On the eve of India’s recent election (February, 1967) the fourth national election since independence in 1947, the Delhi correspondent of the London Times sent home two alarming dispatches. In one he announced the end of India’s parliamentary democracy, predicting …
Dear Son, Our discussion of the “New Left” started with a rather small event related to the wretched war in Vietnam. Two GIs, captured by the Vietcong, were being released in tribute to the “American peace movement.” At a press …
In view of some very sweeping pronouncements that have been made about the meaning of recent economic reforms in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, it seems appropriate to begin by baldly stating my view as to what these …
Bad books are easily ignored. They may waste an unwary reader’s time, but this is a minor irritant. Really bad books, however, are noxious: they insult the intelligence of readers; they also injure the cause they avowedly seek to promote. …
There is little I see to quarrel with in Irving Howe’s original statement on the CIA and students (March—April DISSENT) or with Lewis Coser’s forceful statement published above. I would only call attention to the disappointing fact that too many …
I. Comment by Philip Green To an observer, the recent controversy over tolerance in the pages of DISSENT has shed more heat than light—chiefly for the reason that the disputants have been talking about different things while seeming to be …
“Have you ever been abroad?” I asked the taxi driver in Budapest. “No,” he replied, “only in Vienna.” The answer was not, apparently, intended as a joke. It reflected something essential in the new East European atmosphere: the recrudescence of …
From opposite sides of the spectrum of American politics, Eisenhower and Rustin suggest the same general theory of moral djugment in wartime. They both suggest that only one judgment is possible. War itself (Rustin is a pacifist) , or some …
I have one major disagreement with Lew Coser’s article: this concerns his firm belief in the long-run ineffectiveness of CIA subversion in the fight against Communism. His example is a democratic union in India struggling against a Maoist union. He …
The cold war has been a demoralizing force in American life, forcing us to concentrate on such questions as security and prestige. It inspired the hysteria of the McCarthy period and the anxiety that has marked our relations with the …
On March 22 The New York Times declared editorially that at the Guam meeting of U. S. and South Vietnamese leaders, the emphasis was not on military problems but on “that other side of the war—the progress toward economic and …
The almost esoteric controversy and clamor that have surrounded the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) show in clear perspective some basic facts about America in the time of the Johnson Administration: what’s happening to the poverty program, convolutions of …
I have just finished reading Paul Feldman’s extraordinary article on “black power” in the January—February 1967 DISSENT. It is certainly the best discussion on the subject I have seen, and probably the best article on the civil rights movement I’ve …
I Mutual trust is indispensable to any democratic polity. Without it, without a sense that the political men we deal with can be assumed to be self-actuated, autonomous actors engaged in pursuing their material or ideal interests in an open …
The censor’s work is never secure, for history deals harshly with yesterday’s moral judgments. The road from the 1909 Chicago censor’s refusal to license two feckless horse operas (“Tile James Boys” and “Night Riders”) to this year’s unstinting praise for …
