Word: feuer
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Like a sort of campus crime reporter, Feuer hustles from century to century and country to country-Germany, Russia, Japan among others-gathering evidence to support his group-neurosis theory. The theory is, at best, debatable. And like most men with a pet theory, Feuer seems compelled to hand in evidence in his own favor. But his book makes fascinating reading as a partial compilation of the games a great many young people play. With allowances for Feuer's bias, the basic game of Getting Back at Father goes like this...
Ploy No. 1: "I can't respect you any more." The opening gambit for all student movements, says Feuer, is "the moral de-authorization of the older generation." Like a replay of Death of a Salesman, a million sons must unmask the hypocrisy of a million fathers. Feuer writes of three generations of 19th century Russian students: "Each generation refused to be morally castrated as its fathers had been...
Ploy No. 4: "You made me do it." Feuer sees terrorism as the natural climax to student movements, since after all what Freud's "primal sons" want to do to Father is symbolically kill him. In Feuer's version of history, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I, reads like this: the young Bosnian student Gavrilo Princip "finally achieved his place as a father-destroyer . . . even though it also meant the destruction of himself and the maiming of European civilization...
Ploy No. 5: "I don't care what happens to me." Feuer believes that student movements have a morbid need for what the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini called "the touchstone of a martyr." The suicide rate in student movements has been conspicuously high. In Japan, at a peak of student unrest, suicide (the "ultimate test of one's sincerity," the ultimate thwarting revenge on Father) became the No. 1 cause of death among those under...
...Feuer finally judges student movements to be both destructive and self-destructive. "Parricide, regicide, and suicide"-so goes his sequence. He heaps blame on students for a lot more than just World War I. You name the issue; Feuer makes a tie-in. Fascism: Student Leader Karl Pollen and his dagger-wearing elitists "set back for a generation the liberal aspirations of the German people . . . The heritage of the German student movement of 1817 was transmitted to the Nazis." Communism: Russian students "stood back perturbed and bewildered," says Feuer, when the Bolshevik Revolution finally occurred...