foreign leaders. They imagine themselves superior to all previous generations because they have tools such as the Internet that lets them access foreign sources and foreign individuals directly, as no generation had before. They think their cynicism toward their own business leaders insulates themselves from making the mistakes of previous generations, because they "know" that all wars spring from our own greed. So they want to elect political leaders who will resist the siren song of war.
But the Greatest Generation imagined themselves much the same. They had access to good sound newsreels and newspapers and magazines and books as no generation had before, and this included Marxist and left-leaning texts which told them that World War One had been "bunk" engineered by the munitions magnates. They were cynical toward their own business leaders and they wanted to elect political leaders who resisted the siren song of war.
So they did. And the appeasement this produced led them directly into a war which seared into their souls in the most painful possible manners that appeasement doesn't work, that one has to stand up for oneself and for what is right if one expects to remain free against foreign aggression.
I knew such a member of the Greatest Generation very well: my adoptive father, who was a nice and generally soft-spoken man but with a core of steel beneath, a core that had been forged in the Great Depression and World War II, and who made sure that I understood the necessity of courage in a world that included evil people. He was born in 1918, I was born in 1964, and he died in 1986. If I'd been born in 1990, I would have never have had the chance to know him.
(my adoptive mother, born in New York City in 1924, had only fuzzy memories of World War II, but they included the utter terror of knowing that, on the other side of the world, a whole vast alliance wanted to kill her, personally. This stuck in her head -- perhaps a bit too strongly).
When I was a child, in the 1970's and early 1980's, World War II was very much a living memory: and not merely among a small group of extremely-elderly people. The Greatest Generation was in its 50's to early 70's then, and we all had parents and grandparents who remembered World War II, we all watched TV shows (both documentary and fiction) set in World War II, and we all remembered the Holocaust not only as something which had happened in the past but as something which could happen again if we let down our guard.
The greatest irony is this. Because the Millennials have helped elect and protect people like Barack Hussein Obama, we're going to go through those fires again. Not in exactly the same way -- I think that it will be shorter but far more intense, and will be very much divided into an early period of US cities going up in mushroom clouds followed by Muslim cities doing the same, and then avenging American armies fanning out to annihilate Islam root and branch -- but it will come to much the same thing.
And it will be the Millennials who will bear the brunt of this.
And it wasn't necessary. And it still isn't necessary. But with an empty suit occupying the Oval Office until at least 2017, our time to avoid this is fast running out.
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)
This quote from Santayana (often abbreviated as "Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it") is the essence of why we should be profoundly worried over the degree to which the Millennials have forgotten the Holocaust, and more importantly the causes and effects of World War II.
This is also the essence of the Strauss-Howe Cycles. The kids in that video were born 1990 or later. Their parents were born around 1960-70, their grandparents around 1930-50. Thus, most of them have never had a close personal relationship with anyone who was old enough to personally remember the Interwar Era, and specifically to remember the sort of mistakes that led into World War II.
This goes a long way toward explaining why they can sit with equanimity, watching Obama (and to be fair, other modern Western leaders) repeating in broad strokes the appeasement policy of the 1930's, without grasping that this is not merely a bad idea but a horribly bad idea, which might have horrible personal consequences not only for the leaders but for the Millennials themselves.
Without the knowledge of how appeasement made that war possible and even inevitable, they cannot really believe that appeasement could cause a future global war. Without the knowledge of how an initially-weak Nazi Germany rose From Nobody To Nightmare, they can't see how Muslim Powers might do the same. Without the knowledge of just how horrid were the atrocities committed by the aggressors when they had their chance, they can't believe in such atrocities happening again, and imagine them to be merely hawkish propaganda. And without the knowledge of just how horrid were the atrocities we committed when our backs were up against the walls, and more so when we finally began to win, they look at the mild measures we take today against the Terrorists and they imagine that nothing could be worse.
The irony is that the Millennials feel disconnected from their great-grandparents because of those elders' profound pessimism, distrust, and in some cases hatred of foreigners and foreign leaders. They imagine themselves superior to all previous generations because they have tools such as the Internet that lets them access foreign sources and foreign individuals directly, as no generation had before. They think their cynicism toward their own business leaders insulates themselves from making the mistakes of previous generations, because they "know" that all wars spring from our own greed. So they want to elect political leaders who will resist the siren song of war.
But the Greatest Generation imagined themselves much the same. They had access to good sound newsreels and newspapers and magazines and books as no generation had before, and this included Marxist and left-leaning texts which told them that World War One had been "bunk" engineered by the munitions magnates. They were cynical toward their own business leaders and they wanted to elect political leaders who resisted the siren song of war.
So they did. And the appeasement this produced led them directly into a war which seared into their souls in the most painful possible manners that appeasement doesn't work, that one has to stand up for oneself and for what is right if one expects to remain free against foreign aggression.
I knew such a member of the Greatest Generation very well: my adoptive father, who was a nice and generally soft-spoken man but with a core of steel beneath, a core that had been forged in the Great Depression and World War II, and who made sure that I understood the necessity of courage in a world that included evil people. He was born in 1918, I was born in 1964, and he died in 1986. If I'd been born in 1990, I would have never have had the chance to know him.
(my adoptive mother, born in New York City in 1924, had only fuzzy memories of World War II, but they included the utter terror of knowing that, on the other side of the world, a whole vast alliance wanted to kill her, personally. This stuck in her head -- perhaps a bit too strongly).
When I was a child, in the 1970's and early 1980's, World War II was very much a living memory: and not merely among a small group of extremely-elderly people. The Greatest Generation was in its 50's to early 70's then, and we all had parents and grandparents who remembered World War II, we all watched TV shows (both documentary and fiction) set in World War II, and we all remembered the Holocaust not only as something which had happened in the past but as something which could happen again if we let down our guard.
The greatest irony is this. Because the Millennials have helped elect and protect people like Barack Hussein Obama, we're going to go through those fires again. Not in exactly the same way -- I think that it will be shorter but far more intense, and will be very much divided into an early period of US cities going up in mushroom clouds followed by Muslim cities doing the same, and then avenging American armies fanning out to annihilate Islam root and branch -- but it will come to much the same thing.
And it will be the Millennials who will bear the brunt of this.
And it wasn't necessary. And it still isn't necessary. But with an empty suit occupying the Oval Office until at least 2017, our time to avoid this is fast running out.