Who wrote the following in 1969?
All through the land, this wondrous month of April, the student revolution has spread to campus after campus, even to the most conservative and the most apathetic. Last year confined to Columbia and a few other campuses, this spring’s revolutionary wave has hit all types of campuses, from mighty elite Harvard to working-class San Francisco State, from poor-boy Queensborough Community to formerly conservative Catholic Fordham. This is a wave that must be considered, that must be understood, for it clearly heralds a mighty and accelerating phenomenon in American life.
The obvious guess would be hardcore leftist communists like Bill Ayers or Kathy Boudin. Someone from the SDS or Weather Underground?
Nope. That was written by Murray Rothbard, one of the fathers of the libertarian movement. He wrote in The Libertarian Forum.
Welcome to the place the universe bends; the ‘anti-war’ movement. We’re seeing it play today in Edward Snowden saga.
As I write in an upcoming piece for Breitbart News. many people forget that the libertarian movement sprang from the 1960s radical antiwar movement. Side note: this is one reason hippie hating Ayn Rand eschewed the Libterian Party. Libertarian trailblazer Murray Rothbard discussed this in interviews like this one:
…here at last was not a namby-pamby “peace” group like SANE, which always carefully balanced its criticism of the U.S. and of Russia, and which also took pains to exclude “undesirables” from antiwar activity; here was a truly antiwar movement which zeroed in on the evils of American war-making; and here was a movement that excluded no one, that baited neither reds nor rightists, that welcomed all Americans willing to join in struggle against the immoral and aggressive war that we were waging in Vietnam. Here at last was an antiwar Left that we could be happy about!
Note that Rothbard was exicited that the radicals in the SDS were ‘zeroed in on the evils of American war-making’ without trying to balance that criticism. This brazen context dropping is a key component of the anti-war movement’s Anti-Americanism. This works to their advantage because the United States is clearly the worst country on the planet when you don’t compare it to every other country on the face of the earth.