Aa
Aa
A
A
A
Close
148588 tn?1465778809

Generation 0

If you're not scared, if you think you're White Entitlement is going to save you from what's coming

you're not paying attention.


https://www.thenation.com/article/steve-bannon-wants-to-start-world-war-iii/


"....... One quarter of the way into Generation Zero, the filmmaker unveils the deeper theory that guides his thinking: the notion of generational turnings popularized by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their books Generations: The History of America’s Future (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). According to Strauss and Howe, roughly every 80 years—a saeculum, or the average life-span of a person—America goes through a cataclysmic crisis. Marked by savagery and genocide, and lasting a decade or more, this crisis ends with a reset of the social order and its survivors all vowing never to let such a catastrophe happen again. Each of these crises, Strauss and Howe posit, have been formative moments in our nation’s history. The Revolution of 1776–83, followed roughly 80 years later by the Civil War, followed 80 years after that by the Great Depression and World War II........

 Strauss and Howe are essentially pop historians—there’s just enough in their framework to make it seem compelling, but nothing that you can prove or disprove with any assurance.

But that doesn’t bother Bannon. Having established this seductive narrative framework, Bannon devotes the rest of Generation Zero to bearing down relentlessly on the decades of the unraveling, which in his mind are the years from 1987 to 2007. As a propagandist, he has two purposes. The first is to make his viewers clearly understand who are the victimizers and who are the victims; the second is to use that framing to help shape the new societal order that will come, as he believes, after the fourth turning plays itself out.........

 Bannon ends Generation Zero with both a warning and a hint of hope: “When you get into a crisis era, literally anything can happen. The restraints come down. These are the eras of revolution. These are the eras of reigns of terror,” his narrator says. But “the question of what the new order will be is up to us.”

In a Time magazine article published shortly after November’s election, David Kaiser explains why this is so chilling. Bannon had sought to interview him for Generation Zero because he is one of the few professional historians who have taken Howe and Strauss’s work seriously. As he writes, “My own interpretation of [their work] is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place.” The Republican Party, he says, has such a vision, while the Democrats have been more concerned with protecting the achievements of the New Deal.

 But Bannon, Kaiser says, had more on his mind than merely rolling back the legacies of Democratic presidents from Barack Obama to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. He writes:

" Bannon had clearly thought a long time both about the domestic potential and the foreign policy implications of Strauss and Howe. More than once during our interview, he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect. I did not agree, and said so. But, knowing that the history of international conflict was my own specialty, he repeatedly pressed me to say we could expect a conflict at least as big as the Second World War in the near or medium term. I refused."

 Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China. It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war. As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order. He is now in a position to make that a reality."
2 Responses
Sort by: Helpful Oldest Newest
163305 tn?1333668571
Bannon is Trump's Goebbels, the puppet master behind the scenes.
Helpful - 0
148588 tn?1465778809
Kinda lengthy, but Buckley always demanded intellectual rigor in these types of pieces, and the National Review is one of the few conservative rags that attempts this.
Helpful - 0
1 Comments
My mistake. This is 'The Nation', not 'National Review'.
You must join this user group in order to participate in this discussion.

You are reading content posted in the Current Events . . . Group

Didn't find the answer you were looking for?
Ask a question
Popular Resources
A list of national and international resources and hotlines to help connect you to needed health and medical services.
Herpes sores blister, then burst, scab and heal.
Herpes spreads by oral, vaginal and anal sex.
STIs are the most common cause of genital sores.
Condoms are the most effective way to prevent HIV and STDs.
PrEP is used by people with high risk to prevent HIV infection.