Selma and the March to Montgomery, so full of the hyperbole of hope, the promise that democracy would at last come to the South, marked an end to the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement. Since then, the emphasis …
You ask for my top-of-the-head thoughts on “the enrages or the beat or simply the deviant,” and one of the first things that occurs to me is that it is precisely that sort of question—and the purpose for which it …
In foreign affairs, no rule applies over long periods of time. Only the simple-minded imagine that, once committed to a crusade, a government must continue it until either victory or defeat. Or like children watching a Western, they assume that …
Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of thoughts and questions. To take the success first, can it primarily be attributed …
When I first wrote a review-article for DISSENT on Venezuela,* I advanced the idea that the Betancourt “democratic” revolution, which enjoyed enthusiastic U.S. support, was really the beginning of a genuine “counter-revolutionary” movement in Latin America. I took it that …
“You, Serge, are an intellectual, and you’re polite, we all know that. That’s why you keep quiet and don’t ask any questions. But our boys from the factory, they ask right away. ‘Well, Vaska,’ they say, ‘so you got drunk …
On April 19, 250,000 Indonesians paid public homage to the memory of Sutan Sjahrir, the Sumatra-born socialist leader of the early Indonesian Republic and its first premier. He had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner …
At the 1950 meeting of the Catholic Press Association, the featured speaker of the program was a man at the peak of his influence—Senator Joseph McCarthy. When he was accorded a standing ovation only two people kept their seats, the …
Accused of distributing a 128-page pamphlet “detrimental to the interests of the Polish state and dealing with political and social relations in Poland,” over a dozen members of the Polish Communist party were arrested in Warsaw in April 1965.* In …
The state mental hospital system, which took shape in the late 19th century, was extravagantly heralded as a cheap and humane solution for the problem of mental illness. But this high hope proved unjustified: the mental hospital merely became a …
That Lionel Abel misinterpreted Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade is entirely forgiveable, though not a little pitiful considering the play’s straightforwardness and clarity of intention. But that Mr. Abel should have based a criticism of contemporary culture, more particularly of modern …
East Berlin, June 17, 1953: The workers’ uprising is seething in the streets; on stage, the “Boss”—artist and man of the theatre, a figure clearly modeled on Bertold Brecht—is rehearsing his new production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. At the close of …
Historically, it has been a basic premise for socialists that because the trade union constituency is composed of workers, unions must play a progressive role in society. This assumption was rarely challenged, especially since unions for many years did exercise …
The end of civilian rule in Nigeria, a country regarded as a happy exception to the trend toward one-party dictatorships in newly-independent countries, has far-reaching political implications. The popular Western version of Nigeria—a showplace of democracy in black Africa—was a …
The limiting case of the President’s generalization is the CIA’s enrollment in—or, perhaps, enrollment of—Michigan State University’s Vietnam project. In this extreme instance the university was used as a tool, though as a rule the academic community is handled more …
