How could 60s counter culture even start when America had just saved the world, given rights to blacks...

How could 60s counter culture even start when America had just saved the world, given rights to blacks, and had gone through the 50s, the pinnacle decade of Western civilisation?

Does this show that people desire something to complain about?

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Communist subversion.

>given blacks rights

sure the right to the hose

>mai golden age ruined by hippies

If you are going to discuss history throw off the ideological goggles if you want anyone to take you seriously.

where are you from you seem to have a distant and idealistic vison of the 50s not what we were taught in school

It is an academic thing. Some kinds of philosophers became more popular and influenced the intellectual elite, which in turn influenced the rest of society.

I remember reading about those American soldiers that were locked in Vietnam for 7 years. They couldn't recognize America anymore, due to this.

Communist infiltration.

>suppression of civil liberties in the name of anti communism
>non whites treated like second class citizens
Why are the 50s so glorified?

Because /pol/lacks.

b-but FALLOUT video games!

Well crime rates were a lot lower then. Now all they do is commit crime

You people are fucking stupid

Post WWII U.S. is probably the most prosperous era of any nation in history up until some time in the 70s, and I'll throw you a bone so you don't whine more about /pol/ and say that it effectively ended with Reagan.

The irony of Marxist revisionism crying about muh racism when there was no better time to be middle or working class is amusing

Also ironic in the fact that despite African-Americans faced open discrimination in the South, they didn't suffer from many of the social issues effecting them today.

The fallout old world was more one of scarcity and conflict, not the idealistic bs that Bethesda tries to shill

>implying I believed what they taught me

I simply said that was what I was taught, maybe we should have eased them into proper society, instead of giving them rights all at once

Does Marxism mean anything at this point?

The 70s may have been a rough time, but you'll neeeeeeeever guess who managed to single-handedly fucking destroy America's future forever because this whole fucking country is too busy uncritically sucking his cock 24/7.

Dialectics you idiot

>low crime
>low unemployment
>everything becomes more affordable
>heaps of working class families jumping into middle class over the span of a few years
>30% growth of purchasing power over one decade
>new comfortable and affordable housing
>advances in car and airplane transportation
>interstate system built
>gigantic advancements in medicie
>focus on family values


But of course, all of that is irrelevant because MUH BUS SEATS and MUH BLACKLISTED SCREENWRITERS.

>the 50s, the pinnacle decade of Western civilisation?
>most of Europe in ruins
>America intact

What a disgusting decade that was.

It was a population boom that was bound to collapse

90% of which only applied if you were white

>implying any of that is sustainable

Wrong

Unless you were black in the South is also applied to you

It's ironic that despite living in a time where systematic racism was rampant in some parts of the country, African-Americans were still better off in some ways.

Also, the country was 90% white during that time so you're pretty much talking about everyone anyway

The blacks were only 10% of the population. TEN PERCENT. And it's not like they were prohibited from owning cars and houses.

You're profoundly missing the point.

Yeah, it wasn't sustainable, for various reasons. But for the period when it was sustainable it was pretty damn good, which is why the time is looked back on fondly.

I guess, but it's important to note that that kind of era brings its own demise. No point fantasizing about it

Counter culture included being more accepting of other cultures, re-connection with nature, free love, and music, among other things.

It's not hard to see how that came about, people were willing to take on bigger issues because of the period of growth and prosperity. The people that were historically oppressed and problems people saw in the world finally seemed able to be overcame. They weren't just looking for something to complain about, there has always been poverty, there has always been suffering. Why is it weird to want to make it less?

from buying houses in certain neighborhoods, yes

>he fell for the golden 50s meme

user, the 50s started with a devastating, unpopular war. Truman's approval rating by the end of the Korean War was lower than Johnson after Tet or Nixon during Watergate.

Throw in the absolute terror of nuclear annihilation, the spooling up of the civil rights movement, and the pervasive Red Scare, and you have a decade of building social tensions that led up to the political strife of the 60s.

I can't believe there are people who are saying Jim Crow was not bad....like maybe it's because I have really old parents who lived in that time period but this revision is insane.

There were only a few side effects (because I refuse to call them benefits) that probably were helpful inspire of mass discrimination. The Black upper class were indebted to the black masses, black teachers supported their students in an uplifting and empowering manner and it created the cultural renaissances from the 10's to present through utter deprivation.

