As I'm sure we've all noticed, you can't take a proverbial stroll (scroll) through the modern town square - Twitter, Instagram - these days without being accosted by a miasma of memes regarding how Everything Is Terrible, and It's All The Boomers' Fault.
The expensive, useless educations, that leave 25-year-olds lumbered with huge debts whilst unable to get a decent job.
The spiralling property prices, and inability of the young to get on the housing ladder.
And, most indicting of all, the crisis of loneliness and isolation, as families shatter and scatter, and more and more of the young fail to form their own.
It's undeniable that these trends are real: the useless education, the huge debts, the unstable careers, and the increasing failure of younger generations to hit the historically normal milestones of early adulthood - buying a house, getting married, starting a family.
But whose fault really is this?
The dominant, fashionable narrative goes something like this:
The Boomers (named for the post-war 'baby boom' that took place 1946-1964) were handed a pristine civilisation of iconic, reel-worthy idealism (we've all seen those vintage clips of 1950s London on Twitter), with safe neighbourhoods, strong families, and sealed borders, but they decided to destroy it all for one big sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll extravaganza, whilst opening the UK's borders up to the entire third world. Meanwhile, they enjoyed free education, stable careers, affordable housing, and overall great lives, essentially gobbling up all the resources and opportunities to leave subsequent generations - particularly Millennials (born 1981-1996) and Zoomers (born 1997-2010) - with nothing.
It's a nice little story, and it serves well for agitating the endless divide and conquer 'generation wars' the ruling classes are forever fomenting (and that didn't exist prior to the 1950s and the creation of 'a youth culture') - but is it true?
Funnily enough, like just about all "official history", no, it is not.
When evaluating the Boomers, and blaming them for everything, there's one rather significant detail that is conveniently sidestepped, and it's this:
Who raised the Boomers, and what had they just lived through?
The Silent Generation, and a world war (or, for some of the older Boomers, The Greatest Generation, and two).
So, Boomers' parents - young adults starting their families in the late 1940s and 1950s - had grown up in a country torn apart by war. What was that experience like?
It was characterised by "extreme personal hardship", defined by the Blitz, strict rationing, and deep social shifts. Over 60,000 civilians died in air raids, and life was dominated by blackouts, evacuations, and shortages.
Approximately 384,000 British service members - fathers, brothers, and sons - were killed in combat, leaving hundreds of thousands of families reeling in bereavement, whilst many veterans who did survive were left facing life-changing injuries, both physical and psychological.
When peace was finally declared in 1945, after six years of huge upheaval, loss, and devastation, millions of people were left processing enormous trauma. They were given little or no psychological support in the form we would now understand it, and then they were starting families.
As a consequence, this cohort of people, unsurprisingly, didn't always create the most warm, nurturing, and loving family homes.
Profoundly shaped by what they had endured in the war, where they had had to contend with all sorts of brutality and deprivation, these generations tended to prioritise the value of hard work and emotional repression, over encouragement or emotional expression.
This meant many of their children - the Boomers - were unhappy at home, and associated family life with coldness and repression, if not outright abuse.
Research indicates that untreated post-traumatic stress disorder in parents who had lived through the war often led to toxic family environments, featuring violence, severe discipline, and significant emotional neglect.
And it was this upon which the conniving social engineers (those who had fomented both the world wars in the first place) leapt upon.
In the late 1960s, when the oldest Boomers were just becoming adults, a trifecta of momentous social reforms were introduced, radically reshaping personal relationships and family life. These were:
The Family Law Reform Act 1969
Between them, these laws gave society no-fault divorce, legal abortion, and the reduction of the age of majority, when a person is given all the full responsibilities of adulthood, from 21 to 18.
We can hardly blame the Boomers for these laws, given the very oldest of them were only in their early twenties when they were introduced, and the youngest were just five.
The Boomers did not devise or pass these laws (we will get on to who did shortly) but they did enter adulthood profoundly influenced by them, and at a time when they were particularly vulnerable to such influence.
A lot of Boomers had been very unhappy growing up, with parents they experienced as antagonistic towards each other, incarcerated in miserable marriages and with more children than they wanted or could provide for. As such, many Boomers saw these radical new social reforms as the magical solutions to all the deep and scarring problems of family life that they had experienced growing up.
