Opinion Piece: Teaching; How Society Gets Taught History by Books and Media and Politics by Maurice Frank
Older generations writing up history such that everything used to be better and slagging “young people today” has been around cyclically for thousands of years, and is a regular failing of emotionally divided societies. But But I can see no other case in history, of generations having their whole era, including in what is believed possibly can happen, and their status in history, rubbished with the media’s approval and active taking part, as the present generations living after WW2, at the hands of oldies who also believe every epic problem imaginable was fought, won, and solved forever, entirely by them, entirely in the 1940s.

Some old folks have a spiteful ego trip where they automatically believe that all modern life is luxurious and no privations at all can exist while all sorts of noble privations to brag about existed in their time, and this contradictorily while they also claim it was a superior time in caring and moral standards! “Yah-boo everyone is prosperous now but the past was all morally noble hardships that make us better than you.”
Braggers get indulged accepted and believed, by popular media and polite society, in saying: that in every way you can think of, they were stronger and more heroic enduring all sorts of grim things and we are rubbish because we are pathetically soft, our lives are never nasty, – and simultaneously, that their “old days” were a community paradise where they all cared for each other and left their doors unlocked and we are rubbish because we are hard and yobby, our lives are never nice.
The old idea of one-sided respect for age is clangingly discredited and turned into social exclusion when it is asked to include seeing them as superior for what events they chanced to get caught up in unchosen. Post-1940s society has been popularly taught history in a way that denies that whole generations can have have any significant survival problems hardships or superlatives still existing for us or ever again to be possible, while we are supposed to owe everything to a generation who hold that those things were possible for them. That is a TOXIC relationship. Made by repetitive selectivity in the teaching reporting and sharing of history.
The more normative and less socially conscious of the old, taught to live in the happy bubble of that legend, have often seemed completely unaware of significance of modern events like the 1970s oil crisis, deindustrialisation, globalisation, credit crash – oh but the Great Depression. They have in my experience even read modern ecological disasters and crisis, but not the 1930s dustbowl, as part of an imagined decline in society since their era. To the generations who they have ranted at “yah-boo decline”, they have offered no grounds for self-esteem in history. Asking us to have contentment with no self-esteem, and a value system that does us down.
By cherrypicking history to paint the picture wanted, 3 generations have been emotionally bullied with an impossible claim that 1 superior miracle generation saved us and solved overnight and permanently every previously insoluble problem, across war and poverty and medicine, and gave us a completely soft life in which how dare we believe that any hardships can ever exist no matter what happens, so we must accept an unmeritorious status and gratefully revere them however badly they treat us. This social oppression, putting us into a place to be dominated, has further directly caused economic dispossession. The neocon era’s impoverishment of the young and exclusion of them as a workforce with proper rights, this bigoted bending of history has made possible, exactly by inviting the old to refuse to believe it was possible, from the ego fantasy that the 1940s generation had solved all such problems.
Poverty and Welfare
The recreation of poverty, and accompanying economic marginalisation of the young, from the 1980s, while the old were encouraged to think it could not possibly happen and that “yah-boo 1930s” always trumped anything happening now. Surely that has been the most practical impact, the most gravely serious upon life conditions, from a generationally hostile spinning of history. Thus, at the beginning of workfare schemes in 1988, as I crossed the road to join a demo outside a benefit office, the placard saying”would you work for £23 a week?”, a passing retired-age couple who had never experienced the post-industrial economy said : “Hello what are they demonstrating about now? Would you work for £73 a week? Well, God, if they don’t like the pay they can go and get themselves another job.”
The beginning of welfare provisions was fought by the House of Lords in 2 years of constitutional crisis, 1909-11, from a budget introducing old age pensions, to the first national insurance provisions for workers including health and short term dole. It was increased in 1919 replacing (in England, so easy to know less of Scotland’s poorhouse system) the former obligatory workhouse system which there are several ways of saying was no longer right for the post-WW1 conditions. This was still alongside the Poor Law with its Guardians with local budgets until that was abolished in 1930, when benefit rates became national, under the name Public Assistance, and the workhouse was abolished, but its housing function for some, not yet wholly replaced by council housing, continued to be given by “public assistance institutions” in the same buildings.
