Several respondents to my essay, "Is Any of This Connected?," which is posted on this Web Site in the Newspaper Articles section at the Unedited FORUM 6-11-00 link, criticized me for being 'too strident' and for making what one respondent claimed was a 'blanket characterization of the Boomer generation as -- dangerous.'  In the spirit of sharpening the debate on the 'generational aspect' of current events, I am posting my answer to this 'agitated Boomer' so that we may gain benefit of points of view that I can share with you by answering the questions and comments posed.

       This is a perfect way for me to sharpen the 'explanations' that I am trying to provide for what many of us see as a decay and dissolution of our treasured American civilization.

       As for the criticism of my writings as being too 'strident,' of course they are. They are meant to be so.  Here is an explanation of why I do it this way.

Begin the conversation with an 'agitated' Boomer:
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Note: The conversation is comprised of the respondent's text separated by the >….. > symbols or quote marks and my answers which are in plain text.

Dear [Agitated Boomer],
       Thank you for your considered and thoughtful comments. It is clear from said comments that you are susceptible to impulses from your limbic brain and run your mouth before you use your cerebral cortex.  In the slim chance that you are still worth 'redeeming,' I will give you a few examples. First, you wrote,

>
>I do not enjoy your inflammatory rhetoric or your blanket characterization
>of the "Boomer" generation as "dangerous"!  I happen to be part of that generation...
>

       If you had read carefully my 'inflammatory rhetoric,' you would have discerned that I accuse the 'power elites' of the Boomer generation, not the Boomer generation in its entirety.  If you take the time to read the excellent book, "Generations: the History of America's Future' or 'The Fourth Turning,' both by Wm. Strauss and Neil Howe, you will find out a great deal about the 79 million members of your generation. Those whom I write about, and have written two books about, are the 5 to 8 million 'elites' of your generation.

       Those 'elites' are the ones who, during the mid-1960s, stormed the university administration offices, took over by force the campus, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, dodged the draft, burned their draft cards, fled to Canada, marched on Washington, as some traveled to Prague and Moscow to demonstrate against the war. How do I know this? I read about it. And for some of it, I was THERE. I saw it with my own eyes shortly after spending a year getting shot at every other day over North Vietnam. Where in the hell were you during this time?

       I doubt very seriously that you are one of these 'power elites' of the Boomer generation, given your bragging about being a "proud military man of 15 years and a staunch conservative..."  But all of us are characterized in history, as Sam Huntington reminds us in his 'Clash of Civilizations,' by the 'elites' of our generation (mine is the Silent Generation). We are stuck with what our 'elites' do.

       If you are serious about your protestation, "...[I] believe that the current wave of leftist thought and policy will be reversed by changing people's hearts and minds..." then you will recognize that your generation's 'power elites' are potentially the most dangerous generation in our nation's history. Read the 'Generations' book if you don't believe me on this.

       Our task, yours (the non-power elites of the Boomers -- 70 million strong), mine, and everyone of the other living generations is to hold back the totalitarian impulses of the 'power elites' of your generation until the next Civic generation comes of age. That is the Millennial generation. This is a major task.

       To explain this, I turn to a metaphor. I choose one taken from my research into the experience of our POWs of the Korean War. An Army psychiatrist who interviewed our repatriated GI prisoners delved into the re-education techniques used by the Chinese to PASSIFY them. These same techniques, developed in parallel in the U.S. by Kurt Lewin at our National Training Laboratories are now being used on our military -- to gain acceptance of women-in-combat, the homosexual lifestyle, and affirmative action programs (i.e. 12/12/5 and 20 for the Navy).

       These 'sensitivity training' techniques' were used on our young GIs to render them PASSIVE to their captors' control. They were very powerful.  They worked. More than half of those who died (38 percent died in captivity -- the highest in any of our wars) did so from what the GIs called give-up-itis. According to Major Mayer, the psychiatrist, "..we examined hundreds of these cases, we found that a new disease had occurred -- a disease explicitly of PASSIVITY. This was a disease of that most popular of all of the targets of the psychiatrists -- the mother's boy. The unresolved Oedipal complex, or whatever you want to call it. Nonetheless, the passive kid. He would walk into his hut in Korea, look despairingly about him, decide it was no use trying to participate in his survival, would go off into a corner by himself, pull his blanket over his head, and in 48 hours was dead."

