By Theodore Shoebat

Generation Alpha (born in the 2010s) and Generation Z (born in the mid-90s and mid-2010s, also called Zoomers) are growing up into a volatile world where — unlike what we have been accustomed to for decades — the United States will not be the governing force of the world any longer. This is at least what was observed by a report from the analytical website, Freedom Lab:

“From a geopolitical perspective, Gen Alpha is growing up in a world where the U.S. is no longer the undisputed global (political, military and cultural) hegemon. This means that they (in the West at least) are growing up in more insecure times, in which the outcomes of international conflicts are quite uncertain and new (proxy) wars may be looming.”

In 2006, analysts Neil Howe and William Strauss, who focus on new generations and the future of societies, conducted a contest over which term would best describe zoomers. Certain terms were suggested and then voted on. The winner for the term that would best describe zoomers was “Homeland Generation”. Zoomers were infants or elementary school students in the age of the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, being the first generation to answer with “I don’t know” when asked, “Where were you on 9/11?”. Since zoomers were either too young or not even born yet to remember 9/11 (Alphas were not born at all) terrorism is not a major topic for them (unlike with boomers or millennials). According to polling done by the Harvard Public Opinion Project, out of a list of eight possible foreign policy priorities, only 17.1 percent of zoomers surveyed (ages 18 to 24) listed terrorism as the most important. Comparatively, Millennials aged 25-29 were nearly 30 percent more likely to put terrorism first.

They are a generation raised on the internet and the biggest generation of homebodies. Thus, they are giant reciprocators to the dark politics of the internet, where racism, nationalism and socialism are argued for by sophists. Howe concluded:

“Readers also sensed a worldwide cultural movement towards nationalism, localism, and an increased identification with one’s roots.  The word [Homeland Generation] also fits since this generation of children is literally kept more at “home” than any earlier generation of kids, thanks to the protective, hands-on child-raising style of Gen-X parents.”

Moreover, the Cold War narrative that made Americans so concerned about communism is fading away in the minds of zoomers, with many seeing socialism in a positive way, a far cry from their boomer predecessors. As the Atlantic reported back in September of 2019:

“In the U.S., Millennials and Gen Zers are losing their belief in the American dream, with its individualistic promise that your destiny is in your own hands. Some surveys even put socialism ahead of capitalism with very young voters.”

Nationalism is going to be intensified by the isolation that coronavirus has triggered and also by mass migration that could erupt once the coronavirus crises has been abated. A recent report states that “COVID-19 may be the latest global event which could trigger millions of people relocating around the world.” Violence is going to simultaneously spark mass migrations of poor populations and the animosity towards those migrants by host countries who will see the migrants as spreading disease. For example, Syria is still greatly suffering through its civil war and it appears that another wave of Syrian migrants could happen again. As a very recent report from the BBC tells us:

“Syria faces the risk of mass starvation or another mass exodus unless more aid money is made available, the head of the UN World Food Programme has said.

Ahead of a donor conference in Brussels on Tuesday, David Beasley told the BBC a million Syrians were severely food insecure and some were already dying.

The war-torn country’s currency has collapsed and food prices have soared.

In desperation, many Syrians might have no choice but to try to flee to Europe as they did in 2015, Mr Beasley said.”

With the coming of another wave of migrants, there will also be the fear of the host populations that such migrants will bring violence and disease (especially considering we would be just getting through the covid crises). Just as in the migrant crisis of 2015, the next migrant crises will see migrants trying to enter Greece from Turkey. In fact, the Greek government reported that it has received intelligence that Turkey is planning on sending another wave of migrants into Greece. As VOA reports:

“Greek forces are on heightened alert as reports have surfaced that Turkey is preparing to push through a fresh wave of migrants to Europe. Officials in Athens say, they fear that refugees infected with the coronavirus may be among the new wave of asylum seekers.

Greek government officials contacted by VOA say the heightened alert follows intelligence reports showing Turkish authorities moving refugee groups from remote inland areas to Turkey’s western shores, where smugglers could secretly ferry them to Greek islands less than a few kilometers away.” 

The fear of migrants spreading disease is already becoming violent in Yemen where Shiite Houthi militias do not want migrants from Ethiopia and in fact have murdered people. As one report from the New York Times tells us:

“The Yemeni militiamen rumbled up to the settlement of Al Ghar in the morning, firing their machine guns at the Ethiopian migrants caught in the middle of somebody else’s war. They shouted at the migrants: Take your coronavirus and leave the country, or face death.

Fatima Mohammed’s baby, Naa’if, was screaming. She grabbed him and ran behind her husband as bullets streaked overhead.

“The sound of the bullets was like thunder that wouldn’t stop,” said Kedir Jenni, 30, an Ethiopian waiter who also fled Al Ghar, near the Saudi border in northern Yemen, on that morning in early April. “Men and women get shot next to you, you see them die and move on.”

This scene and others were recounted in phone interviews with a half-dozen migrants now in Saudi prisons. Their accounts could not be independently verified, but human rights groups have corroborated similar episodes.”

Numerous migrants were forced out of Yemen and to the border of Saudi Arabia where border patrol officers have detained migrants, beaten them and deprived them of sufficient food. This type of horror could be seen in Europe being done under a nationalistic, reactionary government. This is the world that we are entering.

The zoomers and alphas are growing into this world where nationalism is yet again at the forefront, socialism is becoming trendy, America is beginning to lose its position as the world’s leading hegemony, and other powerhouse countries — Germany, Turkey, Japan, etc. — are rising in their own nationalist goals of becoming major hegemonies. We are quickly being acclimated into a stage of global capriciousness and instability, unlike Gen. Xers, millennials and boomers who have been accustomed to a world where America is number one and the idea of the revival of a nationalist phenomena or of socialism or fascism becoming popular is laughed at. But this world is disintegrating and we are entering a new zeitgeist.

