On the other hand, in the case of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and its mass youth movements propelled against the elder peoples in that country was manipulated by higher-ups in the Communist Party.
http://www.tfp.org/TFPForum/TFPRecommends/Books/mao_the_unknown_story.htm
Similar horrible excesses in manipulating youth movements in Southeast Asia in the 1970s led to the horrors of the Killing Fields under Pohl Pot.
In short, youth movements in many corners of this planet have sadly often been something to fear—especially by the oligarchies. Therefore, these sort of movements have either been put down brutally as occurred in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China in 1989, or have been bought off—as has happened in wealthier lands like Britain, Germany, the USA, Scandinavia, and even in Gulf Oil Sheikhdoms in recent decades. (Of course, unless the governments in these lands don’t make it easier for youth to spend years acquiring higher education—rather than try to enter the job market—pressure from soon-to-form full-blown youth movements are not impossible to imagine in Western Europe or North America, either.)
When I think of bought-off youthful generations, I often recall my days in Japan and my two decades teaching and working with Japanese and South Korean students at the university level.
I, personally, was amazed by how much impotence both Japanese youth in general and Japanese college students specifically were manifesting in the 1990s (and later) as their country floundered for nearly 15 years of recession and deflation.
The youth of that era in Japan have even come to be called by all observers as “The Lost Generation”. These age-cohorts were part of the mass of unemployed and under-employed youth in Japan between 1989 and 2003. (In short, Japan was a nation which only finally got out of its economic depression 5 years ago—only to face another one this autumn in 2008. Will youth be able to accept any more of the status quo in life-business and economics?)
I lived in small-town Japan from 1992 to 1994. In small towns some young people have often ended up locking themselves up in their rooms for years.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6535284
For this reason, the source of most domestic violence in Japan has been viewed as a role reversal, whereby much domestic violence in the U.S. is simply “adults versus children” or between two spouses, a lot of Japanese domestic violence comes from youth against their parents.
These youth are called hikikomori in Japanese. Michael Zielenziger, a scholar at the East Asian Studies Center in Berkley, is an expert on hikikomori. Zielenziger explains that most hikikomori, are “young men who lock themselves away in their bedrooms,” and they are “fearful of society's expectations.”
Japan's aging working class now also face young women who “shun motherhood”, and do their best not to continue to rebuild the burdensome family relationships that their parents have put up with for generations.
COMPARING THE GREEKS AND JAPANESE
Unlike in Japan, where neither psychological training holds much sway nor where other modes of handling changes in the modern-economic tendency to alienate and under-employ its most youthful populations, Greece should have known better. Greece has experienced youthful discontent every generation for nearly two centuries.
Nonetheless, Greek government leadership this decade has appeared not to appreciate the alienation of its youth at all—despite having much more experience of youthful rebellion and anarchism than has existed in Japan over the past 6 decades.
So, in a fairly brash action, the Greek government, in 2004, began to go out of its way to further alienate younger citizens. The government did this, for example, by reducing the number of university seats available to graduating Greek students and by running up the cost of education while trying to privatize numerous parts of the higher education system in the country.
