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Comment by Alphasite_ | Hacker News Reader

Is this exclusively an American concept? Because ve never seen this in the UK or anywhere else in fact.

Seriously?

Try googling a popular UK site e.g. "millennials site:www.bbc.co.uk" and you'll there's been plenty of articles over the years.

Time to join the internet generation :)

(although you'll also see generational articles in the UK's dead tree news)

The hatred towards "Baby Boomers" appears much more prevalent in the U.S than the UK, certainly.

Really? The children of the "Great Generation?" The love for Baby Boomers in my work video shown to the whole company and a lot of the literature seems to always life them up as the best working generation who built the US Economy tot he power house of the 1980s and beyond.

Displaying more love isn't contradictory with displaying more hatred; often, the two are proportional. The UK is probably simply more indifferent.

I have no real scientific basis for this, but I always felt that the "Greatest Generation" came back from a horrific war, had large families to replace those lost, and had their life experience as a reason to spoil their children who grew up during a boom time that seemed to have no end in site with no regard for the future.

But that seems a rather broad brush to be slapping around so I'm sure it's largely unfair.

I suspect the Depression was more of a thing, because I'd asked about it. Most people did not do combat duty during the War. We won that war in the factories and oilfields.

It was also the most heavily propaganda-oriented thing in living memory. Y'know all them John Wayne war movies? Yep.

The classic propaganda movie is best exemplified by "Sergeant York". The scene where the dapper officer explains the conflict between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Duty, Honor, Country" is exactly how propaganda works. "Well, it's not killing if they're Huns."

I always thought "The Best Years of Our Lives" exposed the more sinister aspects of the war experience ( it describes PTSD decades before the concept existed beyond "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" ) , and it's interesting that my favorite authors were either outsiders ( like Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth), pop historians ( Michener ) or those who went through the war as dogfaces ( Heller, Vonnnegut ).

Well, 400,000 dead and nearly 700,000 wounded. Don't forget people witnessing the aftermath of total war in the European and Pacific theaters whether they were in combat or not. I think it was a bigger thing than you imply.

I'm not sure where you're going with the propaganda films as compared to my point.

But I agree, the Great Depression would be a contributing factor to what I'm describing.

It was a big thing. That 400k/700k was just Americans; for the Soviets it was millions. Mind boggling. But the number of Americans actually exposed to the horror was relatively small - say way < 10%. The death camps took a very long time for Americans to absorb. The behavior of the Japanese in war was also very slowly taken up, although it was mainly expressed as racism in the short term. When you leave thousands to die on an island without relief or resupply, the racism writes itself.

The propaganda made the Boomers uncomfortable. I've made somewhat of a study of Sixties literature; I don't think it would have been that way if it were not for WWII propaganda. The WWII propaganda is also quite out of character for Americans historically. Even with the curtailment of basic freedom of speech in the Civil War, plenty of people were on Lincoln heavily the whole time.

FDR was all but immune from even criticism.

This propaganda changed the American character a great deal. I had two grandmothers from the pre-WWII period and they thought differently than people do now.

I think the Depression was the principal cause of WWII.

Baby Boomers were the generation after the "Greatest Generation"

I read this as stage-setting.

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