this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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I think you could overthink it even further and I would enjoy reading it.
My instinct is that this explains a significant portion of the boomer zeitgeist and their effect on the world, but not the whole part.
I think the resentment about no Nazis is a very interesting avenue of thought. I think the boomer predisposition towards xenophobia and interventionism probably has a lot to do with viewing the world through the cope lens of WW2 veterans and the re-framing of their efforts/motives as a heroic struggle against an otherworldly genocide machine.
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Oh for certain there's no way I'd manage to cover this in full, even if I could write a whole book on the subject. My perspective is limited to my narrow window of the world, and even if I interviewed 1000 people for said text I'd still have infinitely more gaps.
With all the time and funding in the world I'd love to pursue this line of thought to its conclusions. We've all grown up with the a priori knowledge that "Nazis bad", and while that's true it's also a gross oversimplification.
What made the Nazis bad? How did they come to power? What forces fueled their creation and rise? And the conclusion your average boomer seems to have come to is "authoritarianism", completely detached from the meaning or implications of such a word, and then the thought terminates, and the termination of this thought precludes any further analysis, especially on the similarities to Weimar Germany and the States at any point, similarities even a child might notice given a small amount of information. The Nazis were just "the greatest evil the world ever knew", and "our heroic forebears defeated them" and "because they were heroes we don't question them". And if our parents were great heroes who fought evil and ~~destroyed the one ring~~ defeated fascism then where's our great evil to fight? Oh OK we beat the Soviets, the next largest "authoritarians", guess we can fuck on off to Epstein island since heroes can do no wrong.