As the car moves from the airport through the city, memories return: the giant village of two-story houses we saw 38 years ago is still there. Tall towers in Stalin’s wedding-cake style now shoot up in-between every now and then, …
As I always tell my students at Johnson City University, it was not easy for educated Americans of the last century to throw off the yoke of European culture, especially that of British literature and opinion. In the first place, …
My title is not a misprint. The liaison between sex and socialism, though of long standing, has always been more an affair than a marriage. Except for occasional outbursts of passion, neither partner has been particularly eager to acknowledge the …
MARTOV: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, by Israel Getzler. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. 246 pp. $12.50. People who have experienced political defeat like to console themselves with the thought of historical vindication. The past has rejected them, the future …
So we have left footprints on the face of the moon. An admirable feat. We can congratulate ourselves, we can be proud, we have shown that it can be done. Most likely, it had to be done even though the …
THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM, AND REVOLUTION, by Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers. 128 pp. $1.25. Every once in a while I seek a bit of comic relief from the burdens of our Kafkaesque world. One unfailing source has been, …
Last June, while President Thieu was meeting President Nixon at Midway, a small group of intellectuals, students, politicians, and labor leaders gathered for dinner near the Truong Minh Giang market in a crowded quarter of Saigon. Not all of those …
That the President is often a mean-spirited man is no discovery; that he struggles painfully to overcome or conceal his character is also clear. But a president sets the tone of his administration and Nixon is no exception. Well, what is …
Spain made all the difference. Describing in 1946 his own evolution as writer and as political man, George Orwell commented that he had been confused and uncertain until about 1935, but “the Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned …
What was Stephen Spender to the students and what were they to him in 1968, “the year of the young rebels”? They, the engage and the enrages, were seeking to restructure the university and radicalize the society (Columbia, the Sorbonne), to …
Civil disobedience is generally described as a nonrevolutionary encounter with the state. A man breaks the law, but does so in ways that do not challenge the legitimacy of the legal or political systems. He feels morally bound to disobey; …
John Llewelyn Lewis was a miner, and he was very Welsh, his huge lungs filled with the coal dust, bitterness, rebellion, and majestic rhetoric of the Welsh coal fields. An Iowan by birth, Lewis became the voice of the American miner …
In 1932 I was living in Leningrad, and there I discovered the existence of clinical psychiatry when a person very dear to me was struck down by mental illness. Those were dark times, of shortages in the cities and famine in …
Progressive programs today have difficulty in finding a constituency that will demand basic redistribution of resources in the society. Progressive forces have demanded, of course, that the war in Vietnam be ended, and have hoped that this will lead to increased …
If we set aside the events of May 1968 (how aberrant they really were becomes increasingly evident), we may wonder whether it does not take a world war or the jolts of decolonization for France to lose her electoral equilibrium. The …