The baby boom generation which started with so much promise when it came of age in the 1960s has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America into a bloody imperial hegemon [abroad] and a bankrupt Spy State at home where financialization and the 1% thrive, half the populations lives off the state and real main street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land. Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s President. She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the 1960s; and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent years in power.[1]
Mr. Stockman's views are well worth reading but his ideas that there was anything promising about the Boomers who "came of age in the 1960s" is laughable. The enthusiasm for peace evidenced by those high-minded poseurs was in direct relation to how low their draft lottery number was. Never was there such a rush to enroll in divinity school as in those heady times. PBS must have aired a series on the Reformation.
And that "nationalism" had anything to with the "the deadly cycle of war that had started a half-century earlier in the bloody trenches of northern France" is equally silly. Nationalism is a simple preference for one's own land, people, laws, customs, and culture. It no more "inexorably" gives rise to a desire for world conquest than that it is inexorable that a surgeon will spontaneously turn into an axe murderer. Pre-Obamacare anyway.
Similarly, his idea that WWI extended into the Cold War because the "victors" refused to demobilize after WWII and together brought about "the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War" is drivel beloved of leftists and moral equivalence zealots. Nixon was a man with a "megalomaniacal will-to-power" that was "terrifying," "cold war hysteria" was "bull," and "the defeat and retreat of the American Imperium by the idealism and defiance of the baby boomers was interrupted by the Reagan defense and Cold War revival" which was an "historical error."
America's Sweetheart.
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By "the idealism and defiance of the baby boomers" I presume he means their ardent participation in the communist-funded and -inspired anti-Vietnam War movement and the successful effort of America-haters to turn the Democrat Party into an ultra-left, communist advance guard.
MAJ Arthur D. Nicholson Jr.
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OK. Stockman thinks that we should have just sat back behind our nuclear shield and waited for the Soviets to implode. Good to go where a long-term strategy is concerned but I recall the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was by eminently conventional means, news of which I received in the back of a truck while an infantry Officer Candidate at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Too, Charlie in the tree lines of the Mekong Delta fired plenty of tracers that were green and seemed to have plenty at hand. No one was thinking then about any abstract notions of mutually assured destruction and Soviet economic collapse in the distant future.
Moreover, the Soviets still held onto American POWs from WWII and Korea and either executed them or worked them to death, not to mention they shot down our planes over international waters and imprisoned the crews. MAJ Arthur D. Nicholson Jr. was shot down like a dog while acting as an official observer in East Germany which I will never forget. His NCO was prevented from attending to him and no medical aid was offered or summoned.
Not Ferguson
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At what point
do you stack arms when you know your Soviet enemy is responsible for 30-66 million Russian deaths by torture, starvation, execution, exposure, slave labor, etc.? What did the narcissistic, Boomer party animals know or care about this?
Off the pigs, maaan!
Stockman doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. The Soviets were constrained but they were still active and murderous in what they did to oppose us. What seems clear to Stockman in hindsight – Soviet decrepitude – wasn't appreciated at the time, no one in the entire government having predicted the Soviet collapse when it came, as I recall.
One of these days maybe they'll send us Lee Harvey's real KGB file.
Hi!
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Well, all right then. A groovy, shopworn, threadbare "analysis" that only clouds any person's attempt to understand the long civilizational struggle between the total Soviet and Chinese states (with all their crimes, lies, and terrible pathologies) and the enlightened, civil, decent, productive, and rational Western world. Military-industrial complex carries bit of water these days but back then they were providing what was needed to intimidate the hell out of Ivan.
Facing down the Soviets and accelerating their demise was one of the finest things that Reagan did, though many of like mind preceded him and made their own contribution. The Reagan military buildup was a righteous effort.
Stockman's animus toward the military-industrial complex is well worth trying to understand. I also have little disagreement with his idea of the missed opportunities of the Clinton(s) and absolutely everyone's fiscal irresponsibility. Perhaps Stockman can favor us later with his views on the matters of Supreme Court evisceration of the Constitution (and ruling class complicity in that) and of communist infiltration of American government, media, and universities. Evisceration of the Constitution goes a long way to explaining how we have ended up on a runaway train that is the federal Leviathan. The military-industrial complex wasn't laid down over something even remotely resembling a constitutional republic. I ask once again, what did the Boomers know or care about this?
C+ for Stockman for not noticing that the Constitution has been trashed, that we've been invaded by the third world, and that we've been in a 30-year race war in which whites haven't been doing much fighting.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what the Boomers have given us is imperfectly but aptly described by the 118 words above. We aren't in Kansas anymore where the direction of the country is concerned. There are some delusional or treasonous people at work in our midst and what they are doing has nothing to do with any kind of misjudgment or failure of the intelligence community.
Something has gone very wrong and we are badly in need of a serious Trumping.
Notes
[1] "Hillary Clinton: Class President Of A Failed Generation." By David Stockman, 4/13/15.
H/t: American Freedom Union.
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