Youth who do not want to be fascists

He fell silent. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro let tears fall with a restrained gesture. “It hurts me deeply to see that one, two, or three generations have completely failed this generation. That is to say, we are leaving the incoming generation a world in ruins, with its moral, social, and spiritual fabric disintegrated,” in a statement that rose as a generational apology, as a plea for forgiveness for not having known how, been able to, or wanted to act as a transmission belt, as a generation, for the values that have sustained Western civilizations for the last three-quarters of a century.

Del Toro's emotion is neither vacuous nor banal. It is born from a deep concern for today's youth and the world we leave them to rebuild. Neither the boomer generation nor Generation X have known how to maintain the scale of values in which they grew up. The world is divided, adrift, and the youth of yesterday fix their anger on the adults of tomorrow whom they themselves have not known how to guide.

The fixation on young people goes back a long way. Perhaps from May 68? Perhaps from the student revolts against the final days of the Franco regime? Perhaps from the illusion of the new democracy? The old wanted the maintenance of a statu quo and the forced respect for a severe morality with direct and undisguised repression of adolescents and young people, who presented themselves as the standard-bearers of freedom: labor, ideological, moral and sexual.

But not everyone, of course. I remember the skepticism of the late Tomeu Ferrer when he was told that young people were the ones who had to change everything. “Do not trust the youth, because they are no more left-wing than the rest of society,” said the old fighter from Manacor. And perhaps he was right.

‘Fracture’, is today the word.

The rebellion of the youth of 60 years ago confronted an outdated, exhausted, and repressive system, which, moreover, sustained its existence on the privileges of those who had always been in command. The rebellious youth of 60 years ago was radically left-wing, revolutionary, if you will.

Now, on the other hand, rebelling means wanting to bring down a system that has been built as an alleged guarantor of people's fundamental freedoms and rights. Rebelling, today, has become a far-right ideal. Or not even that. Let's think about France. Let's think about Barcelona, this past weekend. Young people without ideological bias who have only in common the fact of feeling expelled by the system. Condemned to school failure and to wander through a labor market that will put every obstacle it can in their way to curb any option for personal and economic progress. This is the fracture with the system that is now being used.

Last week we published in the magazine Cent per Cent an interview with the spokesperson in Mallorca for the youth organization Arran regarding the general strike call for next November 11th. The spokesperson denounced that today young people “cannot emancipate ourselves, because the market is controlled by the elites.” At that point, dozens of comments appeared: that she doesn’t work, that she is too young, that she knows nothing, that she hasn’t left her home, that she is naive… As is now the custom, some of the writings were from anonymous profiles, but the majority had a clear profile: older men. Generational fracture and gender fracture. Today, for a young woman to express an opinion and to do so at the antipodes of the fashionable rebellion has become an exercise, for many, that is intolerable and an unredeemable sin: being young without being a fascist.

But there is room, within the reactionary wave, for hope. Mamdami in New York, Die Linke in Germany, the socialist miracle of old Lula in Brazil, the Students' List in Serbia, transversal and without leaders…

This is the third fracture. Within the same generation, there coexist the chauvinists who will vote en masse for Abascal and Alvise while idolizing Vito Quiles, the deracinated lumpens who organize through social networks to loot expensive stores in large cities, and the upper-middle-class daughters who cry out desperately for decent housing accessible to all young people and the population in general.

The one and the other resemble each other like chalk and cheese, but the same spark has ignited them: the final demolition and the subsequent reconstruction of the world in ruins that they have inherited from us. And from these disjointed and disoriented revolts, a new model of civilization will have to be born that we, the old boomers of the 20th century, will very likely not be able to comprehend. It will be all we can do, like Guillermo del Toro, to apologize for the disaster we are leaving behind.