Generational failure

Remember the "greatest generation"? Tom Brokaw wrote a book praising the generation of Americans born between 1905 and 1925, who withstood the Great Depression and World War II and created our world.  (If you ask me, the Civil War generation was even greater, not to mention the Revolutionary War generation!)

There was an article in The New York Times by someone whose name I can't remember saying that the Greatest Generation's big failure was racism.  I'd argue that racism is every generation's failure and that you could just as well single out the World War I generation that joined the Ku Klux Klan in the millions.  If you ask me, the Greatest Generation's big failure was the Cold War.

I think that the Cold War was a mistake.  An avoidable, destructive and protracted mistake which happened to make certain Americans rich and others powerful.  The World War II generation had learned to obey their government like enlisted men obey their officers, view foreigners with a combination of fear and feelings of moral superiority, and accept arbitrary measures like the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. (Americans, I've often said, have a way of learning the wrong lesson from everything...) I'm not saying that the Soviets were guiltless in all this, but this generation let themselves down with McCarthyism, the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan's unpunished crimes--those who praise Reagan condemn themselves.

Back in the '90s I read a short article in The New Yorker, then edited by deferential Queen of the Weasels Tina Brown, in which Saul Bellow said he didn't know what motivated anti-anticommunists except for residual Stalinism. (Bellow must not have been close to any victims of the Hollywood blacklist.) Well, what motivates anti-anti-anti communists if not residual McCarthyism?  Of course, this was about Bellow trying to spin things so that the issue would be communism rather than anti-communism.

Susan Sontag famously pointed out that Reader's Digest in the 1950s was depicting communism more accurately than The Nation or The New Statesman were. Well, Reader's Digest repeated what the rest of the press was saying--that was their job, of course--while the other two didn't.  Big deal!  What's a lot more important is that the conservative media like Reader's Digest got anti-communism wrong, while the other two got it pretty right.

The most appalling thing about Cold War atrocities like McCarthyism is their enablers and apologists.  There's a fashion among some liberals to subscribe to the conservative myth of the Cold War as a WWII-style "good vs. evil" conflict. Tell it to people in Iran and Guatemala, where the CIA connived to subvert democratic governments and replace them with repressive dictatorships that played ball. It's worth pointing out that "good" Washington's anti-communists in Central America murdered more people than "evil" Moscow's communists in the Warsaw Pact satellites of eastern Europe. (This myth is, to put it nicely if PC, "Eurocentric"!) 

This group also emphasizes the beneficial policies of "liberal realists" like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (He was a liberal historian who joined the Kennedy administration and wrote a pre-Nixon memo promoting presidential deniability!) I have a one-word answer:  Vietnam.  When they weren't enabling conservative atrocities, they came up with one of the biggest on their own there. "Liberal realists" proved to be neither liberal nor realistic.

And the Cold War isn't just ancient history:  today we see Uncle Sam making similar mistakes in the Middle East and Korea, not to mention Russia itself. (I think of the conflict with Islamic terrorists as Cold War II!) And when Congress and the press let Reagan and his henchmen escape the consequences of their Iran-Contra actions--for crying out loud, Colonel North even got out of doing his community service!-- they guaranteed that such malfeasance would happen again.  It used to be that a big White House scandal happened every fifty years:  Grant in the 1870s, Harding in the '20s, Nixon in the '70s.  Now they're happening every ten years!

Nixon would have been impeached, but resigned.

Reagan should have been impeached, but got away with it.

Clinton shouldn't have been impeached, but survived.

Bush Jr. should have been impeached, but was discredited anyway.

And now comes Trump...

I'd say that the Baby Boom generation's big failure was neoliberalism, but that's another story for another post. (What big failure will the post-1980 Millennial Generation come up with?)