"The family" is itself the problem, Boomers were told - and they believed it. They had seen it, often within their own homes. People trapped in the oppressive institution of marriage because of archaic laws, and saddled with too many babies because of religious superstition.
Now, though, society had pioneering, progressive new laws that would liberate people from the torturous prison of the family, allow them to only have the children they wanted, and this would ensure an incredible, idyllic future where everyone was happy and free!
You can see why the Boomers believed it. They were young and impressionable - and that's why they were targeted. That's why the same social engineers that gave us no-fault divorce and abortion, suddenly and dramatically dropped the age of majority from 21 (when brains are close to full maturity) to 18 (when they are still decidedly adolescent). It was to ensure to ensure they had maximal access to malleable minds, and could thoroughly (as subversive social controllers had always sought to do) corrupt the youth - and thus, erode the society.
Nobody suggested to the young Boomers that it was not in fact "the family", but rather, the people in it, horribly traumatised and broken by brutal world wars, that had created the problems at home - and that broken people who get divorced don't magically become fixed.
No, nobody mentioned that possibility. It was made emphatically clear: it wasn't the people that were the problem. It was - as subsequent generations came to dismissively call it - "the piece of paper". The institution of marriage itself that so confined and damaged people, and that made them behave so destructively. Divorce, therefore, was the magic bullet to happiness.
That transformative tonic hadn't been available to the Boomers' poor, miserable parents - but it sure would be to them.
Consequently, many Boomers sincerely believed, when they themselves began divorcing in their hordes in the '70s and '80s, that they were doing the right, progressive, liberating thing for everyone involved. Not just for themselves, but for their children, too. Because, they perceived, their own childhoods would have been so much happier if only their own warring, unhappy parents had divorced, and set everyone free.
The children of the Boomers, however - Gen X and the Millennials - often saw things rather differently. Suddenly catapulted back and forth between two homes, negotiating new schools and new friends, and with, not infrequently, stepparents and step-siblings thrown into the mix, many of these children reacted by growing up to reject marriage and family entirely - and not necessarily consciously. Rather because, without having observed and grown up within a conventional marriage themselves, it was a "knack" many never learned.
People whose parents divorce are less likely to marry themselves, and more likely to divorce if they do - and societies not founded on lifelong monogamous marriage flounder very quickly. Stabilising societies with marriage has long been identified as been the fundamental underpinning to advanced civilisation.
The social engineers who introduced the social reforms of the 1960s knew all this, of course.
The long-game plot of the social engineers over the twentieth century, which began with two world wars, was to destroy Western civilisation - but not simply by outright killing people. That's never been the most effective way of permanently overthrowing a society. Rather, they aimed to do it by destroying the social institutions upon which all advanced civilisation has always been based - specifically, marriage and the family. As a certain communist revolutionary is alleged to have said, if you want to destroy society, destroy the family.
The social engineers with this goal in mind therefore had to convince an entire generation that marriage and family were the source of all discord and despair in the world, so they would willingly break up their own - and they did this by brutally traumatising two generations with war, giving them no effective support or treatment to deal with this trauma, and then leaving them to raise children.
Those children (the Boomers) were then targeted when they were very young and vulnerable with radical new social reforms regarding the dangers of marriage and family. They consequently applied these subversive ideologies to their own lives, sincerely believing they were doing the right thing - and here we are today, when marriage and birth rates are at catastrophic lows, and almost all white European groups are at risk of extinction.
This, however, is not the Boomers' fault: they were weaponised victims, manipulated and played to be instrumental in their own country's demise in ways they could not possibly have fathomed at the time.
They were, effectively, "bought off" as teens and young adults, by devious social subversives, who offered them tantalising incentives for rejecting historic conventions regarding family formation and ordinary life.
Don't be boring and stay in your hometown with your family and friends, go off to university instead - it's free! And you'll have a really exciting career, not like your boring old parents.
Don't settle down at 19 with your high-school sweetheart, we've got the pill and abortion now, you know, go and have some fun!
