Seeds of Anarchy: A Study of Campus Revolution Edited by Frederick Wilhelmsen Argus Academic Press, $1.95 It has become a journalistic cliché, though it is being worked and overworked by more pretentious writers, that the European Continent, if not the world, is being rapidly “Americanized.” And certainly there is a good deal of truth in this cliché, as there is in most clichés. What is almost always ignored, but is perhaps as important, is that the United States is being rapidly “Europeanized” or “Continentalized.” The number of politico-ideological assassinations in recent years (John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King) is a sign of this (see my article, “Political Assassination: Two Historical Types,” NR, July 2, 1968).
So also, even more obviously, would seem to be the upsurge of politico-ideological anarchy and violence on some (if only a few) American campuses in the last half decade. Student exuberance and restlessness we have always had, but until roughly five years ago, this exuberance and restlessness generally expressed itself, in this country, through what we used to regard, in more innocent days, as “campus hijinks.” Politico-ideological turmoil on campuses we held to be essentially a foreign phenomenon, Latin American or Continental, thankfully alien to these shores. But now the lightning has struck us as well. In this sense, as in a number of others, we are becoming “Europeanized”; here, too, American isolation is gone.




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