For a New Liberty at 50

I was born shortly after the end of World War II, in 1949, in the British occupied zone of West Germany. My parents were both refugees, endangered at or forcibly expelled from their original homes in Soviet-occupied East Germany. As countless others of my generation, then, I was raised by a generation of parents and teachers who had just experienced some horrific military defeat and were then subjected to harsh and often brutal treatment by hostile foreign occupiers. Humiliated, abused and intimidated, then, the generation of my parents kept largely quiet and obediently went with the “flow” as increasingly dictated in the West by the US. Hence, the “education” of my generation was to a large extent the result of Anglo-American propaganda and indoctrination. Every fad or fashion over there, in the lands of the victors, cultural or intellectual, was immediately imported and eagerly adopted by my generation.