Twilight of the Baby Boomers
Trump – Not For All Mankind
Iran – Another Failed Colour Revolution
Global Warming as Regional Freezing
Kiev’s Greed Causes Its Suffering
‘White Traitors’ in the USA?
Cosmopolitan Canada
China Keeps Cleaning Up
Twilight of the Baby Boomers
‘Reform’ is less of a threat than most people think. It gets some disappointed Labour voters, but the latest YouGov poll shows that they are mostly disappointed Tories.[1] That the young are trending strongly left.
A 2022 survey by the Financial Times found that Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are not drifting to the right as they get older.[2] Hopeful, at least for Britain and the USA. But it is a small consolation after decades of a strong drift to selfish and asocial right-wing politics by the Baby Boomers: people born between 1946 to 1964.
My own generation, I was born 1950. But I’ve been saddened to see them so keen to demolish the kindly Britain we grew up in.
We wanted the rules of sex relaxed – though many thought at the time that male homosexuals were just tolerated deviants and should stay ‘in the closet’. I must confess it took me time to see this was wrong.
I was not wrong in rejecting the widespread view that drugs were safe.
The main point is that most of us saw the state as a nuisance: something that senselessly got in the way of our freedoms. So when we became tax payers, a greedy majority were increasingly unwilling to pay for later generations to have all of the economic benefits that we had had.
Under Thatcher, a sudden rise in unemployment did not bother them. In our generation, you had to be pretty hopeless not to get a job. Or else choose to live in one of the few areas of high unemployment: as a student at Bangor North Wales I saw many who chose that once they got their degrees, or failed to get them,
The fact that later generations were finding it harder or impossible did not register. Nor the fact that it was no longer easy to get your own house as an ordinary worker in your 20s. Or that a decent Council House was once a cheaper and easily available alternative. Far too many were willing to blame individual failing for later generations not having the same advantages.
Selfishness was always strong among Baby Boomers. One vivid example is a pop song called ‘My Generation’ by the English rock band The Who. Written by guitarist and primary songwriter Pete Townshend. Sparked, it seemed, by him not being quite as privileged as he thought he merited after earning riches from music in a way previous generations mostly had not.
“Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train and is said to have been inspired by the Queen Mother, who is alleged to have had Townshend’s 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighbourhood.”[3]
He’s now 80: someone with money to burn might park a hearse somewhere that he’ll have to keep seeing it. See how he likes it! It would not bother me, but I suspect he hasn’t got a solid world-view in which one’s own death is acceptable as part of life.
The lyrics baldly say “Why don’t you all f-fade away (talkin’ ’bout my generation)”.[4] People thinking the world ought to belong to them rather than older generations who had created it. And most of ‘my generation’ were happy to dismantle the taxation and state spending that had done the real work of sharing the social wealth among those who needed it most.
They were also jollied into thinking that the Second World War had been an unfortunate accident, heroically won by Britain and the USA. With the Soviet Union gaining unfair advantage. Not that the British elite had helped Hitler rise in the belief he would destroy the Soviet Union for them.[5] When he quarrelled with Poland, they maybe thought he could be boxed and persuaded to be more modest. Things then went so horribly wrong that they needed the Soviet Union to save them from Hitler.
Post-war, the elite conceded a lot at a time when many in the West saw the Soviet model as a real alternative. Sadly, Moscow then got bogged down in past methods and rejected the sensible relaxation that many loyal communists wanted.[6]
What was done in China after Mao shows that it could have been done. China now shows the way forward. But meantime most of my own Baby Boomer generation are fading away in a fit of resentment. Resenting the fairly predictable results of their own actions.
Trump – Not For All Mankind
An SF series called For All Mankind gets its fifth season on Apple TV this March. It imagined the Soviet Union being first on the moon. A Liberal Imperialist fantasy – the Soviet system lasts, but the USA are heroes in keeping them limited. But very entertaining.
It’s always seemed to me that the Soviet loss of the race to the moon was an early sign of that system’s decline. Stalin’s ruthless and successful planning system was replaced by a pseudo-market that became very corrupt.
The squalid reality we live in is that Bush Senior and Thatcher decided that the Soviet fall made it a suitable time to attack secular nationalists in the Global South. Afghanistan could be safely neglected, rather than spend money to broker a deal between the leftist government and the warlords.
The West’s centre-left went along with this rubbish, and endorsed phony claims that state enterprises were wasteful. MPs who were or had become securely members of the Upper Middle Class agreed that welfare was a huge and hideous burden on productive private business. The Global South would be transformed into capitalist democracies. The West would privatise everything possible.
And would also bail out the very rich, when there was a crisis. Obama did that in 2008, and Labour did not ridicule the absurd claim that British state spending had caused that global crisis.
There were a series of wars, none of which produced a result to be proud of. Afghanistan belongs to the Taliban, far stronger now than they were when the USA invaded.
