At university, twenty odd years ago, I knew a baby boomer ex-professor who had most of the standard Leftist opinions; we got on fairly well because I was more or less apolitical and like me he was generally very conservative about literature, abhorring Literary Theory in good measure. He was also quite brave, in that the university was then relatively conservative, so he was very much swimming against his immediate current.

His great moral touchstones were Hitler and sex, the former being the most evil man of all time, the latter being the only thing worth doing. So, typical r-selected hedonistic boomer. He had a habit of returning to the Holocaust, Nazis, and Hitler at the drop of a small hat, so when I was once ranting semi-seriously about chavs as a degenerate form of human life, he squirmed uncomfortably then expostulated grandly, “The Nazis said exactly the same thing about the Jews.”

I stared at him, thinking, And?

“And sometimes they were right!” he continued, then looked baffled at his own rather odd and (I suppose) anti-semitic remark, before continuing, huffing, “But this kind of language, this is exactly how Hitler referred to the Jews!” and then glared triumphantly as if to say, “I just likened you to Hitler: game, set, match.”

The Reductio ad Hitlerum is by now so common a tactic as to warrant no lengthy explanation; however, I often wondered why my boomer acquaintance would head unerringly and absurdly for a Nazi/Holocaust/Hitler reference, e.g.

Johannes Q: I forced myself to read this ghastly Lit Theory book, I ended up hating it so much I wanted to burn it, but –

Boomer: Johannes, the Nazis burnt books.

Johannes: Oh. Yeah. I guess.

Boomer: Then they burnt Jews.

Johannes: Oh yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t actually going to burn it. I was just –

Boomer: This kind of language is what enabled the Holocaust.

And so on. He was animated by an aggressive zeal to stamp out anything that in any way reminded him of Nazis, an attitude that seemed a bit odd to me at the time, but is now the norm among the twittering elites. I wondered why exactly he was so agitated, so highly-strung, as if he’d gone back in time to 1930s Germany and was just waiting for the jackboots at the door; when in fact he was living in a Leftist paradise of ever-increasing degeneracy and nihilism.

From the moment I met him, in the late 90s, he talked as if the State security services would soon take him away because he was a dangerous dissident who could well bring down the Government; I just assumed he had good cause to think so, since I tend to believe people, but over the next two decades nothing at all happened, the police did not kick his door down and give him a good drubbing, MI5 did not pop him in a sack and dump him in a reservoir, an old school friend did not pop by to gravely warn him that his name was causing terror among the elites, and he should leave the country immediately. Nothing happened at all. He just continued likening everything to the Holocaust, and everyone to Hitler, and occasionally intimating that he would certainly be executed or at the least imprisoned by the State, and the last I heard he’s still doing it, undisturbed by what he (predictably) calls “the Gestapo”.

Why, as the Joker would say, so serious?

Of course Leftists are usually emotionally damaged to begin with, demonstrating Borderline and/or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but all the same, the frenzied zeal and sense of mission and fear about the Boomer struck me as misplaced and odd. Turning it over in my mind, I recall that his father was wounded in World War 2, and the Boomer grew up in the 50s, no doubt bombarded with war and post-war propaganda about how uniquely moral it had all been, the fight of the good guys against the Ultimate Evil, on behalf of the Ultimate & Forever Victims. Growing up in this atmosphere, knowing that you would never get to fight in such an operatic, allegorical conflict, against so superbly evil an adversary, must have left some curious marks upon his psyche.

He and his generation were trained to think in terms of good vs evil, with evil unambiguously represented by white men who care about their people, their race, their land and their culture. This Manichean worldview left the Boomers with a sense both of a mission, and of being born too late to fulfil said mission. All they had left was to shriek “NAzi! HitleR!!!” and feel, momentarily, as heroic as their soldier parents and grandparents. Like a dog trained to fight an animal that no longer exists, all they can do is maul soft toys and play make-believe.