I was a campus radical in 1968. My professors put up guideposts that are missing today.
Paul Berman’s books include “A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.”
Sympathetic adults used to say to us student radicals in 1968, “I agree with your ends but not with your means.” By this they meant to applaud our lofty ideals and to deplore our raucous and too-raucous riots and mayhem. But these days, I discover that my own views have taken an opposite turn. The raucous aspect of student protests seems to me only a secondary problem even now.
The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, which might seem odd in the context of a student strike in 1968 in New York. But nothing was odd. In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger.
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