Cometh the hour, cometh the Gen Z. Brave young people around the world are proving it
From Iran to Ukraine to Israel, it is young people who are risking life and limb for families, friends and their own futures
The political passions of Western youngsters are nothing short of dire. They neither know nor care what systematic horrors communism and the Nazi regime inflicted on tens of millions of innocent people. They think “climate catastrophe” is to be addressed by making life on earth as horrible for humans as possible. They think things like law and science are just racist constructions. Even their hedonism is horrible: take the preference for nihilistic drugs like ketamine and MDMA over and above the honest and hearty pleasures of a mug of ale or glass of Burgundy.
They’re not all like that of course – and there are some amazing, brave, innovative youngsters involved in the quest to save the Anglosphere and Europe from total ruin.
But where you really see the courage that lives within this generation is among those risking life and limb for the intermingled fates of themselves, their families, friends and nation. Their courage is rendered starkly in the old-fashioned terms of war and is visible in valiant battle, formal and not, against pure evil.
This round of Iranian protests, which may well finally topple the Ayatollah’s nightmarish 46-year reign, is mostly being conducted by young people. Really young. Children as young as 15 or even 10 are out protestingwith anti-regime placards. Year Six age. Let that sink in. Teenage girls are dying for the right to burn their veils and cut their hair. Tarlan, a 17-year-old protester from eastern Tehran, writes a sentence on her bedroom mirror with lipstick every night before leaving the house: “I’m willing to be the next one, if it means I’ll be the last.” Her courage has become known after catching light on TikTok.
Many of the women who have been murdered by the regime this time have been between 16 and 22. That these very young women are engaged in such courageous, life-and-death (and often death) activity against one of the most dangerous and evil regimes the world has ever seen is also remarkable. All too many of their peers in the West are preoccupied with such issues as those advertised by that grim ghoulette, Greta Thunberg. Recent large-scale polling shows how far young American and British women have swung to the Mamdani-embracing, performatively “progressive” Left.
The contrast only grows when we think of the Western Left’s response to the Iranian protests: sullen silence at best, and more often than not, brazen critique of, as I saw it on one Instagram wit’s account, the “Zionist monarchy” they believe is pulling all the strings. That Hamas-loving girls on Western college campuses are tutting at what their infinitely braver sisters are fighting in Iran is deeply mad.
Iran is not the only country whose frontline war against evil is being fought by Gen Z. Israel is also full of a generation of incredibly courageous young people who, at 18, head off to the army. The frontline of the Jewish State’s grisly defensive war in Gaza, the most horrible and complicated urban warfare ever waged, against the most monstrous enemy ever known, has been, in the main, conducted valiantly by teenage men with many women too.
The IDF’s efforts have involved mass mobilisation of reservists, bringing the average age of units up far higher than usual, but the infantry skew young. Many of them would much rather not have to risk their lives to fight against Hamas, and would prefer to finish routine army service then bunk off round Thailand, but most understand why, and for what, they are doing it. To say that our young people are morally underdeveloped next to these warriors is the understatement of the century.
And then there’s Ukraine, where conscription, like in Israel, saw tens of thousands of young men sent to the teeth of the Russian meat-grinder. More recently, young Ukrainian men have been deserting the army, desperate to get out of it, and the country, at all costs. The money that was proffered them them at the start, plus the moral imperative, has lost its appeal given how hopeless and brutal it all is – something which could easily have been avoided had the US decided to make sure Ukraine won.
At any rate, the disillusioned young men fighting for Ukraine – or rather, refusing to fight – are quite a bit further down the line than the Iranians and are less well supported than the Israelis. They are four years in defending their country in what the world has allowed to become a hopeless war. And even now, there are plenty of brave young souls like Pavlo Broshkov, interviewed by Reuters as one among a cadre of young fighters (of whom none, very sadly, remain standing). “I am 20 years old,” said Broshkov, recovering from horrific leg injuries. “I haven’t really seen life, but I went there. If I was offered to do it again, I would. I did what every responsible Ukrainian citizen should do.”
I would like to think that if push came to the kind of shove seen in Iran, Ukraine and Israel, that our Gen Z would wake up and step up too. The difference, I fear, is that the luxury ideology of Islamist-inflected Leftism has had time and oxygen to dig in deeper here.
But cometh the hour, cometh the youngster – and whole cities of terrible ideology can be swept away in one tsunami of necessity. I just hope it doesn’t need to get to that before our Gen Z get over their love affair with exactly the kind of ideas that the brave souls in Iran are fighting against.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
