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The baby boomers screwed up Europe in much the same way as they did the United States. They formed and mouthed banal platitudes for their children as they destroyed their heritage, invited hordes of foreign marauders, and stole their inheritance.
There are differences. Europeans have senses of national identity steeped in centuries of history; Americans don't. The barbarians at Europe's door are more recent and more frightening than America's. But the origins are similar. The French 68ers, soixante-huitards, were just about as loud, self-righteous and ignorant as the hippie protesters in the United States.
I am privileged to have a historical perspective. I lived in Berkeley in the 1950s and 60s, then on the French border of Germany in the 1970s. The drug revolution, the sexual revolution and the antiwar movement swept my younger siblings generations but not my own. It was appalling at the time. The madness seemed unsustainable, but yet it continued for decades. Markus Willinger captures it all with a great economy of words.
He is a stirring writer in the tradition of Voltaire and Zola. This is his "J'accuse" of the whole baby boomer generation, and the hapless generation X which will suffer for the boomers' sins and its own inability to ever get out from under them. Born in 1992, Willinger is in the heart of the millennial generation.
The book is short: 40 pages of material stretched to 140 through large type and big margins. Only 1263 Kindle locations. It is easy to read in one sitting, and so powerful you cannot put it down. Chapter 1, included here as a comment, establishes themes developed through the rest of the book:
The remaining 40 chapters go at several recurring themes from different angles: family, sexuality, race, diversity, Islam, globalization, democracy, freedom, debt, escapism, responsibility and even art.
Willinger does not use the phrase cultural Marxism, but that is how the things he despises would be characterized in the United States. The Boomer generation sacrificed family and children to their own selfish desires. They divorced on a whim, paying no attention to the children who were brought up lonely and unattended in front of TV sets broadcasting pictures of perfection that their lives would never experience. They became alienated. One paragraph strikes home: "No one showed us how to build a family, or how to stick together or resolve the conflict. We have failed a thousand times in trying to realize our ideal."
He is equally brutal on the subject of the sexes, and sexual ambiguity. It is totally refreshing to see something so honest, so politically incorrect emerge from Europe:
"Of all the battles you’ve fought, your battle against the sexes was the most reprehensible. Instead of the harmonious union of men and women, you’ve promoted alliances of [redacted by Amazon – gays and cross-dressers], the union of nothingness.
"You’ve taken the manliness out of men. You’ve raised them to be feeble teddy bears lacking the power to act, lacking courage, lacking strength — in short, the will to power.
"You’ve convinced women that femininity is outdated and socially constructed. You’ve told them that it’s not necessary to look pretty and healthy, not necessary to have families and children, and that only their careers matter.
"So it was that the womanly men and the manly women met, and didn’t know what to do.
Beyond the fact that men and women not understand how to relate to each other sexually, they do a bad job of raising children. They, and the society they have built, are incapable of forming men and women capable of joining in partnerships to raise children in the traditions of their ancestors. The millennial generation is haunted by a loneliness that comes of being uprooted. More even than uprooted – there was no substance in which they could have taken root. Everything was upended. Cultural institutions, especially the church – destroyed. The schools – turned into propaganda outlets. The very land itself, ravaged and exploited in the name of consumption.
The economy of every European country, like those of the US and Japan as well, has been funded by vast borrowing. By the Boomers, with tacit acquiescence by Generation X, to be repaid by Millennials and beyond. When they could not borrow any more they simply printed money. All the while, the Boomers are enjoying pensions and health benefits far more extensive than their taxes would have supported, to be paid for by the chumps - Generation Identity. Politics has supported this wholesale theft, with all parties in collusion against the voiceless young of the rising generations. Politics also supported abortion, birth control, vasectomies and lifestyles that did not encourage children, to the point that members of Generation Identity do not form a cohort nearly numerous enough to support their parents.
Meanwhile, the Boomers monopolize the politically protected, well-paying jobs, leaving youth unemployment rates between 20% and 50% throughout Europe. Willinger's peers are not acquiring the capital to form their own families, nor the skills that would bring the income to support their burdensome elders. The catastrophe is cooked in.
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