Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 by Stuart Klawans Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 340 pp., $15.95 Around a decade ago, the Nation started publishing a movie critic who not only displayed the brains, sensitivity, social conscience, …
A certain kind of leftist just can’t help blaming American imperialism for September 11. In the search for “root causes,” their instinct to designate the United States as villain overwhelms their spirit of critical inquiry. Overlooking the perpetrators’ frank expressions …
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the word “genocide” in 1944 because he believed that, in the aftermath of the Turkish “race murder” of the Armenians and of Hitler’s extermination …
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein Princeton University Press, 2002, 336 pp., $29.95 Longtime labor supporters may remember the Joe Hill ballads or Ralph Chaplin’s anthem “Solidarity Forever,” but years ago, the unions stopped …
Early every Sunday morning, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, held Mass in the garden of his residence in the East Timorese capital, Dili. The day before the referendum on independence from Indonesia, …
Politics is about ends and means—about the values that we pursue and the methods by which we pursue them. In a perfect world, there would be a perfect congruence between ends and means: our ends would always be achievable through …
In early October 2001, grief still gripped much of the nation. Anthrax-laced letters kept the public, as well as media, in a state of acute anxiety. In this tense atmosphere, the U.S. government quietly changed its policy governing the Freedom …
On a ridge in southern Rwanda, a few miles from the Burundi border, lies the town of Butare. The National University is there, and for many years both the town and the province of the same name enjoyed a reputation …
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 can appear within two different frames of interpretation. The first sees them as attacks on the United States as a state and its people. The second views …
There are some who think that because the United States has global interests and a heart of gold, it is entitled to act just as it pleases, economically and militarily, anywhere it pleases-not a bad first approximation to the classical …
Free Trade Today by Jagdish Bhagwati Princeton University Press, 2002, 128 pp., $24.95 Free Trade Under Fire by Douglas Irwin Princeton University Press, 2002 248 pp $27.95 In 1985, the first few environmental organizations were beginning to look critically at …
Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last year, not only because of the success of the war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghans greeted that success. The pictures …
In the summer of 2000, I met Scott Slaten, an America soldier who had come to Pristina, Kosovo, two-and-a-half months earlier as part of a NATO-led peace keeping force (KFOR) providing security for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). …
Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman Verso, 2001, 364 pp., $35 In the months after the Nazi invasion of France, while hoping for an exit visa but expecting Stalin’s henchmen, Victor Serge managed to write …
If man were to begin by studying himself, he would see how incapable he is of going beyond himself. How could it be possible for a part to know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to a knowledge of …
