What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communist leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained …
The United States today is an astonishingly powerful nation. Yet it is a nation increasingly unable to apply its power effectively or in a manner satisfactory either to itself or to the rest of the world. This is less because …
Can poverty in the United States be abolished within the limits of the welfare state? Or does the present commitment to end the scandal of economic misery in the richest nation history has known require measures which will go beyond …
Adlai Stevenson was surely the most attractive human being to figure prominently in American politics since the second world war. He was a cultivated man in the tradition of an older America that seems almost to have disappeared. His wit …
The heritage of colonialism in Vietnam is Communism. The strength of the Communist party of Vietnam is a unique phenomenon in the developing world. Vietnam was the only country where a Communist-led government was established at the end of World …
Though I feel that the U.S. will have to withdraw all of its military forces from Vietnam if this disastrous chapter in our history is finally to be closed, I do not favor “immediate withdrawal.” There are no major political …
I think all opponents of our war in Vietnam, and certainly the Left, should take what seems to me the most promising and reasonable line: Put every conceivable and possible effective pressure on the President to get him to implement …
I assume each of the respondents will begin by rejecting your condition—to discuss the Vietnam war “apart from urgent expressions of anxiety and indignation.” That would be like talking about hell without fire. The conduct of this war is inseparable …
MAY, 1965 Letters from India, as a rule, are written by “outsiders” trying to appear as “insiders.” A Westerner visits India for six weeks, is touched and appalled by the sights, sounds, and smells, and goes home to write a …
This intervention is an act that must be repudiated.—Romulo Betancourt, former president of Venezuela. No matter how one looks at it—politically, morally, tactically—the American armed intervention in the Dominican Republic cries out for the sharpest condemnation. The poet Robert Lowell …
Some people have asked whether the French municipal elections of 1965 would produce another Popular Front—even if this phrase could hardly mean today what it did in 1984. More precisely, the question has been raised whether the French Socialist party, …
One of the most celebrated passages in the writings of Mark Twain describes the episode where Huckleberry Finn, in helping the runaway slave Jim to freedom, is suddenly seized with guilt and almost demoralized by the enormity of his behavior. …
With this issue DISSENT opens up a discussion of the “new leftism,” in which, as always in our pages, a wide range of opinion will be welcome and each person will speak for himself. One view is expressed below by …
For some time after Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 coined the term “participatory democracy,” it was received with more humor than respect by civil rights workers in the South. The concept has become important this past winter, for …
The Addict in the Street edited and with an introduction by Jeremy Larner from tape recordings collected by Ralph Tefferteller Grove Press, 288 pp., $5.50 Reading this book is a highly disturbing experience—for it compels us to confront (through the …