Kamala Harris lost in 2024 and Hilary Clinton lost in 2016, because they stood for these bad policies. And showed no concern for the white working class, no longer secure and trade-unionised as it was in the 1960s
Iran – Another Failed Colour Revolution
Iran’s economy is weak because the USA keeps hampering its trade. But protests about this were hijacked by a long-prepared network of people wanting to go back to the days of the pro-Western Shah. Or else just destroy the country.
The authorities got violent, only when some protesters started waging war against the authorities. This is largely kept out of Western news. But as so often, The Economist mentioned facts that the business elite need to be aware of:
“Some protesters have fought back with knives and hunting rifles. The authorities like to exaggerate the count of their own dead to fuel a narrative that the opposition is being armed by foreign powers. Still, even opposition groups have tallied around 150 security men killed.”[7]
Iran was a dictatorship under the Shah, who had in the 1950s overthrown a moderate and elected regime that had dared ask for a decent price for oil. And that the new Islamic regime allows open elections with real contests for who forms the next government. With oversight for the religious authorities, but the majority do indeed want strict Islam. Political Islam moved into the gaps made when Western efforts damaged socialism within the Islamic world.
That’s why I believe accounts like this:
“Mossad [Israeli] agents were on the ground in Iran and surely there were CIA operatives working alongside them. They worked closely with local agitators — the rioters who were bent on destruction and assassination — to turn the peaceful protests into violent protests, which would then lead the government to turn to violence. There is abundant video footage of the agitators at work.
“Moreover, the tag team sent many thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran before the protests began. Should the government shut down the internet and the phone system – as expected – the Starlink terminals would allow the protestors to communicate among themselves and with the outside forces helping them…
“The US military (and maybe the Israeli military) was primed to attack Iran once the protests had reached critical mass, finishing off the regime and creating chaos in Iran that would hopefully break the country apart.
“But the strategy failed, mainly because the Iranian government was able to shut down the protests quickly and decisively. A key element in the government’s success was shutting down Starlink, which made it extremely difficult for the protestors to communicate with each other and the outside world. Once that happened, the protests were doomed and both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Trump understood that the tag team could not use military force to deliver the coup de grâce. The Iranian regime had survived.”[8]
I’ve seen claims that the authorities were able to locate the dishes when they were hidden. They give out signals, and Iran might well have had help from Russia or China or both.
It had always seemed to me that ‘liberation by internet’ was going to fail. I’d warned about this as far back as the year 2000.[9]
I don’t like the current regime, but it does seem a fair reflection of what ordinary Iranians actually desire. And outside of Europe, where there were older parliamentary traditions to look back to, the various ‘Colour Revolutions’ have either been crushed or resulted in a failed state.
Global Warming as Regional Freezing
Scientists tend to be bad at getting their message across. Global Warming was correctly predicted as the general trend. But only an average. All weather models predicted that there would be small regions that would have bouts of unusual cold.
More rain overall, since a warm atmosphere holds more moisture. But familiar weather patterns started shifting much sooner than had been predicted. Floods alternated with droughts.
People shifted to call it Climate Change. Much worse than if the familiar weather were just warmed by 1.5 degrees centigrade.
No one expected a much warmer Arctic so soon. Nor the weakening of the polar vortex that had previous stopped this still-very-cold from commonly flowing southwards.
You’ve probably seen in the news that the USA now (26th January) has a massive storm of snow and frozen rain. Caused by a clash between an outbreak of cold polar air and warm moist air from the south. In previous years, the mass of warm moist air was missing. 2021 saw severe cold extending much further south.[10]
Since I follow Japan’s English-language news, I also knew about their abnormally heavy snowfalls. Cold polar air hitting moisture from the Sea of Japan.
Climate change can’t be proved to cause a single, specific storm. But the trend is for them to be more severe and disruptive.
Kiev’s Greed Causes Its Suffering
“Because Mr. Putin has portrayed his war domestically as a rescue operation for the Russian-speaking people of Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk, it would be difficult to sell a victory at home that does not result in the capture of the rest of Donetsk. Russia already controls Luhansk.”[11]
That’s an example of how the news gets twisted. No one would say the USA portrays Alaska and Haiwaii as part of the USA: international law confirms this. Does so despite US violence and racism when taking over Haiwaii.[12] But when the reality of International Law does not give the answer they like, they hide it. Western news sources will say that Beijing claims that Tibet and Taiwan are part of China, even though this is the clear legal position.
The Ukraine War began in 2014, rioters persuaded a very corrupt parliament to certify that hatred of everything Russian or Soviet was a requirement for being a proper Ukrainian. The Oblasts (regions) of Crimea and of the Donbass had never signed up for that. Most of the people there spoke no Ukrainian, and saw Russia as a friendly country.
When the option to be Ukrainian-but-close-to-Russian vanished, Crimea asked to be wholly Russian, as it had been till Khrushchev moved it in 1954. The two Oblasts of the Donbass were ready to settle for autonomy, but Kiev repeatedly thwarted a referendum about whether the majority actually wanted this. Kiev must have known that Russian-haters in the Donbass were a minority.
