Hippies After a 60's Atomic War

Curious, if there's an Atomic War between the Soviets and West in the 60's (Mid to Late), what happens to the Hippies?

They were all about Peace, Love, and changing society, and were even starting to flee to the hills with the Hippie communes thus establishing their own societies in a way. Could they try to rebuild a society in their peacey, lovey way? Could the communes actually survive or do anything? I mean, I'm picturing a Tolkein-like* Medievalist Hippy agrarian feudalistic society. Although the more likely result is a bunch of kids who have no idea what they're doing.

*The Flower Children loved JRR Tolkein.
 
most Hippy communes didn't work out in OTL, though fewer drug dealing bikers might help
Well, that is a fair point. Hippies either had their communes fail because they didn't know what they were really in for, or members just got bored and started to leave until no one was left. And sometimes a bit of column A, and a bit of column B.
The new deal here would be, there'd be no alternative. You can't go back to civilization. You can't collect welfare checks in a communal pot and go out to get supplies. You can't get bored and return to suburbia.

Could "The Whole Earth Catalog" help?
 
Easy victims for the biker gangs.


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They rejoin mainstream society, and succumb like everyone else to the hard-edged realisation that they are now living in a world where survival is a scarier thought than having died in a nuclear holocaust. I really think any propagation of hippie ideas like peace and love will be seen as especially naive, when the wider population are probably now competing for uncontaminated foodstuffs and avoiding disease.

If the hippies are in a commune however, somewhere isolated with good farmland, they might survive, but only if they know what they're doing. If they are, as you put it, 'a bunch of kids who have no idea what they're doing,' they'll likely starve to death.

Well, they were doing stuff. It's just that most of the time, they were way over their heads and having trouble getting by. But if it's a choice between getting shit together or starving, I think they'd try to get their shit together. There's no society to wander back into now. They have the whole world to rebuild if they want; they just have to take the first steps.

Again, would the "Whole Earth Catalog" help? Isn't that some Hippie survival guide?
 
Curious, if there's an Atomic War between the Soviets and West in the 60's (Mid to Late), what happens to the Hippies?
Well, first off during the 1960s the soviet arsenal was still relatively limited (per wiki: between 5,000 and 10,000 warheads depending on the exact date, compared with a US arsenal of 25,000-30,000) and while ICBMs and SLBMs were in service, both were still relatively immature (read reliability and accuracy less than brilliant -so a need to point multiple missiles at one target; most versions in service being liquid fuelled with resulting limits in response time; etc.)... forcing much of the nuke delivery capability onto bombers.

Both sides had functional air defense systems including Fighters and SAMs... thus, many of the bombers deployed would have been lost and nukes expended taking out air defense asets, cutting back on the number of nukes that actually reach strategic targets. Given the simple difference in number of bombers the yanks are likely to come out ahead in terms of number of bombs getting through.

Thus, chances are that while the USA would suffer quite a few hits the level of direct destruction would not be as bad as an exchange in the 70s or 80s... so, chances are there's still a moderatly functional government with control over most of the US. So, any hippies that take to the hills will come down to find not an empty land for them to rebuild into a world of love, pot and hope, but rather a damaged and enraged but still functional US...

Of cause, indirect effects of the exchange may then promptly squish both the US and the Hippies (the actual ability of a nuclear exchange to cause a nuclear winter is under debate... but if you cop one then it'd be nasty).
 

NothingNow

Banned
Could "The Whole Earth Catalog" help?

Massively. Books like the Whole Earth Catalog and Back to Basics are pretty damn useful in these situations. Back to Basics covers pretty much everything you need to know about pretty much everything in this situation bar Fallout precautions, which should be in Civil Defense publications. The Whole Earth Catalog is a bit less practical than Back to Basics, but still extremely useful.
I own both, and have them properly packaged for longevity with a hell of a lot of seed in the same bag. Come the End and I shall be ready.
 
There was an wisecrack about how if you get mugged are you going to call a hippie? Well, if you're starving are you going to call a cop?

