Lost lessons

At present there are two generations in the US, the Silents born between 1924 and 1944, and the Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1960 (or 1964 for some) who grew up in a world defined by many events they experienced first-hand. The list includes the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, the 1960s, and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. As these generations exit they are replaced by a new generation of Millennials (1982-1996) and GenZ (1997-2010) who lack the direct historical memory of the previous generations. It may even be that they lack a secondary memory of a parent or grandparent who experienced these events.

Why is this generation shift important? Consider for those who lived through the rise of Hitler and World War II. The saw futile efforts by UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to appease Hitler by giving him part of Czechoslovakia and declaring ‘Peace for our time’, only to see Germany roll into Poland barely a year later. They also experience the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the death and horror of World War II, and the genocide of Jews and others across Europe. These were not distant memories, but facts of their lived experiences.

Now the people who lived all this will soon be gone. Soon we will live in a world where there are no Holocaust survivors, refugees from World War II, or veterans of that war. First-hand memories and experiences of these people will be gone and new generations lacking such experiences will come of age and lead the country. What will the lessons of history be? How much will be lost as Santayana and Hegel foretold?

Generational memory is not limited to the US. Generational shifts are occurring across Europe, including in Russia and Ukraine. Vladimir Putin was born seven years after World War II. He has no direct experience of it and he was barely one-year old when Stalin died. Putin grew up in a world defined by the Cold War, when in his mind the USSR was great and there were clear geopolitical lines that defined the world. He has forgotten the pain of war inflicted on his country by the Nazis and he seems to think that the world he grew up with Ukraine and the former Soviet republics part of Russian empire is how the world out to be today.

But Putin’s generational world is coming to an end. Half if not more of the populations of Russia, Ukraine, and other states in the region grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall and breakup of the USSR. They have collective memories far different than those of generations passing away. In my nearly 15 years of teaching in Eastern and Central Europe and Russia I have been forecasting that the real generational change would occur when the World War II and Cold War generations pass and are replaced.

The good news is that a new generation has a chance to reinvent the world and Putin might ultimately fail to win against the hands of generational change. The bad news, as we are seeing with the Russian invasion against Ukraine, is that the lessons of history are often forgotten.

Excerpted: ‘War, Generations, and Historical Memory’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org