Right now, a bimonthly is not exactly the most convenient medium for commenting on the rapidly shifting and enormously exciting political events of the past few days. It would be foolish, a few weeks before these words reach print, to …
Kudos for Abel Editor: Thank you for Lionel Abel. On an exacting day, when fire and brimstone rained down from heaven, rigorist judgment had stipulated for ten. But I believe the March–April issue of Dissent can be saved by just this …
For some time now I have been teaching in a Harlem elementary school and trying to understand the attitudes shown by the parents toward the school. Last September, the teachers’ strike forced me to speculate on how the hostilities of …
In the 1890’s Kansas—dominated by Republicans since Civil War days—fell to the control of the Democrat-People’s party. Political passions were fired so high that armed conflict in the capital was threatened. This state of affairs became known as “The Matter with …
What is most interesting about Felix Greene’s new film—Inside North Vietnam, now showing in New York and theatres throughout the country—is that, for all its claims to truthfulness and humane feeling, it employs a strategy of propaganda not radically different …
This past fall, peace groups in over a dozen cities across the nation sought to place the issue of the Vietnam War before the voters in the November municipal election through use of the initiative petition or referendum.* This novel …
Those who believe that the American economy can provide the means both to fight the war in Vietnam and wage massive attack on poverty at home must also believe that economic resources can be shifted from private to public purposes, …
Problems of “Legitimacy” Editor: Michael Walzer is in error when he says, “The `Call to resist illegitimate authority’ is . . . misnamed. It is a call to resist the immoral acts of legitimate authorities.” I am astonished that he …
“England,” said a European statesman, “offered a Europe of computers; Couve de Murville chose a Europe of sugar beets.” Beyond the political considerations that led General de Gaulle to veto England’s entry into the Common Market, there was, indeed, the choice …
To an audience of Parisians, in 1950, Bertrand Russell insisted that the philosophy of Hegel (which he had always said he could not understand) was responsible for German fascism: it was Hegel, not Gobineau, Haeckel, or Stewart Chamberlain who had …
What, yet more books on the concentration camps? Who wants to read them—to stir up painful memories, to unbury the dead? But are we so sure we have learned the lessons of the camps, that key phenomenon of the mid-twentieth …
In the last year’s Arab-Israel crisis, most Of US on the democratic Left supported the Israeli cause. Our justification for this had little, if anything, to do with Zionist sentiment. The existence of a small democratic state (whose every action we …
We print below several excerpts from a statement by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, professor of psychology at the City University of New York and president of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center. His statement was first delivered as an address to …
The whim of history will press into a man’s hand a flag behind which he rallies people—only to discover that he does not understand them and that they don’t know why they follow him. This happened to George F. Kennan, …
Eugene McCarthy has demonstrated enormous political courage in challenging President Johnson directly in the primaries. He is not a man much given to the quixotic gesture. And since he has risked the ire of the supremely powerful in this country, …