All that progress had happened before Beveridge’s 1940s redesign of the system, and the reason why Beveridge was chosen for that was his earlier involvement in the 1911 reforms. This is clearly why accusations of deliberateness of unemployment and softness of public assistance existed exactly the same in the 1930s as now. Poverty clearly had shifted well away from Victorian levels, and a more complacent public already thought that it had all been largely solved until WW2 evacuation experiences showed them otherwise. Despite the slump it was a boom time in development and increase of some modern household goods: washing machines, phones. But that is not how generation bashing has perceived the interwar period – it believes that poverty remained undiminished Victorian right up to the 1940s, insoluble for all of history before then, then ceased to exist overnight and permanently.
GCSE Bitesize acknowledges of the 1910s “many historians label this period the beginning of the welfare state,” yet the BBC never does to adult audiences. It is is always biased to the idea that the welfare state only began with Beveridge. This belief has widely stuck, e.g. frustratingly featured in the Church of Scotland Church and Society Council’s latest write on the present welfare situation. To define the 1930s as a no-welfare time served (1) the right wing interest in tempting the generation who were there to feel an ego trip about strong and noble survival that yah-boo can never be either matched or needed by everyone younger, (2) a left wing attraction to claiming the entire credit for welfare for the Attlee government to help promote Labour. So on both sides! it has served agendas that are overbearing over the young, that push them into a control position of cowed gratitude, to elders who are hurtful to them in return.
Then some elders believe nonsense as spiteful as to write a newspaper letter claiming the young don’t know what life without central heating is like, while yah-boo her generation were big and strong without it – when many folks who even have homes still don’t have central heating. I grew up without it. But there are always some among the young who also want the wishful comfort of believing in no poverty, and will prefer to endure the insults in exchange for that comfort – I can cite a right wing cousin comfortably employed in engineering from exactly 1979, in 1991 refusing to believe a headline on parents on benefits not affording to feed their kids properly, and saying “think of Mannie Shinwell who could remember when things were really bad”. Jeremy Paxman, crying in a genealogy show over a Victorian ancestor’s hardships, instead of realising that his own comfortable background is no guide to modern deprived lives, says “We don’t know we’re born, do we?” – a picture utterly contrary to the facts of I Daniel Blake, and more older viewers’ egos were encouraged to bigotry.
The Attlee government will always have lots to be credited for without needing to have credit denied to all welfare builders who went before it. The argument for crediting the 1940s for welfare included that Beveridge was a fully developed welfare system while the welfare of 1911-48 was inadequate. But that has become a tool for generational spite disbelieving that welfare returned to inadequate in 1988. If a welfare state is only a Beveridge-standard system, then we only had a welfare state for 40 years and no longer have one since 1988. If the system since then, blighted by workfare and sanctions and the social fund’s return to the pre-1930 Poor Law model of variable locally budgeted relief, if that is still a welfare state, then 1911-48 was.
It tends to be the tabloid style dumbed down history books that claim a 1940s start and the more deeply analytical ones that credit the 1910s start. But they all seem reluctant to use the term “depression” for any later slumps than the 1930s one, as if they will face anger unless they let it be a magic word of cache for just that one slump. Historically a depression is a long slump, the early 1990s and after the 2008 crash both qualify. The 2008 credit crash is interesting in that, with the banking system in emergency and for its own sake needing the crash taken seriously, the media encouraged a 1930s-equivalent view of its seriousness, this time their interest was not served by belittling such talk as they always had before.
As the 1987 Wall Sreet Crash was mathematically bigger than the 1929, why did conservative Paul Johnson in his history book call it “not as bad as 1929 but ..” ? The practice of claiming 1929 and “the Great Depression” as a unique world systemic crisis in capitalism, that must always be held as the superlative and never dare be thought possible to happen in any other generation, is clearly in absurd conflict with another idea often stated in history books: that from before it happened, Hitler was waiting for it as his chance to bid for power! Clearly not a rational picture. In no one generation can someone be awaiting in advance as a likelihood an event that in any other generation must not even be called a possibility.
Ever since Victorian times ended, the favourite generational yah-boo jibe on poverty has been bare feet. There was obviously a gradual cultural shift against their acceptability going on, spanning from 1910s all the way to the end of hippie fashion in the 1970s, when you still commonly saw them in parks. That also was about shifting health attitudes. Their present general unacceptability is in fact an oppression, against the cause of dress freedom and its biological endorsement in autistic sensory issues. Some folks have perfectly good physically sensitive reasons to find bare feet comfortable. It is nice to record that there are campaigns for it in the green scene. That makes it understandable and no surprise, to learn from costume history that even in some Victorian school photos (particularly rural), bare feet were a comfort choice, when modern soft shoes not yet invented, and not about poverty at all.
