They can be heard asserting that the university is the "creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement," an incubator of revolutionaries first, and place of learning only thereafter. They demand emphasis on increased student participation in university governance. The importance of activism is an essential part of higher education, they shout, and the voices of the students must be heard. They howl at the decadence of society in rhythms reminiscent of Ginsberg, commune with the forests and mountains and rivers, and read to each other from Nietzsche and Hegel and poets of current high regard. Those born of the middle class find themselves disgusted with middle-class liberalism, seeking to establish a culture to fight the bourgeoisie. Family life and the whole of conservative politics, to them, is repressive and insincere, hypocritical through and through.
While it might sound as though I'm describing the current culture of university students, this was the culture of students in 1920's Germany.
Mark Twain said it best; "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
There is a rhythm that goes often overlooked, if not completely obscured by the journalists and historians incapable of accepting their role in promoting mass-murdering dictators before their crimes are committed. This rhythm is often described as history repeating itself, but this hardly does justice to the subtlety with which the repetition arrives; because it is only after those whose praise allowed villainy to go un-investigated until its very last moments have completely whitewashed their complacency that a generation is raised, ignorant of the details which could protect them from making the very same mistakes. Mark Twain said it best; "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
There is no contentiousness to stating Germany's Depression following World War I laid the groundwork necessary for Nazism to succeed. But few seem willing to address the details of the youthful revolution taking place amidst the impoverished and college-aged Germans, who wished nothing more than to cast out the "old ways" and establish an "authentic" new order. Idealism, environmentalism, mysticism, paganism, unrestrained sexuality and rebelliousness, pure and simple, were the natures that made a twice-rejected art student such as Adolf Hitler so appealing when his political action came.
After all, fascism is by its very nature a movement of the young, exalting passion and action over reason and discussion. The opinions of the inexperienced and unknowledgeable, presented as pure for their innocence, must be made equal — even more equal than the opinions of others — to bring about the best of a new age. The old dogmas can only be defeated, they would have you believe, by idealistic action uninhibited by the cowardice which comes with age.
The same idealistic passion of activism could be seen in the 1960's, a time equally whitewashed of its terrorism enacted for the best of intentions. Self-styled revolutionaries under the banner of the Afro-American Society at Cornell University threatened death to any who opposed them; roaming gangs of racial segregationists asserted their righteousness through violence and pastoral speeches. University administrators were terrified to punish the Paramilitary Black Nationalists for fear of the judgement of courts of public opinion. These revolutionaries saw themselves as the opposite of fascists, and yet when one of their professors read aloud one of the speeches of Mussolini, they cheered enthusiastically. And one day, armed with rifles, shotguns, and baseball bats, they took over the Willard Straight Hall Student Union to demand ethnically-pure educational institutions, staffed and run by members of their own race. They said it was in response to finding a cross burning outside their dorm, but it was later revealed that they themselves had built and set fire to that cross -- a Reichstag Fire for a new generation.
With every other generation we see it, and fascism rears its ugly head in America, in the most American ways possible. But just as in Germany, and Italy, it does not rear from the right; it is only in the aftermath that those who supported it so strongly in the media and academia attempt to wash their hands of the crimes, and lay the blame at the feet of their political opposition. It is only fortune that the United States has no feudal past from which class struggles can evolve into something far more sinister. The darknesses of our past pale in comparison to those of Germany and Italy, and likewise the darknesses which spring forth from the soul of our nation are more easily defeated by the aspect of our national soul which distinguishes us from Europe.
American exceptionalism, for its best and worst qualities, always wins out against the forces which seek to destroy it. And it will again, and again after. Democracy and liberty is in our blood. We must only remember to disassemble the infrastructure which this liberal fascism puts in place, lest our acceptance be our downfall in a battle of attrition against us. And we must report and document all of history, even the parts which we might regret, lest our grandchildren are forced to learn the same lessons again.