West Ukrainian nationalism has always been aggressive. Never respectful of majority wishes: they think their minority populations should have it all. Ukrainians who didn’t feel a tie to Russia felt entitled to deny basic rights to those who felt otherwise. That they owned territory that was never part of Kievan Russia. Land given a mixed Russian and Ukrainian population by the Tsarist state opening up depopulated land to settlement by conquering the slave-raiding Tartars of Crimea.
The same West Ukrainian aggression applies to regions with mixed Polish and Ukrainian populations:
“Zakerzonia … is an informal name for the territories of Poland to the west of the Curzon Line … claimed as ethnically Ukrainian territories by Ukrainian nationalists in the aftermath of World War II. However, before 1939, the areas of Zakerzonia were mostly inhabited by Poles, who constituted about 70% of the population of this area. Ukrainians lived in a minority in Zakerzonia, constituting about 20% of the area’s population.”[13]
Almost all Poles dislike both Ukrainians and Russians. They went along with a war that promised to greatly weaken Russia. But this failed, so dislike of Ukrainians is becoming more overt.
Within what was once Soviet Ukraine, both sides suffer, but only the suffering of one side is shown. The city of Donetsk was repeatedly shelled by right-wingers who held nearby portions of the Donbass, but Western media never showed that.
‘White Traitors’ in the USA?
When Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed its name to X, many users hived off as a new entity called Bluesky. And I chose to follow both. X has more rubbish, but also more interesting posts. Blocking the rubbish-posters and favouring the interesting improves the quality of what you do get.
Bluesky has many posts citing the anti-Hitler poem: people who did nothing when it was someone else, then found themselves alone. But I don’t think anyone expected Trump’s immigration people to start shooting white people, which has now happened twice.
Regular police have always been prone to shoot troublesome black people. I’d suppose that non-whites assume ICE is dangerous. White people thought they were still secure for normal protests.
But a majority of Republicans back Trump on this, even though detailed study of what was filmed show that neither victim was in any way a threat.
The excuses are absurd. One ICE man felt threatened by a car driving away from him. Another terrified by a gun that a male nurse held legally and had not tried to draw.
ICE is using terrorism to persuade illegal immigrants to flee rather than fight to stay on. And perhaps to scare legal non-white immigrants to quit regardless.
The original poem talks as if most Germans were too timid to act. Not in fact a realistic view: the Nazis got a third of the vote in the last fully free election in November 1932. The Social-Democrats and the centre-right had blatantly failed, and the Communists peaked at just under 17%. Hitler strengthened because he had a run of success. Also because most Germans felt that the Weimar system had failed, and the future would be either Nazi or Communist.
Nothing remotely similar exists in the USA. Voters may choose in 2028 to go back to the mild decline that existed under Biden. Which would include the profound change in US identity that began in the 1960s.
The founders of the USA knew they were an offshoot of British culture, and they wanted to develop this rather than abandon it. So they imposed quotas from 1921, keeping out most of the Italians and East European Jews who had been arriving in increasing numbers. And measures against Asians had begun even earlier, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
US Republicans voted for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which dropped racial rules. At that time, the U.S. was 85% White, 11% Black, and Latinos less than 4%. East Asians very few indeed.
Republican politicians before Trump tapped into racist feeling, but didn’t really share them. Skilled Asians were useful money-makers. Illegal immigrants helped undermind Trade Unions. And the traditional white working class blamed the wrong people.
It’s even possible that Trump would be ready to break up the USA if he cannot recapture it for the values of his father, an enthusiast for the Ku Klux Klan.
Snippets
Cosmopolitan Canada
“Canada’s deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US.”[14]
Canada was assembled from a French-speaking settlement that the British Empire gained in the Seven Years War, and a significant number of Loyalists who had stayed loyal to the British Empire that had made their lives possible. There was always tension, though it eased when the USA and the disbanding British Empire worked together as a single world-dominating Anglosphere.
Canada retains the broadly tolerant culture that Trump is fighting against in the USA. And he also expects a ‘purified’ USA to co-exist with China and Russia. So although he blusters against Canada, I would not expect much to happen.
*
China Keeps Cleaning Up
«China has moved to tighten the rules on declaring personal assets and business connections for officials as part of the ongoing battle against corruption.
“Tens of thousands of officials have been purged and prosecuted for corruption since Xi Jinping became the party boss in 2012, including dozens who were in the upper echelon of the ruling party, and going after the ‘big tigers’ has helped provide a warning to others.»
Avoiding the corruption that killed the Soviet Union.
*
Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams. Date 26th January 2026
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53923-how-would-britain-vote-at-the-start-of-2026
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4 – pay site
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Generation#Recording
[4] https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/the-who/my-generation
[5] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/d-nazism-and-the-guilt-of-upper-london/
[6] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/
[7] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/01/15/bereft-of-legitimacy-the-reeling-regime-in-iran-massacres-its-own-people
[8] https://braveneweurope.com/john-mearsheimer-the-tag-team-fails-in-iran
[9] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/46-globalisation/the-web-is-always-insecure/
[10] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/as-p45-the-texas-freeze-of-2021/#_Toc68336980
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/world/europe/trump-ukraine-peace-talks-russia.html – pay site
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingdom
Labour Affairs 