Try out my thesis in the case of your nation's PMs or Presidents - you'll probably find lots of national leaders born before 1929 or after 1939 but the decade in between seems to have gotten skipped.
Look at two of Britain's more recent Labour PMs : Callaghan born in 1913 followed by Blair born in 1953 --- a 40 year spread !
No wonder then that the socialist Callaghan supported the maintenance of the British empire while the centrist Blair (and his conservative opponent John Major) did not.
They were simply generations apart.
I think the reason for the absence of those born in the 1930s is because they were either too young to convincingly support WWII's values from personal experience and too old to convincingly oppose WWII's values from lack of any personal experience with it.
And I think the key date in the changeover was 1990 : a date by which virtually all WWII veterans had to have retired from powerful positions at the top of the workforce because they had reached 65 .
Also a year when baby-boomers too young to share the war hype finally were old enough to be taken seriously as the national leader.
A baby-boomer, in my definition, is someone who is more exercised by why the Allies did so little to prevent the Holocaust (a story revealed post 1945) than they are emotionally stirred by stories of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk of 1940.
I think you'd have to be born in 1929 or earlier to really get caught up in the emotional high of 1940's Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain --- only a few children in 1940 who were younger than ten would really understand what all the fuss was about.
A person born in 1935 (a tweener) was simply both too young for the Dunkirk spirit and too old for the Woodstock spirit...
Look at two of Britain's more recent Labour PMs : Callaghan born in 1913 followed by Blair born in 1953 --- a 40 year spread !
No wonder then that the socialist Callaghan supported the maintenance of the British empire while the centrist Blair (and his conservative opponent John Major) did not.
They were simply generations apart.
I think the reason for the absence of those born in the 1930s is because they were either too young to convincingly support WWII's values from personal experience and too old to convincingly oppose WWII's values from lack of any personal experience with it.
And I think the key date in the changeover was 1990 : a date by which virtually all WWII veterans had to have retired from powerful positions at the top of the workforce because they had reached 65 .
Also a year when baby-boomers too young to share the war hype finally were old enough to be taken seriously as the national leader.
A baby-boomer, in my definition, is someone who is more exercised by why the Allies did so little to prevent the Holocaust (a story revealed post 1945) than they are emotionally stirred by stories of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk of 1940.
I think you'd have to be born in 1929 or earlier to really get caught up in the emotional high of 1940's Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain --- only a few children in 1940 who were younger than ten would really understand what all the fuss was about.
A person born in 1935 (a tweener) was simply both too young for the Dunkirk spirit and too old for the Woodstock spirit...
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