But I mean for my sharecropping mother picking cotton with her siblings and her illiterate father they didn't benefit from any of that until they immigrated west and stayed away from migrating southern whites.

>It's a "The 50s was the best decade in America" episode.

>people think the 90s wasn't the peak of American civilization

people desire chaos and degeneracy. entropy is unstoppable. better give up and enjoy the ride to hell.

Absolutely none of your points argue against anything I said.

The Korean War was devastating. For Korea. The U.S. wasn't impacted at all, especially economically.

Other than the Cuban crisis, the threat of nuclear winter never became a reality until Brezhnev and Reagan went full retard in the 80s

The Vietnam War is where you can point the finger at the beginning of social upheaval and the twilight of the post-war boom in 70s as the end of the most economically successful period of any country, maybe ever. The Civil Rights movement was only really important for African-Americans, which I have conceded the time wasn't great for them but they were still better off in some ways.

So yes, nothing you've said refutes the 'golden 50s meme' especially in regards to the economy, which even detractors and revisionists are never able to argue against and always focus on social issues.

Teenagers and young adults found the culture of the time boring and stifling, and elements of it certainly were. They instead flocked to or created their own works, which took many forms, from something abstract like beat poetry to less esoteric, more concrete forms of expression, like the heavily blues and gospel influenced rock music that begun to pop up.

American parents, who were formerly enjoying a post-war population explosion, were shocked and outraged by these forms of expression for many reasons, and started what is often called a moral panic. Thus, disconnect between the generations begun to grow, a detachment that was certainly not helped by our aggressive foreign policy, which often put the lives of the (often disenfranchised) young people and racial minorities on the line.

Apparently it means disagreeing historical narratives annon doesn't or even trying to approach history without heavy political bias

The main issue for the hippies was social because of how conformist everyone was in the 50's. It sounds like a horrible decade

We were not better off at all user

What happened after the era of the 5 Good Emperors? What happens with every dynasty of Chinese Emperors?

someone puts their shitty kid on top of the pile and he shits down the peak

It is irrefutable that the country was better off economically. You are simply a moron if you think otherwise.

Orochi?

And then, that generation ended up depressed and hooked on drugs.

This is kind of why everything went to shit. Baby boomers were collectively the most spoiled bunch of cunts ever.

>MUH BLACKLISTED SCREENWRITERS.
congratulations. your world view is so sophisticated that 40% of your black text is based around a random movie that came out a year ago.

Better off economically because literally every country in the world was hit with a crippling disaster from war. This is simply economics not magic "golden age" or something. Of course that sort of state would end in a decade or so.

Better off socially is a matter of debate

The 50s were good because of relatively isolationist foreign policy.

The US fought a simple, defensive, conventional war, and then didn't lose a single man in combat until the end of the decade.

The 90s also had this pattern. A simple, defensive conventional war, followed by a lack of serious ground combat.

And then the neocons fuck it up with a poorly thought out foreign war.

You mean 15 years ago? The Majestic came out in 2001.

>Better off economically because literally every country in the world was hit with a crippling disaster from war. This is simply economics not magic "golden age" or something.

Nice circular reasoning

Not for black people

Not him but how is that circular reasoning

The point is it wasn't some sort of special cultural or idealogicl force that made economics good, it was that everyone else was in a depression, this meant the dollar had huge purchasing power.

It's not something the 60s kids "fucked up" but just the purchasing power going down because the depressed countries started recovering. This would have happened no matter what sort of idealogy the 60s kids had.

Now do you understand basic economics?

Absolutely. There's no doubt that the counterculture fucked up for its supporters, but they still tried.

>defensive conventional war
>didn't lose a single man in combat until the end of the decade

So I guess the Korean War doesn't count.

>defensive war
kek

why do you think? Kids grew up and became rebellious adults. Also the major tenets of early 20th century progressivism totally failed, some specific examples:

- TV replaced newspapers and radio as the main source of cultural socialization in households
- Americans became suburban, rather than urban, people
- railroads stopped being profitable and fell into serious disrepair. Penn Central RR even sold their historic NY Central terminal to the Knicks. A large part of this was government regulations on railroad pricing (which went away in the 1980s, and following that consolidation into the current big four US RRs). pic related
- welfare programs ripped families apart (for example, a mother could only obtain welfare if she was single)
- organized crime fell apart as their neighborhoods were filled with new immigrants, who made huge money off the then fetal drug trade
- blacks were now allowed to buy into white communities
- LBJ cut and run, destroying his party's coalition and tacitly admitting Vietnam wasn't winnable
- Nixon was a crook (a big fucking deal at the time)
- Mao died, and China was willing to liberalize some of their economic policies for US companies
- OPEC brought America to it's knees with the oil crisis (something which nobody had previously thought possible)
- the space race was won and NASA had gone to the moon first

tl;dr things changed

>10% of the population was worse off than the 90%, therefore it was shit

Free speech movement. Blame those fuckers up at Cal.

