Jeffrey C. Isaac’s review of Frances Stoner Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War (“Rethinking the Cultural Cold War,” Summer 2002) argues, in effect, that the end justifies the means. The end was the cause of liberal anticommunism. The means was the …
As the first anniversary of September 11 approached, a controversy over the meaning of that fateful day and the place it will occupy in our national self-understanding irrupted into public view. The debate emerged not as battling manifestos by prominent …
I would only support an American war against the current Iraqi regime if (1) the current regime blocks inspections and refuses to carry out its obligations to disarm and a renewed and reinforced policy of blockade, sanctions and deterrence has …
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel Harvard University Press, 2002 454 pp $29.95 Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam by John L. Esposito Oxford University Press, 2002 196 pp $25.00 Political Islam is all …
I do not support an American attack against Iraq under current conditions. Such an attack would be justified only with a broad spectrum of international support, based on a convincing consensus of imminent and extraordinary danger. Both disarmament and regime …
Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age
The Surveillance State
I support a war on the grounds that the current regime of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq is a criminal state that has gone beyond the pale even as judged by the very low standards of the Middle East region, …
The name James Chapin may not be familiar to many Dissent readers. He didn’t write a great deal for the magazine. Until the last year or so of his life—when he turned out superb political analysis for an unlikely outlet, …
Like a few million other people, I consider George Orwell one of my favorite political writers, but I don’t riffle through his books, looking for wisdom whenever a political crisis comes along. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, …
Telecom companies are staggering into the emergency rooms of the world economy, candidates for life support or even euthanasia. Long viewed as leading the way into the “information age” of productivity and enlightenment, they are suddenly presenting symptoms of what …
Civic Nationalism and the Left
When David Riesman died this past May at the age of ninety- two, it was something of a surprise to learn that he had still been alive. For an earlier generation of sociologists, such obscurity would have seemed inconceivable. The …
Hackers never were part of the mainstream establishment, but their current reputation as villains of cyberspace is a far cry from the early days when, first and foremost, they were seen as ardent if quirky programmers, capable of near-miraculous, unorthodox …
WHAT WAS THIS? I’d been invited to some Washington think tank for a May Day symposium on socialism, which also seemed to be a reunion of the old Shachtman-Meany-Kirkland Social Democrats USA. What strange error had led the planners to …