There is a common misconception that the younger generations cannot go to the Right, but are engulfed into Left-wing ideology. While Leftism is extremely popular amongst the young, this does not mean that they cannot become Right-wing reactionaries. In the 2015 French election, the Right-wing candidate, Marine Le Pen, won first place amongst voters under the age of 35, taking 30% of their votes. So, it is definitely possible that a substantial amount of zoomers will turn to the Right. In fact, this is already happening.

Europe’s younger people are more antagonistic towards the economic welfare systems that their parents are so accustomed to. The reason for this is that it was the young who got the heaviest burdens of the post-2008 economic crisis. While the older people were protected by a social safety net, the young had to endure through very high unemployment rates, unstable employment and low wages. It is such generations of youths, disillusioned with the “good old days” of their parents and grandparents, that eventually see hope — not in some dream of economic prosperity — but in joining the military and following some regime. To reference the observation made by George Friedman back in 2013:

“In Europe, it was a generation that felt betrayed by World War I, then an older generation crushed by unemployment and inflation and finally a younger generation with nothing left to lose. Then came World War II and the stunned realization that there were indeed things left to lose.

Driving in Spain, things look quiet, neat and empty. But in that emptiness there is something ominous, perhaps not so much post-apocalyptic as pre-apocalyptic.”

Elections in recent years have shown that young people are susceptible to accepting the anti-migrant narratives of the Right. This is the reason why when the center-Left and center-Right parties in Denmark began to adopt Right-wing populous rhetoric against immigration, their popularity shot up amongst both older and younger voters. These center parties even supported  the infamous “jewelry law,” whereby — in the words of a report from the Atlantic — “the state can seize assets from refugees to cover the costs of their stay.” Denmark’s shift towards Right-wing policy rhetoric had made her the leader towards this path upon which Europe is treading. To quote Morten Stinus Kristensen: “Denmark has been the leader of the pack in making xenophobia and Islamophobia acceptable foundations of immigration and integration policies.”

What makes this story even more fascinating is how Denmark was seen as the experimental lab to observe the effectiveness of Right-wing rhetoric on immigration. And for the purpose of analyzing the possible future that zoomers and alphas are growing up to, let us inquire a little into European Right-wing movement that helped bring about this nationalist phenomena and its evolution. Looking at the life of the revival of Right-wing hysteria within our recent years, one will see in its provenance the Counterjihad movement that was birthed soon after 9/11 and was officialized in 2007 in the Counterjihad Summit in the EU Parliament building in Brussels, which was organized by a Flemish neo-Nazi, Filip DeWinter. DeWinter posed himself, not as a racist, but simply as a patriot who wanted to stop the Islamization of Europe. But looking at his history, his goal behind the Summit was quite conspicuous. There is a video of Filip DeWinter in which he is screaming out: “Yes, Vlaams Blok [his party] will put our own people first and yes, Vlaams Blok will have a Flemish Flanders and YES, the Vlaams Blok will have a white Europe!”.

In 1988, Filip DeWinter joined a demonstration of a hundred or so Nazi sympathizers (himself included). The plan of these neo-Nazis was to enter the Lommel German war cemetery where 40,000 Nazi German Wehrmacht soldiers were buried, and put flowers on their graves. With Filip DeWinter was the Nazi, Bert Eriksson. Eriksson was a member of the Hitler Youth during the Second World War, and a Nazi fanatic who received media attention in 1978 when he travelled to Austria and dug up the remains of the Nazi collaborator, Cyriel Verschaeve, and brought them back to Alveringem.

The purpose of DeWinter’s Summit was obvious: use Islamic terrorism as part of a strategy of tension to raise up the Right and make fascism fashionable. The movement of the Counterjihad was eventually spearheaded by an organization called Stop the Islamization Of Europe (or SCION. We wrote extensively about this group back in 2016), which was led by a Danish activist named Anders Gravers Pederson. He saw Denmark as the perfect place to commence the Counterjihad movement because, in such a small country, one could see the effects of Right-wing rhetoric immediately, and from Denmark the spark could percolate to the rest of Europe. In the words of Pederson:

“We know that Denmark is such a small homogenious country, where the effects are felt quickly, much quicker than in bigger countries. Because of that we believe that Denmark is the perfect place to practice the anti-jihad actions and thereby affect the population, because we get a response right away. Then we can discover which actions will have the greatest affect on the people, and which actions can be copied to other places, USA, Canada, Australia and the rest of Europe”

Just as Denmark was seen as the experimental ground for a Right-wing revival, Denmark is now leading northern Europe in Right-wing policy. In the years of the 1990s and 2000s (and before this), the world was — whether we knew it or not — moving towards fascism and socialism. We are under the spell of thinking that the Second World War solved such a problem. But it simply made this human virus go dormant, waiting for the right moment to attack a weakened immune system. That immune system of global security is definitely weakening, with the US moving towards isolationism, and allowing other powerful countries more freedom to do what they want — allowing and encouraging Turkey to invade Syria and encroach on the eastern Mediterranean, facilitating Germany becoming more militaristic, allowing for Japan to become more militarily independent — all of these things are taking place as we speak. But the events leading to where we are now were ongoing for decades. By the time militarism shows itself fully, the denouement of the incremental steps of prior decades finally unfolds and manifests, the zoomers will already be established in politics and the alphas will be of perfect military recruitment age. The world that we are entering in this next coming decade will be one of the thickest darkness, wherein death will be celebrated and cruelty paraded, where the creed of the people will be: “let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless.” (Wisdom 2:11)                

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