Communist subversion is a shit tier /pol/ meme. The US was already on it's way to giving women equal rights (as they did in the 1910s) and blacks equal rights after ww2. Truman himself desegregated the military, the writing was on the wall at that point.

The statement was

>The Civil Rights movement was only really important for African-Americans, which I have conceded the time wasn't great for them but they were still better off in some ways

This is incorrect

protip: the 50s were great for white people. Blacks lived in total poverty, with many rural areas resembling the third world (no water, power, or phone service). Illiteracy was extremely common, even gangsters today can read at a 3rd grade level.

For white people it was alright, if you ignore the recession in the early 1950s.

Lemmie tell you why that is wrong: Northerners are just as fucking racist. There were race riots as far north as Boston. If you moved from the deep south to New York City, you were still liable to face racism. Your house wouldn't be firebombed, but you could still be denied the same opportunities that were given to whites.

In what ways are blacks better off?

No, it wasn't 90% white, but it sure as fuck seemed like it was don't it?

Actually they were. If you were black and driving a police officer could pull you over and beat your ass for no god damned reason.

Honestly, I would argue that the civil rights movement is important to all Americans. It has really had a profound affect on many other movements, and has made America more of a welcoming place.

>1950s
>isolationist foreign policy

Eisenhower went full brinkmanship, putting nuclear weapons in any country he could. This is how the US got entangled in both Korea and Vietnam.

Conventional wars do not imply isolationism.

>the country was better off economically
>not for black people

and why did those people act as they did? Because they got to be on TV. The cultural impact of having an easily accessible visual medium (especially one that can operate in real time) can not be understated. This is how you get all the stupid "the whole world is watching" and "peaceful" chimpouts, because people know they are being watched and are playing for the camera

Neil Postman wrote about this specially in his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death".

>If you were black and driving a police officer could pull you over and beat your ass for no god damned reason.

This happened to me when I was a teen and I'm white. I'm being oppressed I guess.

yeah except nowadays when you were arrested you'd be given court-appointed legal counsel. This is not a right you had before Powell v Alabama:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._Alabama

>In Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932) the United States Supreme Court reversed the convictions of nine young black men for allegedly raping two white women on a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama. The majority of the Court reasoned that the right to retain and be represented by a lawyer was fundamental to a fair trial and that at least in some circumstances, the trial judge must inform a defendant of this right. In addition, if the defendant cannot afford a lawyer, the court must appoint one sufficiently far in advance of trial to permit the lawyer to prepare adequately for the trial.

which, of course, was also not very well enforced since nobody gave a shit about niggers until the feds imposed the civil rights act and thus opened up courts to litigation

I wasn't arrested. It happened exactly as described, a cop pulled me over and beat me up, then left.

Were you targeted and those in your community targeted for being white folks who were moving up economically by a black population who were in positions of authority and power on all levels of government?

If not its a false equivalency

I honestly don't know to this day, not that I really care. The cop was white so it wasn't about race I guess.

If he pulled you over and said, "where'd you get that car nigger?" Then congratulations, you are a 1960s black man.

See dude. Doesn't take away from the fact that the officer was a piece of shit, it just isn't the same.
A police office flashed a lighted/pulled a gun on me while walking home one night in my neighborhood and asked what I was doing there. Apparently people said they saw a suspicious man even though I was a Fucking 15 year old with an Afro wearing Hollister.

This /thread

>Why are the 50s so glorified?
Because people (/pol/) still blindly believe propaganda that was used against the reds 65 years later.

So is your autism special assistance-tier, or can you at least live independently?

Counterculture began in the 50s. It led to desegregation, not vice versa.

Bitter whites

>black people weren't prohibited from buying houses

KEK

I like how you can look at news and see whats going on today and say "yeah its just a meme, no communism here, boys!"

