I admit it freely: I am still not a TikTok user. I belong to the boomer generation, for whom the world of 15-second videos, where content is just a backdrop for compulsive scrolling, remains an alien planet. Of course, as a media professional, I am drawn to its massive reach – numbers in the millions that the traditional press or even internet portals can only dream of today. However, every time I am on the verge of creating an account, one thing stops me. Fear. Or rather, physical disgust. I am repelled by the stench of those who control these reach figures. Because if anyone thinks this is just a dancing app, they are naive. It is the most powerful weapon of mass destruction, aimed at the minds of our children, with Beijing and Moscow pulling the trigger together.
In the summer of 2025, we saw this weapon fire. And with terrifying effectiveness. After years of failed attempts to convince my generation—people who remember the Cold War, the Polish People’s Republic, and 1989—the Kremlin changed its strategy. They realized that “boomers” can no longer be reformatted. We have the vaccine of memory. That is why all resources were thrown into the battle for the minds of Generation Z. A generation for whom the Soviet Union is prehistory and freedom is something that is given once and for all, like air or Wi-Fi.
The operation, which swept through the smartphones of European and American youth between May and September, was a masterpiece of social engineering. Russian strategists, using a Chinese platform (which in itself shows the alliance between these regimes), inoculated the virus of “soft pacifism.” There were no sickles, hammers, or portraits of Putin. Instead, there was “sad vibes” aesthetics, melancholic music, and emotional blackmail.
The main narrative that flooded the internet was: “This is the war of the boomers.” Russian propaganda, dressed up as concern for mental health and ecology, conveyed a simple message: “Why should you die for the mistakes of old politicians in suits?” “Why should your life be wasted in a trench because of someone else’s ambitions?” In the summer, when Europe began to timidly discuss the need to reinstate universal conscription or reserve training in response to the collapse of the US protective umbrella, TikTok exploded with hysteria.
This was not the pacifism we know from the days of hippies or protests against the Vietnam War. That pacifism had an ideological basis, sometimes naive, but moral. The pacifism of TikTok AD 2025 is narcissistic. It is pacifism based on the cult of “me.” “My mental health,” “my comfort,” “my career.” Russia, a totalitarian state that feeds its own 18-year-olds into the meat grinder near Kharkiv, promotes extreme individualism in the West. It convinces young French, Germans, and Poles that refusing to defend their homeland is the highest form of self-care. That desertion is “self-care.”
Influencers – some of them cynical agents of influence paid by intermediaries in Dubai, but most of them simply “useful idiots” chasing clicks – began to promote anti-system content en masse. The war in Ukraine was presented not as a clash between civilization and barbarism, but as a “conflict over resources” in which “both sides are evil” and the only victims are the planet (because tanks emit CO2) and young people.
The effects are devastating. Polls conducted in September 2025 in Western European countries showed a drastic decline in support for NATO among 18-29 year olds. This is no coincidence. It is the result of brainwashing. We are dealing with a generation that has been convinced that the nation state is obsolete and that the duty to defend it is a form of slavery.
For the Kremlin, this is an ideal situation. They do not need to defeat NATO militarily. All they need to do is raise a generation in the West that, when faced with a tank, will not take up arms, but a phone to record a “story” about how scared they are and how unfair it is.
The stench I mentioned at the beginning is the smell of decay. The Chinese owner of the algorithm precisely promotes content that divides, weakens, and demobilizes Western societies, while blocking or cutting off the reach of those who try to explain what the Russian threat is. It is an alliance of autocracy against our future.
As a boomer, I look at this with horror. I see Russia cultivating a “fifth column” not of ideological communists, as in the 20th century, but of lost, overstimulated kids who have been told that cowardice is a virtue and ignorance is freedom. If we don’t find a way to get through to them with the truth — to explain that their “comfort” exists only because someone else is holding a rifle on the eastern border — we will lose this war. Not on the front lines, but on our own children’s smartphones.
PB
