Inside the Philippine military camp thirty-six hours into the rebellion against Ferdinand Marcos, there is a sense of isolation and despair. Bleary-eyed rebel soldiers, unsure of the outcome of their action or its impact throughout the rest of the country, …
In the era of Reagan the women’s movement has lost its center. Social activism of all kinds is retreating, and feminism is no exception. The National Organization for Women (NOW), during the post-ERA presidency of Judy Goldsmith, suffered substantial losses …
The following interview with LASZLO RAJK was conducted by a German writer, HANS-HENNING PAETZKE. It has been slightly condensed for reasons of space. —Eds. HANS-HENNING PAETZKE: Mr. Rajk, you were born on January 26, 1949. Your father, after whom you …
This past March the Nation marked its 120th anniversary with a special issue containing articles of varying interest. One of them, alas, stood out—a racist diatribe by Gore Vidal concerning Israel, American Jews, and “fifth columnists.” It is many years …
In September 1985 Reader’s Digest published an article that paid glowing tribute to the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL–CIO’s labor arm in Latin America, and to its executive director, William Doherty. “Bill Doherty’s Blue-Collar Freedom Fighters” …
The beleaguered New York City hospital workers’ union, Local 1199, shows signs of renewal. In a rare break with the power of union incumbency, the scandal-ridden regime of President Doris Turner was narrowly defeated in a late-April ballot monitored by …
Reaganomics represents a new economic policy, one that in principle seeks to curtail or abandon public service and oversight and replace it by presumably more efficient private agents. True, the stress Reaganomics places on competitiveness and profitability as regulatory mechanisms …
Robert Boyers, a professor of English at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi, an intellectual quarterly, offers in the first two chapters of this critical study what he calls a “fluid definition” of the political novel since 1945. He then …
Since 1973, when the government report Work in America officially proclaimed the American worker to be unhappy, unwilling and unproductive, managerial ideologues have concentrated on the development of a control strategy grounded in the liberal concept of “worker participation.” This …
George Kateb’s “Nuclear Weapons and Individual Responsibility,” (Dissent, Spring 1986) achieves an instant credibility by his open acknowledgment of what we prefer to ignore—the possibility of nuclear annihilation and the anonymity of the powers that control that possibility, impervious to …
In 1980, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a scholar whose specialty was Peronist Argentina, presented a full-blown theory, published in Commentary magazine, attributing the fall of the Nicaraguan and Iranian autocrats to the Carter administration’s “lack of realism.” She derided the idea that …
The first part of my report from Nicaragua in the Spring 1986 Dissent ended with a promise that I would deal with some of the countervailing forces that serve to moderate the centralizing tendencies within Nicaragua—what they are, and to …
My very extensive and varied experience of psychoanalysis as a patient in both Europe and the United States corroborates much that Henry Abelove writes in “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans” [Dissent, Winter 1986]. I indeed agree with him that …
In the new novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa there is an arresting sequence in which the protagonist and his revolutionary comrades stop at the ancient mountain community of Quero. They rest there for two hours before continuing their …
AUSTIN, MINNESOTA: 6:15 and they have at last dropped off the wood for the fire barrels. But until the sun comes up, nothing is going to be enough to keep us warm. The picket lines left the Austin Labor Center …