       This is a perfect metaphor for the PASSIVITY that exists in the U.S. military today and in the population at large. We have been and are being rendered PASSIVE via the psychological conditioning that the 'power elites' of your generation are carrying out on us. I have written a detailed report on this phenomenon, entitled, "Sensitivity Training and the 'Socialization of the U.S. Military." This phenomenon is real. It exists. And you should be able to recognize it from the headlines of any major U.S. newspaper.

       Why bring this metaphor up here?  Because it explains and answers one of your major complaints about my original e-mail message. You wrote,

>
>I do not enjoy your inflammatory rhetoric...I do not believe we will win
>the war against the current liberal onslaught by sending out ridiculous,
>paranoid, e-mail and making blanket accusations such as you have made.
>

       You, my friend, have been rendered PASSIVE by the same techniques the Chinese used to PASSIFY our unprepared Korean War GI POWs. But here, these techniques have been perfected by the 'power elites' of your generation to apply to mass audiences. So what do we learn from the Korean War POW experience? 

Listen to Major Mayer.
       "You could stop these deaths by picking up these fellows; hitting them, spitting on them, slapping them -- if you could just get 'em angry, they survived. If you couldn't, they didn't. The soldiers called this 'give-up-itis.' The doctors couldn't diagnose it. We have never before seen it among adults. Oh, it was seen among some elderly Jewish people who were awaiting gas chambers -- very few, but some. It's seen among new-borns that are pulled out of garbage cans in Oakland, San Francisco, and New York. And we still find them in garbage cans. And such babies, abandoned at birth, sometimes will not participate in their survival, and we have a diagnosis for this. It is called marasmus. They just won't live, even though there is no medical justification for their death. Never before have we seen this among Americans who were adults. And these men were from 19 to 24 years of age. It was not seen in anyone older than that, by the way."

       "A lack of resistance -- passivity. Now, this kind of disease accounted for the death of about half the men who died in captivity. And the death rate was 38 percent. Higher than Andersonville, higher then the Revolutionary War, higher than the Japanese camps at Cabanatuan and Guantotomas, the highest death rate in our military history. And half these people died, to a considerable degree, by their own volition."

       "This is astounding. This bears thought, by everybody, not just doctors."

       And it is just as astounding that we do not recognize that, just as the Chinese rendered 80 percent of our POWs PASSIVE by using these techniques, the 'power elites' of your generation have accomplished much the same to our senior military leaders and the population in general. They have escaped an impeachment verdict by using lawyers and 'public opinion' molded by clever poll-driven propaganda to usurp the rule of law.

       If you had read my first book, 'The New Totalitarians,' you would have already discovered that your generation's 'power elites' have used these techniques to corrupt every institution in the land over the past 30 years.

       So, please think again about my techniques for rousting people out of their comfortable PASSIVITY. Listening to Rush Limbaugh and voting Republican is simply not enough. They (you) must be awakened by "...picking up these fellows; hitting them, spitting on them, slapping them -- if you could just get 'em angry, they survived. If you couldn't, they didn't."

       In view of this real lived experience, don't be so hard on my methods, my 'inflammatory rhetoric' and my 'hard to take' 'blanket' accusations. They work. They worked in Korea, when applied in a different situation. They will work here, in the situation in which we find ourselves -- if you can be made angry enough.

       But my stuff is more than that. All of it is backed up by detailed and thorough, rigorous research. References abound, both in the e-mail message that you obviously only partially read and the books/reports/essays that appear on this Web Site.

       I dare you to take a look at the material there. Then, if you are still not convinced, you can go back to your PASSIVE status and I will leave you alone.  You will have fallen into the COLLABORATOR category -- that of the Clinton 'power elites' and their apologists.

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End of conversation with an agitated Boomer.


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