Wishing War on Young People

I suppose Oliver Dowden's speech on woke was always going to embolden others on the right, and so it was with Jane Moore's Wednesday column in the soaraway currant bun. With the unhinged title, 'Ok kids, let's see how you deal with REAL problems - like a posting on Ukraine's front line', you can see why young people don't bother with newspapers any more. Having necked the windowlene of Dowden's speech, Moore has worked herself up into a frenzy directed against an entirely imagined caricature. With a touch of levity she no doubt thought comedy genius, she proposes a game show for the whingeing woke. Riffing off the popular but long-cancelled Wife Swap, perhaps we might imagine Strife Swap. Be still my splitting sides. She writes,

For episode one, a bunch of Gen Zs might be torn away from their war on free speech in our universities for a lesson in how so many young lads their age fought in the Second World War precisely so they could enjoy the freedom they have today.

Perhaps a posting to the Ukrainian border with Russia might help them to understand the fear of facing down a deadly force that might kill you?

Here’s a gun, kids. You have a choice — kill or get killed.

She then goes on to fantasise about young people getting tortured by the North Korean regime and the Beijing plod. All of this to make a very important point Dowden could only allude to: be grateful for what you have and shut up, because your opinions about "values" will drive the country into the ditch of dictatorship.

Where to begin with such a psychotic imagination? First of all, Moore is paid to write this trash. It'a always been part of The Sun's appeal that it draws on the prejudices of its readership, amplifies it, and repackages it back to them. As most of the paper's readers tend to be older she plays on generational resentment. Cut off from the everyday life of being young, their vicarious experience of 21st century youth culture is mediated by the nonsense in their paper, and representations of young people in other media. The actual life experiences of their children and grandchildren, despite knowing millions of them can't get on the housing ladder, barely make enough money to support themselves and their families, and deal with the epidemic of mental health problems comes second because what their parents read in the paper and see on their screens is more real and visceral to them than what their kids say. It's not that they don't love their children, but because living standards have appreciably risen over their life time the assumption is it can't be that bad because their kids have never had baths in wash tubs, not had to break the ice on the inside of their bedroom windows in the morning, and have mobile phones and flat screen TVs. Moore, as part of the generation that benefited from living through the post-war boom knows well the gap between where her generation started and where they ended up, and can play on the privations of her readers' early years to paint those that have come after them as spoiled brats.

It's a cynical exercise, but one that also plays to the authoritarian longings The Sun has done so much to inculcate. The idea of packing young people off to war is, like so many things, based on a rose-tinted view of the Second World War. Their parents of the wartime generation worked together in a common endeavour and knew their place, engendering a sense of everyone having done their bit. My grandparents fought at Anzio, served in the rear areas of El-Alamein, and worked in the WRAF, and millions of boomers can tell similar stories about what their parents did in the war. They didn't complain, but bore privations and got on with outfighting and outproducing the Nazis. A lot of the postwar generation are proud of what their parents did (indeed, some of their grandchildren are too) and therefore identify strongly with it - hence The Sun's regular use of WWII metaphors and comparisons. Despite their not knowing war nor conscription, many of them felt as though they did experience it through family war stories and the endless slew of war-related media product served up by our culture industries.

Unsurprisingly, the generations twice, three times, four times removed from the war know nothing of these privations. They have not been called upon, and so the virtues of service and sacrifice, discipline and duty are alien to the X'ers, Millennials, and Zoomers. Living in a safe stable society has made them complacent, lazy, and decadent, so they can afford to split hairs over gender pronouns and find dark blemishes on the character of the sainted Winston. As fans of the short sharp shock, Moore knows her audience would also lap up the fantasy of packing the woke off to war to teach them some home truths about how harsh life really is. And while they're at it, they'd acquire a sense of being part of something bigger than them. In other words, wokeness is dangerous because it is aimless. War gives them purpose and meaning, an appreciation of community, and a thankfulness for what they have. Death and lifelong injury, we don't need to think about those things.

Moore's piece is just another piece published day in, day out by The Sun that works to undermine senses of solidarity and collectivism their patriotic readers yearn for. Immigrants, travellers, single mums, they've all had their turns in the scapegoat spotlight. And young people have been there plenty of times too, most recently in relation to Covid. It's abhorrent behaviour intent on turning parents against their offspring, and perhaps Moore really hates her teenaged daughters too. For all the right wing preaching about the sanctity of the family, here we have one of its well remunerated ideologues driving a generational wedge between older people and their relationship with their children and grandchildren. All that is sacred in right wing thought is profane in right wing practice.

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