Whitaker's Current Articles

I have noticed that a lot fewer older folks are giving young people the standard lecture about how easy the kids have it these days. That's because us older folks have had to deal with computers. There is nothing that reminds one of how hard the learning process was like having to learn something yourself.

Today May 8, is V-E Day. On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. According to Tom Brokaw and others, when Germany fell to us and our Heroic Ally, Joseph Stalin, the world was saved. They tell us that the generation that saved Comrade Stalin was The Greatest Generation.

I loved my uncles who served in World War II, but what we are discussing here is not those people as individuals. We are talking about what that whole generation did.

So if my disagreement with this Greatest Generation nonsense makes you say "I am insulting your granddaddy or your Papa", please leave the room and let the grownups talk.

I don't like the World War II generation, as a generation, for exactly the same reason Tom Brokaw loves them dearly.

When the World War Generation came of age around 1940, the white male walked the world like a Colossus. When they ceased to be the dominant group, whites were groveling and begging the world for forgiveness.

By the time the World War II generation ceased to be the dominant group around 1980, anyone who was not fully committed to the end of the white race was a racist. Immigration and integration and miscegenation became the Final Solution to "the race problem." But this "race problem" existed ONLY in white countries and this "race problem" existed in ALL white countries.

No one says that "the race problem" will be solved by miscegenation in Asia or Africa. No one asks to massive third world immigration into Japan or Taiwan or the unpopulated areas of Africa or Brazil.

Only Brokaw's Greatest Generation would ever allowed such an idea to be accepted. As a liberal, Brokaw loves them dearly.

When the World War II generation took the helm around 1938, there were only two truly totalitarian regimes on earth, Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany. They were deadly enemies.

After the Greatest Generation Saved the World and as they ceased to be the dominant group in the 1950's, a third of the world was under a single totalitarian rule, that of Communism. The Communists had killed more people in peacetime before Hitler did his killing in his concentration camps during the War, and the Communists killed more people in peacetime AFTER the War than Hitler did during wartime in camps or in battle.

The accomplishments of The Greatest Generation are beloved by Brokaw as they are by all liberals, neoconservatives and respectable conservatives. They couldn't care less if people get killed or oppressed, as long as the killing and oppression comes from the political left. For them, that is not Pure Evil Hate, like Hitler.

I listened the other day while Bill O'Reilly and a leftist agreed that Communist slogans on tee-shirts in a high school were OK, but Nazi ones should get a student expelled.

The Supreme Court has ruled that an employer can fire a worker for being a Klan member, but not for being any kind of Communist.

In the 1950s, when my whole family went to Main Street in Columbia to shop, I distinctly remember somebody saying, "You know, if we were Up North, we would LOCK the car door!" Everybody laughed because we knew it was true. We had read about locked doors in New York and seen it on TV.

But what is hard to convey to you is how ALIEN this idea was. Locking your house door or your car door in South Carolina was exactly like the story that Eskimos kissed by rubbing their noses together, and I mean EXACTLY that alien.

You locked prisons, not homes.

But I found out later that we were not the only ones who felt that only prisons had locked door. I was reading a black author who was raised in, of all places, HARLEM, New York, and he was the same way! He remembered that, when he was a boy in the 1930s, his family would sleep out on the fire escape on hot summer nights and families on the ground floor would sleep on the street.

In HARLEM!

He said he remembered that, but he honestly didn't recall whether the apartment he lived in HAD a lock on the door. He never remembered anybody using a key to get in.

Another book was by an affluent New Yorker who owned his apartment. He wrote in the early 1950s that he would never get used to the idea of having to unlock the door to his own home.

All this happened while the "Greatest Generation" was in control.

They Saved the World, you know.