Their cultural exclusion from visibility now meant that in 1990 when the Joseph Rowntree reported a finding of families not affording shoes, surely a seminal jolt for the generational bigots, it meant not sending their kids to school. Generation bashers will choose to interpret any interwar photo of them as poverty but any later photo of them as chosen scruffiness. By the 1910s shoes had become a standard of met need for poor kids in institutions, such that bare feet was actually a visible sign of living in family home. Seeing it in schools had disappeared by the post-WW1 period, “at least a generation” according to angry public reactions, before in 1948 Harold Wilson (born 1916) got into trouble for a grumpy comment that his schoolmates in Huddersfield lacked shoes, which turned out to just mean tailored shoes and they had clogs. This is explained in biographies of Wilson, but tabloid-quality Chronicle of the 20th Century ignored this detail and recorded completely wrongly “Harold Wilson said half his class went barefoot.”
Penicillin and Tuberculosis
The same 1940s generation even gets credited with utterly changing the safety of life concerning infections, with penicillin as a wonder medicine. Everyone safe and soft now thanks to it, while it is often portrayed as that before it, the smallest cut meant you died. Yet many folks are allergic to penicillin, so it can’t make that type of whole society difference claimed for it. Its impact was spun to sound so universal for patriotic motives, which then came self-congratulatory and generational.
Yes this 1920s discovery saved a lot of war injury lives who were not allergic to it. Its impact beyond that has been spun to sound like, and seemingly to replace, the 1870s antiseptic revolution in medical safety against infections. For that, a lifetime earlier the 1940s ego trip, is when the turning point happened, in scientific clarity about infections and consequent safety of surgery. Histories with differing views on Lister’s role share that: the time to have a sense of horror about cuts was before then.
Even then, the concern was about surgical or other serious cuts combined with sanitation it was never that any small cut was likely to kill you. Lewis Carroll’s writing about happy summer days in the ending to Wonderland, 1865, would not be possible if it was a time of constant horror for all when everyday cuts were routinely fatal. The idea conflicts with natural immunology! For how do the generation bashers think natural immunology could ever evolve, if it never worked?! Mediaeval knights or lords often lived long lives after recovering from cuts in sword battles. To live a full length life back then took more luck than now but it did happen, was not a freak rarity if you had survived infancy.
BBC presenters have dated solving of TB to 1944, too, in fact the date of discovery of a medicine that failed to prevent George Orwell’s famous death from TB in 1950. The web let me dig out that antidote to generation bashing. The 1950s, not 1940s, were the medical tipping point against TB: key drug isoniazid and a “triple therapy” created in 1952. Only nasty generational mythmaking attitude would select against focusing on that and contrive to bias the main credit to the WW2 era instead. Also, TB was never eradicated, and 2000s its rising incidence in London deservedly shocked the generation bashers. Smug disbelief that it still exists had been working against awareness hence to increase risk. Hence the generation bashing sense of history has not taught folks rightly to facilitate guarding their health.
So, health and welfare and war were all piled into the generational ego-myth together. 3 generations have been emotionally bullied with a claim on a impossible scale, that 1 superior miraculous generation saved us and solved overnight and permanently every previously insoluble problem, and gifted us an unmeritorious completely soft life in which how dare we believe that any hardships can ever exist no matter what happens, so we must live considered unequal, including unequally unable to ever be part of significant history, overawed and abjectly kowtowing to them in snivelling gratitude however badly they treat us. Selectivity with facts, not discussing facts outside the decided-on picture, and moral anger against questioning a moral myth, repaints the picture enough to make even the hurtful absurdity of a miraculous generation stick.
World War 2
The most obvious emotional oppression done around war, is: yah-boo you would not cope with it as well as us and you will never get the chance to show otherwise. Which neatly turns hurt to the ego into an agent of military recruitment. James Callaghan as PM jibed to his aide Bernard Donoghue that “when you’ve done that”, the same war things as Dennis Healey, then you can tell me to move him to another ministerial office: knowing that with WW2 long over, Donoghue had no chance ever to “do that”. How many times the same unfairness from parents to kids? who consequently alienated from history at all, never study it between the lines and never find answers to the jibes.
