What’s Bugging the Students

“What's Bugging the Students,” Atlantic, November 1965.

Excerpt:

What they seek is a pure and self-perpetuating popular revolution, not a “planned economy” or anything like that. And this is why they are so attracted to Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China, countries where the popular revolution has not yet become “bourgeoisified.” As for mass terror in Cuba and China—well, this actually may be taken as a kind of testimony to the ardor and authenticity of the regime’s revolutionary fervor. Our radical students, like other radical students before them, find it possible to be genuinely heartsick at the injustices and, brutalities of American society, while blandly approving of injustice and brutality committed elsewhere in the name of “the revolution.”