Re: Ernest Mandel remembers: fascism and the students (excerpt from a lecture given in Bonn, 29 January 1969)

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Ernest Madel wrote:
>The first advances which the fascists made, were mainly among student
movements and in student milieus. Hitler gained majority support at German
universities, many years before he actually had a significant proportion of
the German electorate behind him. The same applies to an even greater extent
to Italy and Spain. When the Popular Front battled at the polls in 1936, the
Latin quarter of Paris was, ironically, dominated - immediately before and
after the general strike of June 1936 - by the semi-fascist "Action
Francaise", i.e. by an organisation on the far-right of the French political
spectrum.<

interestingly, in the 1960s US, a lot of pro-war conservatives who had been more radical in their youth (such as Seymour Martin Lipset)  used this fact against the student anti-war movement. The rudeness of the SDS was equated to that of the SS. 

The nugget of truth here is that student movements can go either way, depending on whether or not they're allied with the working class and other anti-establishmentarian movements. Here at Loyola Marymount University, the most active student movement seems to be the anti-abortion folks. But it's possible that the young Democrats are rising.

Jim D.