The jibe that there is no dying in wars for the postwar generations obviously insults all those military recruits died in our several recent wars: and the bereaved of terrorist bombs too. So does the absurd practice of referring to WW2 as “the last war”. The much reduced numbers of military deaths and no longer being conscriptory depend on the public across the West retaining the great lesson of Vietnam against acquiescing to war drives. Following 911 the papers were full of kiteflying of headlines like “your sons will die”: they chillingly tested how the public would take it.
Oh but, the generation bashers would say: it’s not about war drives it’s about gratitude and getting heroically saved. The moral cowing that leads to emotional bullying younger generations and pushing them out of the economy. The agenda of browbeating the later generations for morally cowing gratitude towards the folks who died in the world wars includes trapping us into supposing that the military machine’s expending of all those lives was necessary.
It sets up a wall of moral anger against allowing critical scrutiny of whether it was all necessary – more so for culturally popular WW2 than for the obvious evil mass wasting of lives in WW1, but the media still favour a line of hero-owing for those WW1 lives, which conflicts with them being wasted and traps folks back into faith that the bloodbath was necessary. Logically that is an actual insulting of the wasted lives, a siding with the system that took them, and its spin about it. Certainly, for all the emotional regard that has had to be shown in preserving Wilfred Owen’s poems, they were testimony against the war machine, their actual message is unheard and slapped every time the hero-owing spin, with its implying that the mass death was necessary, gets accepted.
In both wars and with any, if even some of it was not necessary, if there were less costly alternative courses of action at any point, then accepting the machine is the wrong course for safeguarding lives present and future. It wrongs the lives lost too – the machine will present it as honouring them, but if the machine was wrong to consume them, then you must ask, would you want it to consume you, and would you want society to spend the lifetime after your death persisting in believing it necessary? Whether you are pacifist or reluctantly accepting of self-defence war, the inescapable point of peacemaking is not to support war machines consuming lives. Hence peacemaking, peacekeeping, are not served by loyal faith in past war machines, or in owing and feeling saved by any life they took avoidably.
Generation bash history never tells us to look at how Churchill flatly refused all question of helping German conspiracies to overthrow the Nazis, which means he actually prolonged their regime and with it the holocaust – it must show too the Allies can’t have really worried about them getting the Bomb! – and hence start seeing as avoidable much of the life expended in removing them. Then some generational fairness is repaired, by seeing the war dead as victims of a system, freeing you from the moral cowing to believe their deaths all necessary. Which instead becomes immoral to do. Moral progress against war, and generational equity, are both found in finding escape from the media’s high moral toll demand to find the world wars’ death tolls all necessary, and seeing many of them as victims of a machine, to be remembered exactly by critical scrutiny of it.
What you could or could not do in any endurance or personal emergency situation is always unwise to boast of in advance, anyone can find limits they would wish not to find – including the traumatic stress toll of war, which has happened to all generations. Generation bashing by heroic boasts about WW2 is instantly refuted on its own terms by the relatively undisputed history that they all supported appeasement before it – totally humanly understandably, as it was right politics to reject repeat of the atrocity that was WW1.
But that they did in fact support it, totally contradicts and disproves all emotionally spiteful hero claims and ego lording and constant accusations that later generations would be weaker in the same situation. The campaigners against appeasement, who WW2 mythology sees as figures of hero-credit, clangingly failed the situation and cruelly failed the public by giving no ground on methods of war and improving its participants’ safety, when WW1’s recent horrors required them to give that ground.
The Christlike personality cult of Churchill, there dented, is the most obviously irrational attitude about WW2. It is particularly emotionally spiteful – yah-boo we had the greatest and there can never be anyone so magically wonderful in your time. The 1930s public already knew he was not the greatest after his role in WW1 disaster Gallipoli, which strikingly means the mythology of him actually dishonours some of WW1’s death toll. Though he gets credited with not wanting to let the Russians into Berlin first, he sacrificed Eastern Europe by determining on a military defeat of Germany instead of regime overthrow, and the Nazis had time to develop the V2.
As well as the cost in lives it seriously risked the first landings failing, or not getting the right sailing window that year – generation bashers add those thoughts to the events’ drama heroics, but they point against the choices made. All, apparently, on the vain and prejudiced calculation, which has totally failed, that this type of defeat would leave Germany long term broken economically !! hence prevented from getting strong again. His 1950s government started the British open-air nuclear tests program in Australia that cruelly sacrificed conscripts’ health.