In the wake of a nuclear war there would be lawlessness, bands of marauding mutant bikers and what not. The hippies in the scenario described would have seen the world that they had left behind go up in smoke. Materialism, militarism, capitalism or any other ism you care to mention would have been discredited. They would have been forced to muddle through as best they could, this time with out a net. It would be the people who can function as a group that would have the advantage in the long run.

And before you go on about the stereotypes regarding peace, love and granola with hippies being easy marks for those predisposed toward violence. Spend some time in the rural Pacific North-West where messing with someones marijuana patch could get you a load of bismuth shot. Most the hippies I know tend to be very pragmatic and a shocking proportion of them are very well armed, unlike their right wing counterparts they do not advertise that fact.
 
I suspect that Hippies are completely outnumbered by rural farmers. The Latter group probably holds the largest voting power after this catastrophe.


I also question if the Hippie Movement would survive in the carnage of nuclear attack. This isn't about their loved one's dying in Vietnam now; now it's about how they put food on the table. No one is going to support the decision to start a nuclear war after its consequences become apparent.


But if the movement held, it would be vindicated. The Man has clearly destroyed the United States. Other opposing points of view (quite possibly Goldwater's Libertarianism) may well wind up on top, but this would probably lead to Hippies emerging as a major political force.
 

Geon

Donor
Hippies After the Bomb?

It's unlikely that the hippie "movement" would survive a nuclear war.

The hippies were counter-cultural and idealistic. That idealism would take a heavy hit once the first bombs started to fall. The majority of those who were in the movement came from middle and upper class families, how would they cope with a world where their "safety net" was now gone?

Assuming a best-case scenario where there is still some level of order in the country (i.e. The Cuban Missile War) it is likely the hippies will end up low man on the food chain. There won't be any time for philosophizing or playing around, it will be work or starve!

Putting aside the idea of mutant bikers and looking at realistic psychological effects of a nuclear war I don't think the hippie movement would have the inner strength to handle what was happening. At best, you would have many shell-shocked young men and women trying to get home, at worst you would have many committing suicide with massive drug overdoses to end the pain quickly.

Geon
 
It's unlikely that the hippie "movement" would survive a nuclear war.

The hippies were counter-cultural and idealistic. That idealism would take a heavy hit once the first bombs started to fall. The majority of those who were in the movement came from middle and upper class families, how would they cope with a world where their "safety net" was now gone?

Assuming a best-case scenario where there is still some level of order in the country (i.e. The Cuban Missile War) it is likely the hippies will end up low man on the food chain. There won't be any time for philosophizing or playing around, it will be work or starve!

Putting aside the idea of mutant bikers and looking at realistic psychological effects of a nuclear war I don't think the hippie movement would have the inner strength to handle what was happening. At best, you would have many shell-shocked young men and women trying to get home, at worst you would have many committing suicide with massive drug overdoses to end the pain quickly.

Geon

Keep in mind, Flower Power also had the idea that society wasn't where it should be and should be changed and fixed (to varying extremes). If the society that exists commits suicide with a nuclear war, it would be a testament to the idea that society was, indeed, broken and would seem to prove the Hippies right.

I think there could be disillusionment in the philosophy after an Atomic War, not because of society blowing itself up, but because of some of the things they may see after the war. Raping, pillaging, etc. But, perhaps to be a Devil's Advocate, no matter what happens or if they had to go out and hunt for food and not spend so much time on their butts thinking about peace and love, they could still live their lives by a Hippie philosophy.

The commune Hippies would be one of the better suited for surviving. They've already separated themselves from society, they have books for how to survive as noted previous, and I think most of them had attempts at self sufficiency such as farms. It'd be trial by fire, though. They would have to make their communes work, at least bare minimally enough to survive. There's nothing much to go back to.

Interesting idea...keep leftist support for guns and public arms. Someone should do a TL on this. (Make sure you include Robert Williams!)

Hippies actually started to carry guns in the latter 60's when the Establishment kept bashing their heads in, people started accosting their women, and the movement got militant in reaction to all that.
 
Hippies always struck me as a bunch of spoiled kids. I really don't see them doing well in a post-apocalyptic world. They'll try rioting once, and only once. If they thought the cops were brutal in a land of plenty, try them under martial law. Crickey, cops and soldiers were already just looking for an excuse to open fire.
 