There's no need to suffer through this difficult period in your marriage, unhappy parents are bad for the kids, you know. We've got no-fault divorce now, leave your spouse, start again with someone better!
It's not remotely surprising that many of the Boomers went for all this, and, for a lot of them, it worked out well. They did get the impressive degree, great career, nice house, and plenty of money. The divorce didn't hit them too hard, they often were happier with a subsequent spouse.
So, they quite understandably handed these same expectations down to their children: leave your hometown at 18 (because, the Boomers thought, imagine how awful their own lives would have been if they hadn't); enjoy your youth and don't rush to settle down (because of all the amazing experiences they'd have missed if they had); leave your partner if things aren't right, life's too short to be unhappy (they know from experience).
But these expectations were handed down to generations growing up in a completely different climate. By the time the Millennials were going to university in the twenty-first century, they, by and large, weren't embarking on the first prestigious step of an enriching educational journey that would culminate in a rewarding and dynamic career: more often than not, they were simply acquiring debt, a drinking problem, and joining an over-saturated graduate job market, leaving many of them unemployed or in minimum-wage jobs.
Failing to commit to a partner in young adulthood, as past generations typically did, has left many people permanently single and childless, as availability of suitable partners sharply contracts with age.
And the inability to buy a house has left many stuck in shared houses with strangers, well into their thirties and beyond.
So, while rejecting social mores worked for the Boomers to a certain extent, and they often did enjoy more professionally rewarding and personally fulfilling lives than their parents, when their children and grandchildren tried to replicate these patterns, they have been increasingly left with very little.
What the Boomers were sold was a con. A convincing con, but one that only really "worked" for one generation - and that was designed to only work for one generation - leaving the subsequent ones with a very poor legacy. Not for them the stable careers and nice houses their parents (the Boomers) had. Neither the lifelong marriages and integrated communities their grandparents (the Silent and previous generations) had.
But just transient work, unstable accommodation, and broken or non-existent relationships.
This was always the endgame of the social engineers: to destroy the family, destroy the community, and create the "perfect" isolated consumer-drone who doesn't have independence through meaningful work, or support through stable family, and therefore is maximally vulnerable to state control.
And to repeat, the social engineers who devised this plan and carried it out were not the Boomers. The Boomers were, for the most part, still at school when all the destructive new social reforms of the 1960s were being put into place.
The Abortion Act, for example, was given to us by "Lord Steel of Aikwood", who was born in 1938 - nearly a decade older than even the oldest Boomer.
In 2019, said Lord Steel was suspended from the Liberal Democrats over allegations he had helped to cover up the prolific child abuse of MP Cyril Smith.
The Divorce Reform Act, meanwhile, was introduced by Labour MP Alec Jones, who was born in 1924, and was never himself divorced.
So you can see the sorts of people imposing these changes on society were not only not Boomers, but not benevolent champions of oppressed people, either. Decorated and privileged, it's clear that Lords who cover up child abuse are not motivated by a concern for the vulnerable, whilst MPs who make available no-fault divorce for the masses, whilst enjoying all the benefits of lifelong marriage themselves, must also have their motives exposed to extreme scrutiny.
The point is that if we want to do any finger-pointing, and we most certainly should, these are the kinds of people who ought to bear the brunt of the blame. The specific people who devised, and passed, socially destructive laws that so gutted society, and the shadowy paymasters and handlers who instructed them to do so.
Not the beleaguered Boomers who, at the time all this was happening, had an average age of about fourteen.
They were handed a broken system - one broken entirely by design, in order to have exactly the effects it has had - but they did not create it.
They are victims of the same psychopathically cruel social engineers their parents were, and their children are.
Whether these ruthless predators are trying to destroy a generation with brutal wars, devious social reforms, or mind-controlling screens, their endgame is always the same - ultimate control over the individual - and it's always achieved by turning us, the victims, against each other, so we don't unite and identify the real culprits.
It's not the Boomers. It never was.
It's the bastards. It always was.
So we mustn't let them grind us down - or fall into any of their devious, divisive traps.
(Such as blaming my generation for eating too much avocado on toast and consequently not being able to afford a house. I *never* eat avocado on toast, I'll have to you know. It's too vegan. Pumpkin spiced lattes, however...)
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