He has no credit for the 1940 stuff, when he wanted to sacrifice the whole air force defending France as a point of Boys’ Own type honour, it was Air Chief Dowding who did not allow that so who has the credit, and Dowding never generation bashed either, but he was an anti-vivisectionist so not an establishment figure. The consequently nonsense religious-type idea that nobody else than Churchill could have done it, it is not rational that WW2 histories have to express agreement with to get accepted as establishment.
History tied to endorse such an absurdity is not objective history. He was a Cabinet minister’s son and aristocrat born before universal suffrage, who got his political creer dynastically, following those of several ancestors. It would be impossible for a special unique magic man, who just happened to live at the right time, to also luckily just happen to be born into that background! he would be born into the Victorian working class stuck in an anonymity and never be heard of.
Equally irrational and used for hero ego generation bashing ever since the time, is the legend of standing alone. How does everyone believe that, when even before the web it was perfectly easy to look up in any history the Old Commonwealth countries’ entries to the war and that they were in it throughout the supposed standing alone period? Britain did not stand alone, it was never without independent allies for a single day.
The European-populated countries where it had set up democracies, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, were all independent from 1931: partly from motives of free hand in the economic crisis, but also because already within the Empire they had proved their power to choose not to join in its wars, in the Smyrna crisis of 1922. Most of them rejected an arrogant summons from Lloyd George to war with Turkey, resulting in his fall and that war not happening. Is it objected that at WW2’s start Australia’ and New Zealand had not yet exercised their power to “adopt the Statute of Westminster”, abolishing letting Britain legislate for them? But that Statute of Westminster itself in 1931 enacted, regardless of adoption, that a British law could only now apply to a “Dominion” with its own consent: so clearly they were not orderable into a war.
Canada took a week to decide to enter WW2, waiting to see that it would turn out naval; and Ireland, with the same status, never entered, was neutral. So there was no standing alone. Churchill’s inventon of the idea was the old-fashioned Imperial conceit of expecting the public to just consider all those countries as extensions of Britain.
Generation bashers usually rubbish that a WW3 can ever be possible: that serves yah-boo ego but how is it logical after they lived through the Cuban Missile, Yom Kippur, Able Archer, and Gulf crises? Anti-nuclear voices of WW2 generation ranging from Tony Benn to Enoch Powell, whose argument it would make a bit easier, used to cite Russia’s horrific losses in WW2 as being a moral reason to refuse to believe in a Russian threat during the Cold War, and even professed to find the belief offensive. Yet all inequality is offensive – so that includes inequality between generations, and that includes taking an unequal attitude to expansionist threats in different generations.
Given how routinely even democratic states act against their people’s humanitarian needs, it was always irrational to judge any undemocratic state’s rulers’ motives from what its ordinary people would want after having a war bloodbath in their recent history. No other perceived threatening powers in other eras were ever assessed on the supposition that their rulers are bound to care for their ordinary people! Hence never before has it been called wrong to believe in threatening motives from an undemocratic state because of that state’s former alignment in events in 20 to 40 years previously. To treat one era as the arbiter of geopolitical reality in another later era, is an act of social prejudice by not treating the generations’ self-esteem as equal: as that includes treating each generation’s threat as equal, equally real.
That Benn did this is a real shame, because he was good for generational equity on poverty issues, acknowledged the early welfare state and challenged the 1980s public with reemergence of begging. But he often banged on that in his youth “I heard the voice of Hitler on the radio”, while he would never allow, and took offence at the idea, my generation to have an equivalent in when we saw the face of Brezhnev. The sting of generational unfairness done there alienated exactly the young who he most wanted to reach in promoting a sense of peace.
Morally good as it is that Benn wanted to prevent wars and opposed our recent foreign wars, his generational double standard on aggressors flaws the peacemaker picture of him with an aspect of social fairness he had not thought of, reading history by comforting belief that it had now progressed beyond there being any aggressors. NB the present generation of Putin’s era likewise are entitled to parity with us in attitude towards having worries about Russia, and not to face a wishful belief that it all ended in 1989. My generation bash the post Cold War generations after us if we comfort our fears and flatter our egos by believing that aggressor danger ended in 1989, just the same as we were bashed by the belief that aggressor danger ended in 1945.