Hippies always struck me as a bunch of spoiled kids. I really don't see them doing well in a post-apocalyptic world. They'll try rioting once, and only once. If they thought the cops were brutal in a land of plenty, try them under martial law. Crickey, cops and soldiers were already just looking for an excuse to open fire.

I don't know how I particularly interpret the Hippies myself. I think some were very much believers in the ideals. I think some likewise believed in them, but were in over their head and naive, and many of them would fall off the boat when things didn't follow their idealized version of the world and the Hippies. And I think many of them became Hippies just because it was the in thing. Instead of running away to join the circus, you'd run away to San Francisco and be a Hippie. Many kids were expecting Eden in the West, and just found themselves lost in a city without any money or support, and just roamed the streets. And I think that follows into is I think the core of this issue: In order to survive, the Hippies have to make things work in the real world.

I agree, if the Hippies try rioting, and a knee jerk police state manages to be put into place (which means the world is only semi-decimated), the Hippies will be on the receiving end of a lot of brutality. Perhaps not worse than what they were treated with in the OTL, since the Cops and Soldiers sometimes did many, many bad things to the Hippies and went beyond what they would do to other people on many occasions, but more frequently bad. Maybe that would enforce a separatism for the Hippies to go communalist en masse.
 
It might be useful if we establish which Hippies we're talking about:
the "spoiled middle class kids" taking a break from mainstream society
or the ones making a serious go at self-sufficiency.

One of the other things I recall from The Whole Earth Catalog (it's at my
parents' house so I can't check everything) is an essay on communes and
the problems with them, which boiled down to there being a core group
who work hard at making things work and have or try to learn the skills
they need and a usually larger group of temporary
members/visitors/hangarounds who treat it more like a vacation, accept
no responsibilities, assume all property is communal (meaning "I can use
this whichever way I feel without asking or telling"), wonder why they
should bother working in the fields when you can just buy TV dinners and
chocolate milk (and leave the packages wherever they finished them)
and so on.
 
The hippies were counter-cultural and idealistic. That idealism would take a heavy hit once the first bombs started to fall. The majority of those who were in the movement came from middle and upper class families, how would they cope with a world where their "safety net" was now gone?

Not quite upper class.........in fact, back then, the majority of upper class kids were probably conservatives if anything at all, contrary to popular belief, like those from some of the old-money families down South, or the East Coast(Hell, same thing is certainly true today, like here in Texas where I grew up. That hasn't really changed much in about 50 years or so.).
 
It might be useful if we establish which Hippies we're talking about:
the "spoiled middle class kids" taking a break from mainstream society
or the ones making a serious go at self-sufficiency.

One of the other things I recall from The Whole Earth Catalog (it's at my
parents' house so I can't check everything) is an essay on communes and
the problems with them, which boiled down to there being a core group
who work hard at making things work and have or try to learn the skills
they need and a usually larger group of temporary
members/visitors/hangarounds who treat it more like a vacation, accept
no responsibilities, assume all property is communal (meaning "I can use
this whichever way I feel without asking or telling"), wonder why they
should bother working in the fields when you can just buy TV dinners and
chocolate milk (and leave the packages wherever they finished them)
and so on.
I'll be looking mostly at the Commune Hippies or prospective Communal Hippies here. I don't know what becomes of the ones that are still in society.

The TV dinners will be stuck in grocery stores in the rubble of the cities, or otherwise already raided, and the milkmen will have been vaporized, or fighting for their own dear lives. I think a big thing here is to keep in mind the fact that it's either work right or die, and the reaction to that, and if they can work right, or if they will flounder. It could turn out like the settlers of America, where they find a way through all the hardship and make it work. Or it could turn out like "Lord of the Flies". Or some could go one way and some the other. Actually, "Lord of the Flies" would be a good thing to look at here, not because it will necessarily turn out like that, but because it examines human instinct, and humanity in relation to power and authority. It's also about a group (of boys) that is stranded away from civilization after a nuclear war. And we can look at the factors that would go into all of this. It doesn't mean someone will bash someones skull in with a rock and worship a Pig head, but it does show human dynamics.
 
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