Belgrade at first seemed very different from the other East European capitals I had visited. The crimson flag of the U.S.S.R. was nowhere to be seen, nor were there lines of grim-faced people waiting in front of the shops. Compared …
Can they really be serious? There are simpletons enough in the Administration. But can they be so simple as to think they can impose a military solution in El Salvador—whether by sending Marines to the rescue or propping a decrepit …
When Rose Laub Coser and I wrote about the Jonestown tragedy (in Dissent, Spring 1979), the sources of our interpretation were limited to journalistic accounts. I was therefore eager to turn to these two books hoping that, with the distance …
The growth of a movement in Western Europe opposing the deployment of American nuclear weapons capable of hitting the Soviet Union has provoked dismay and indignation in many American circles. Not only such certified cold warriors as William Safire but …
The German physicist and philosopher C. F. von Weizsacker once asked Martin Buber why all the Church’s appeals for an end to the nuclear arms race were so ineffectual. Buber’s reply was that the appeals have failed to state what …
Across the railroad tracks, down a ways from Russ’s Truck Wash and Kleen-Maid Enriched Bread, around the corner from several taverns, the barber shop, and the local massage parlor, stand over a hundred multi-storied, antiquated brick-factory buildings. The majority of …
An unanticipated consequence of the Reagan administration’s foreign and defense postures may well be the creation of a massive West European peace movement. This movement has spread throughout the NATO alliance. Not having a unified direction, it shows great local …
For nearly 30 years, Bertram D. Wolfe was a prolific commentator on Soviet affairs. His Three Who Made a Revolution (1948) stands as a seminal work on Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. After World War II and until his death in …
On October 21, 1981 much of the world outside Washington was dismayed by two statements, from leading U.S. policy-makers, which revealed that in inner government circles the prospect of nuclear war with Russia is looked on with increasing equanimity. The …
In Russia’s Failed Revolutions, Adam B. Ulam sets for himself the task of determining why Western-style liberalism failed to become established in Russia, or, as he puts it, “What was it that at decisive moments has frustrated or flawed the …
In recent years, it has become commonplace in the Western democracies to speak of a crisis of the “social democratic consensus.” What is meant is not merely a crisis in terms of the influence and self-confidence of the social democratic …
Editors: Dennis H. Wrong makes a convincing case for his belief that the present decline of liberalism in American politics is more than a normal turn in a cyclical pattern (in “How Critical Is Our Condition,” Fall 1981). Not only …
Since 1945 the British welfare state has had special meaning for Americans. Liberals have praised its accomplishments as typical of welfare states; conservatives have used Britain’s relatively slow growth and international decline as proof that welfare states cannot succeed. Both …
The treatment of Eisenhower by historians has become as interesting as the history of his presidency per se. Revisionists looking back on his Administration through the prisms of Vietnam, the collapse of the Great Society, and double-digit inflation have discovered …
Roger Baldwin was one of those extraordinary men who leave a permanent imprint on their society. His death at age 97 last summer left behind an America significantly more tolerant of dissent and more open to change because of his …
