El Neil on the "Greatest Generation"

This week's issue of Libertarian Enterprise is a single article by L. Neil Smith, written after the death of his mother:

Tom Brokaw, one of many collectivist mouthpieces who made long, highly remunerative careers deceiving those whose lives he helped the state to use, drain, and distort, famously called my mother and father and their contemporaries "The Greatest Generation", a snide, lying phrase and poisonous concept eagerly adopted by an even more notorious collaborator, Rush Limbaugh, a pompous, cynical, hypocritical windbag — and Eddie Haskell wannabe — who made his career by sucking up to those of his elders whom he perceived to exercise more power than he had.

In fact, they were the most politically exploited generation (my dad was born in 1919, my mom in 1926) in American history. Growing up in the shadow of the mechanized mass butchery their parents had called the "War to End War", their earliest memories, for the most part, were of the "Great Depression", a worldwide economic collapse most of them never really ever understand had been caused by the very leaders they adored and their mercantilist cronies — exactly the same sort of tight circle we see today with George W. Bush and his big business buddies.

Having somehow managed to survive not only the Depression, but the nearly genocidal government policies supposedly intended to end it (but which actually made it far worse and more prolonged than it might otherwise have been) they were then informed that an unprecedentedly monstrous evil had arisen in Europe that Americans had some moral responsibility to deal with. They were not told it had been created and empowered by exactly the sort of policies that had engendered the Depression.