I have no serious disagreements with Leo Casey or Michael Kazin. Casey’s description of religious totalitarianism as the real enemy is persuasive. I will continue to argue for the condemnation of terrorism, whoever uses it, and for a general “war” …
Viewed from inside “history in the making,” a place where Americans now dwell, September 11 appears as a day that marked a radical change in our world. When we finally went to sleep that night, it seemed that a familiar …
In the early days of the Bosnian War, Colin Powell, who at the time chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to the conclusion that stopping the fighting would require the use of 250,000 troops. Then-President George Bush took his …
Seven years after the fact, the most enduring—and perhaps haunting—image of the Rwandan genocide is that of the nameless Hutu peasant standing over a pit of putrid corpses, a machete in one hand and a radio in the other. The …
Here are five tangential responses to Michael Walzer. (1) Remember, in 1989, the left’s hope that the end of the cold war might bring a “peace dividend,” an economy less dependent on war? Those hopes died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and …
“What is there to ‘admit’?” -Adolf Eichmann, pretrial testimony REBECCA WEST thought they were boring. Karl Jaspers hoped they might lead the Germans to salvation. Janet Flanner regarded them as an island of sanity in a sea of moral wreckage. …
This is not going to be a straightforward and entirely coherent argument. I am still reeling from the attacks of September 11, and I don’t have all my responses in order. I will try to answer five questions about terrorism. …
Early on the first evening I spent in Sarajevo during the siege, I took a walk from my hotel to Marshal Tito Street in the center of town. The electricity was off, as it usually was in those days, but …
The terrorist attack on September 11 evidently had two purposes. First, to inflict on ordinary Americans pain of the sort widely meted out to other civilian populations around the world by those who oppose their governments. Second, to polarize the …
This special issue, long in preparation, concerns bloody business-although not Osama bin Laden’s. It grapples, as Nicolaus Mills writes, with “the moral and political issues raised by the widespread mass killing and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor.” …
As we begin a new century, what is most striking about the human rights challenges we face is how different they are from those of the cold war era. Whereas the abuses of the cold war period came from strong …
Ethnic bigotry in Rwanda was born of history, amplified by an elaborate system of myths built up around that history, and broadly accepted by Hutu and Tutsi alike. It has often been remarked that Hutus and Tutsis—the latter make up …
This spring, graduate students at New York University made history when they won recognition for the first graduate student union at a private university. To accomplish this feat, students had to overcome the political and legal opposition of virtually every …
It is no surprise that this past April, after China returned the crew of an American spy plane that made a forced landing on Hainan Island following a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet, the Bush administration went out of …
Successive U.S. governments have relied on a simple catechism: the World Trade Organization equals free trade, which equals development. With this rationale the nation has been led into regional (NAFTA) and international (WTO) trade agreements. These so-called “free trade” agreements …