>you will never buy a new 50's Chevy
Just kill me now senpai

Actual social cohesion throughout most of society
Affordable and cheap housing
Being able to earn a livable wage and support a family with a high school diploma
General upward mobility
Interstates
Eisenhower in general
Racial homogeneity

>No, it wasn't 90% white, but it sure as fuck seemed like it was don't it?
Actually...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States#Historical_data_for_all_races_and_for_Hispanic_origin_.281610.E2.80.932010.29
>1950
>89.5% white
>87.4% Non-Hispanic white
Not quite 90% but pretty fucking close

Since the 90's ended with the WTC bombing, did the 50's end with Kennedy's murder?

>isolationist foreign policy

You're fucking nuts if you think the US was in ANYWAY isolationist in the 1950's.

>troops in Europe
>troops in Japan
>nukes in a multitude of countries
>the trip wire mechanism set against the Soviets

>90% of which only applied if you were white

90% of the population was white in the 50's

Look I get that Veeky Forums is has a heavy left bias but claiming the 50's were not a good decade because a small minority of people didn't also experience the roses is quite frankly pure shit. For vast majority of people, there was no better decade than the 50's.

There is NEVER going to be a time when 100% of people personally get to experience a golden age. Someone, a certain group of people, are always going to be on the bottom rung of society. The closest America has ever come and likely will ever come to perfection for the most amount of people was the 50's.

>How could 60s counter culture even start when America had just saved the world, given rights to blacks, and had gone through the 50s, the pinnacle decade of Western civilisation?

LSD is a helluva drug

Counter-cultures started in Britain, then they've got fashionable overseas.

The main difference between British subcultures and "American" subcultures is that "British" subcultures evolved from teenage gangs, American ones were mostly pacifism-related(I wonder why would sub-cultures composed mostly of young men be anti-war... must be communism). Case in point - rockers.

Violent Counter-Cultures existed in the US. In fact British ones were modeled after American ones. Like the Mods in the 60's were modeled heavily over the Greaser who were notoriously violent and anti-establishment. The Fonzie from Happy Days should not be taken as an example of what it was to be a Greaser.

>buying such a car
>wearing such clothes

americans everyone

The countercultures used it way too much, way too fast. Any psychiatric value that the drug had no longer mattered because Timothy Leary and his ilk decided that the drug was best for a "spiritual and cultural awakening", which the government would obviously have none of. Too dangerous

We were never in threat of Nuclear winter desu senpai

>TV replaced newspapers and radio
This, this is the biggest issue.

Reagan was legitimately the worst president the US ever had. I concur, he completely ruined the future generations to follow.

nice binary digits
care to explain?

Different user here - just off the top of my head
>Iran-Contra affair
>literally becoming senile during his presidency
>spiraling debt and deficit

Personally I don't think he's the worst president (hell, Carter was worse), but I really hate how the Right seems to worship him, especially given that he was against many of the policies the Republicans hold dear today. I still can't understand why it's Reagan and not Eisenhower that's worshiped as the ideal Republican.

Well I'm certainly no expert, but I am of course entitled to my opinion.
Giving full support in billions of dollars to the Mujahideen was a terrible choice. Radical Islam took off in the late 70s, and the Reagan admin fully backed it so that the USSR would have their own version of Vietnam, which they did.

You can obviously see the blowback from that today very much so. Radical Islam is an enormous problem, and one which has its birth with American financial and military support.

I remember reading something about business as well, were the Reagan admin made it so that working class earners were no longer making fair amounts in comparison to the US's elite businessmen who run the whole show. Their profits kept sky-rocketing while working class people kept losing out gradually. Look at the massive dead-money scandal which just got uncovered with the Panama Papers. Nobody's going to do jack shit about it though.

the 50's ended WHEN Kennedy came into office

>
That's not how you spell Woodrow Wilson.

>>Iran-Contra affair
>literally becoming senile during his presidency
>spiraling debt and deficit

First user here. Yeah I forgot this - how could I forgot South America.

Also forgot Henry Kissinger under Reagan. That kike deserves to be prosecuted. I fucking hate him. The Reagan admin, of course Kissinger being empirical here, gave the still-very-fascist Argentina direct political support during their "dirty war." Argentinians were protesting against the corrupt nature of their insane government, and something like 40-50,000 Argentinians were tortured to death for wanting to make change.

Meant for

"Quand la France s'ennuieā€¦ "

If Reagan ran again today on his same platform he'd have to run as a Democrat. Supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants would be enough