The wishful motive for that belief is obviously the same in any era, the same now or during the Cold War as it was in the 1930s. For it did feature then, the WW2 legend is often told in a way reminding us instructively that it did. That as the Axis powers emerged, many folks traumatised by WW1, both political class and public,’were desperately hoping that by civilised common sense, aggressor danger must have ended in 1918 . Only an iniquitous generational oppression could contort to say that that attitude was only specially uniquely wrong at that one time but was right later! But when a generationally unfair belief is also comforting, always some of the bashed young are attracted to it – thus how could a delegate at the 1986 Labour conference say “Who in this day and age seriously believes..?” in invasions, only 41 years after WW2?
Curiously conversely, also about wartime Russia, there has developed a fashion for focusing on Stalin alongside Hitler, comparing them or telling their stories as a twin pair, and taking both names together as the joint superlative for murderous rulers. Taking them together, more strongly than taking either one, makes that superlative claim for the era. So why is there not the same focus on Mao? Why do we hear Stalin cited far more often than Mao, when Mao killed 65 million and Stalin killed 27 million? It can only be an intentional choice to want to construct an era superlative picture for the 1940s: for either the comfort or the generation bashing, of thinking of it as a one-off never to be repeated.
This tacking on of Stalin sits at odds with the most morally forceful of the era angers around WW2, the demand to class the holocaust as unique. I find that sharing its most famous victim’s surname makes folks not expect me to be as hurt as I am by generation bashing. As the uniqueness lobby class any disagreement with them as holocaust denial, if is a relief that by sheer force of logic the denial experienced by survivors of other genocides, from the uniqueness idea, shows up when you google the subject. It leads to popular unawareness of the complete exterminations in colonial history, of Tasmania’s indigenous population and groups in the northeast USA including the Susquehanna tribe. Folks with any amount of Jewish ancestry are entitled to care and learn also about the previous “first holocaust” that happened in Europe during the Crusades.
Uniqueness goes with complacent belief in future unrepeatability, the opposite of Simon Wiesenthal wanting his work to be a permanent warning to future repeaters. He supported the Cambodian Documentation Commission, and Elie Wiesel took part with Khmer Rouge holocaust survivors Dith Pran and Haing Ngor (of The Killing Fields film) in an action to the UN for a trials process for it. The lesson they were acting on, the geopolitical lesson of the tribunals also done for Bosnia and Rwanda, that being seen to care is necessary to deterring repetition, is actually a lesson from the Nazi history. Hitler was encouraged as a repeater: he sold the holocaust plan to his top followers by telling them the world had not cared about the Armenian holocaust a generation before.
The Khmer Rouge holocaust’s toll, according those who have worked on it was 2 to 3 million, but BBC current affairs has always called it only 1 million. Belittlers, not attracting any of the same opprobrium as they would if they belittled the Nazis, have argued that its most prominent prison, Tuol Sleng, was a political prison for purged members of the Khmer Rouge itself, this to deny equivalence to concentration camps and insultingly imply that Tuol Sleng’s victims deserved it! They missed out 2 facts that made their argument misleading. (1) Pol Pot ran the whole country as a concentration camp, the equivalence was at that level. He was wearing down the ex-urban population, in his idea “purifying”, with endurance level work. (2)
The sense in which you counted as one of the Khmer Rouge – for the rural population during the civil war before they came to power, if you were in a population who they gained control of, or who forced to pick a side picked them as being pro-poor, then you counted as Khmer Rouge, belonging to their rural movement. After the Khmer Rouge came to power these were called the Old People, who had belonged before the revolution, and were regarded more favourably than the New People, the urban population frogmarched into the countryside at the revolution, who were seen paranoidly as the deposed enemy exploiting class needing it beaten out of them. New People were murdered mostly around the fields where they worked.
Wiesenthal’s long term pursuit of justice, and desire to establish it for all genocide cases, are a great moral demonstration of the rightness of long term caring to pursue personal fairness, a strong refutation of the nasty idea, across many religions and made up psychologies, of telling victims of wrongs to passively accept them and let go. He showed that long term fighting back does not damage you – that sick trick idea to make wronged populations docile. He can be appreciated by the postwar generations, for these things done in our time.
The generation bashers always forgot that Nazi-hunting was an event of our time – and that they wanted our support for it! Increasingly so demographically as time went on; yet ex war reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was quoted “Ah these juveniles, what do they understand?” That was the scandal of generation bashing – actually willing to use the Nazis’ victims as weapons for prejudice by one social group upon another. Think that through.