Do you agree with our readers? Have your say on these MetroTalk topics and more in the comments. There is something ironic in the fact that on the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, the results of a new poll reveal that more than half of Gen Z believe life would be better under a dictatorship, and a third would support a military junta (Metro, Tue).
![[Social Media Communication]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/GettyImages-1423080498.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
They obviously have no idea of what life was, and is, like for the billions who had and have first-hand experience of living under such regimes. Can they possibly be oblivious to the Stalinist purges in the former USSR, Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews (and a further five million political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies), the thousands of Spanish murdered by Franco? Or the millions of Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died at the hands of Saddam Hussein, the Ugandans massacred by Idi Amin, the untold dead of North Korea, Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentine military dictatorship.
![[Living a Zero Waste Lifestyle]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/GettyImages-1371981301.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
The results of this poll only serve to reinforce the argument against the lowering of the voting age to 16. Those who dream of living in a dictatorship would soon live – if they survived at all – to regret it. Bob Readman, Sevenoaks. ‘We are all living in a land of make believe right now’.
Gen Z have lived their entire lives under the influence of the internet, so what this poll tells me is that they are very polarised in their opinions. I am not suggesting that my own group, Generation X, or others are perfect, but I think we have more of a perspective on life. I would suggest that they, and the rest of us, are all living in a kind of land of make believe right now.
