The terrorist attack on September 11 evidently had two purposes. First, to inflict on ordinary Americans pain of the sort widely meted out to other civilian populations around the world by those who oppose their governments. Second, to polarize the …
Early on the first evening I spent in Sarajevo during the siege, I took a walk from my hotel to Marshal Tito Street in the center of town. The electricity was off, as it usually was in those days, but …
This special issue, long in preparation, concerns bloody business-although not Osama bin Laden’s. It grapples, as Nicolaus Mills writes, with “the moral and political issues raised by the widespread mass killing and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor.” …
As we begin a new century, what is most striking about the human rights challenges we face is how different they are from those of the cold war era. Whereas the abuses of the cold war period came from strong …
Ethnic bigotry in Rwanda was born of history, amplified by an elaborate system of myths built up around that history, and broadly accepted by Hutu and Tutsi alike. It has often been remarked that Hutus and Tutsis—the latter make up …
This spring, graduate students at New York University made history when they won recognition for the first graduate student union at a private university. To accomplish this feat, students had to overcome the political and legal opposition of virtually every …
Successive U.S. governments have relied on a simple catechism: the World Trade Organization equals free trade, which equals development. With this rationale the nation has been led into regional (NAFTA) and international (WTO) trade agreements. These so-called “free trade” agreements …
It is no surprise that this past April, after China returned the crew of an American spy plane that made a forced landing on Hainan Island following a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet, the Bush administration went out of …
This is a big Dissent, partly because we are planning a special issue for Winter and could not hold articles over, partly because of an embarrassment of riches. Editors dream about this; I can’t explain it, nor can I do …
Fighting Poverty With Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor 1825-2000 by Joel Schwartz Indiana University Press, 2000, 480 pp., $39.95 Conservatives for some time now have been urging a return to virtue and morality as a key to resolving …
Across the street from the compound where Slobodan Milosevic barricaded himself against police last winter before being carted off to jail sits a beautiful villa once inhabited by Marshal Tito. This same villa, with its manicured gardens and freshly painted …
Liza Featherstone argues that United Students Against Sweatshops activists are active in other anticapitalist efforts symbolized by “Seattle,” that their anticapitalist framework furnishes them with inspiration and vision, and that their radicalism has thus empowered them. These are good points. …
This is a time to speak quietly and act carefully…firmly, inventively, boldly, but above all carefully. With all Americans, with decent people the world over, we mourn the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. …
Blindness by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero Harcourt Brace, 1998 293 pp $22 All the Names by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Harcourt Brace, 2000 238 pp $24 The twentieth century was the era of …
A Proposal for Modesty
