Word: ploy
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...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. 2: "I only want to help." Positing a moral vacuum, students step in as chosen redeemers-"the Elect of History." Since they have a sense of mission rather than any specific purpose, they attach themselves to a "carrier" movement: civil rights, labor, etc. "Back to the people" causes are most popular with middle-class students, particularly if they permit an extra nose tweak for Father. (Mao Tse-tung has recalled the pleasure it gave him to side with the peasants that his father exploited...
...Ploy No. 3: "I always knew you didn't like me." Student movements are anxious that the Establishment (i.e., Father) behave badly. Indispensable to the morale of student movements is an "episode of repression." Nothing develops better "generational solidarity" among the students than official rejection, particularly when there is violence...
...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...