In the past few years the word hypocrisy has been used increasingly in political discussions. The author of a column last year in the New Yorker wondered, for example, whether some good might come of America’s recognition that the Vietnam …
It now is a fact taken for granted that there are a variety of Communist regimes pursuing ever more divergent policies. In that narrow sense, the Titoist heresy has won an irreversible victory. Yet little attention has been paid to …
Differences which can be summed up in a few words can mean, in historical reality, enormous, complex, and difficult social transformations. —Pavel Machonin The destiny of the so-called socialist societies of Eastern Europe is one of the great questions of our …
When I was growing up during World War II, my slightly older friends returning from the military kept saying, “If we win this damned thing the only reason will be that the other side makes more mistakes than we do.” …
A Study of George Grosz My question is simple: is it possible for a man to know if his society is heading for a disaster he would just as soon avoid? The history of the 20th century shows this to …
The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature …
Socialism in our time is undergoing a crisis. It is not a crisis of existence, for our age has seen the arrival of socialism on a scale that surpasses the fondest hopes of socialists of the past generation. Indeed, it …
Hollywood movies used to make the gangster “understandable” by allowing him a human weakness, and the same trick of complication was played on cops. The unstated principle seemed to be: cops and robbers have more in common with each other …
The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, by Gershom Scholem. New York: Schocken Books. 376 pp. At the core of every religion is the problem of making sense out of injustice, imperfection, disorder, and human limitation. The …
Ed Sanders, veteran of the disbanded rock band The Fugs—hence aristocrat of the counter culture which had for popes Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles, for king and queen in exile Timothy Leary and Bernardine Dohrn, for princes of the royal …
Despite its brevity, the 14-day war between India and Pakistan marks a major diplomatic watershed, and despite the localization of the combat it will strongly influence the future of southern Asia and relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, …
Kibbutzim are familiar landmarks in Israel’s landscape. The roughly 230 kibbutzim that have been founded since 1910 have made an enormous impact on the ideology and politics of Zionism and on the evolving institutional and social structure of, first, Palestine …
Originally I had planned to devote this Letter to the internal situation in Israel—the socioeconomic gap and the Black Panthers, signs of corruption in high places, the New Class, and other strains facing a fundamentally egalitarian society that finds it …
George Moldau, “Inspired by Amalrik,” Survey, August 1971 Three years after Russian tanks rolled across the border, the “consolidation” of a Sovietcontrolled regime has been accomplished in Czechoslovakia. A tiny Communist party, operating without popular support, has stabilized the Czech …
The 1968 French elections, held on the heels of the May riots, gave the Gaullist UDR and the Right generally a parliamentary majority. Everyone knew—as Edgar Faure, prominent member of the majority, said—that the primary cause of this success was …
