Contrary to nearly universal expectation, the suit against the State of California’s Board of Education by Kelly Segraves, a fundamentalist foe of evolution, did not turn into a repeat performance of the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Nevertheless, systematic comparison …
Our readers will remember the extremely informative article by Olivier Roy on Afghanistan in our Winter 1981 issue, which we translated from our sister publication in Paris, Esprit. We now provide some excerpts from a conversation, again taken from Esprit, …
One would have thought that the Thatcher government would provoke a much needed renewal of the Labour party. Thatcherism has involved an explicit repudiation of the whole framework of postwar consensus politics, and has defined the policies of both the …
The onset of stagflation in the ’70s has stimulated attacks on the welfare state and its chief proponent, social democracy. The right-wing attack has sought to link causally social democracy’s program—redistribution through public-sector expansion—to the economic problems suffered by the …
If we try to grasp the Orient, it trickles through our fingers like desert sand. What is the Orient? It is best described as the contrast of opposites: the Orient is what the Occident is not. Once again let’s cite …
The oddest things cause consternation in the Reagan White House. For example, on April 30 the president was carried away by his subject matter and departed from prepared text. It was a public ceremony (for the victims of the Holocaust) …
While Lenin was still alive, Soviet writers and artists found it quite easy to obtain permission and the means to go to the West and stay for a few weeks or even longer. As Napoleon said to Savary, who succeeded …
Billington’s previous book, his masterful cultural history of Russia, The Icon and the Axe, was acclaimed as a major departure in the interpretation of Russian culture. His present work, which aims to trace the origins of modern revolutionary faith and …
There is something shameless about Ford Motor Company executives abandoning the Company’s 75-year-old free-trade policy to seek government protection from Japanese imports. No doubt, Ford is having its trouble selling cars. Ford reported a 1980 loss of $1.54 billion. Detroit’s …
I know George Gilder as a likable chap, prey to surges of emotion that last long enough to translate themselves into entire books. In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle, Gilder, then in his Ripon Society phase, wrote with …
Just inside the campus grounds of the National Autonomous University of San Carlos (USAC), Guatemala City, stop the buses that carry students between the campus and the city center. On Monday, July 14, 1980, the 8-black pulled in with its …
Even as youngsters playing his music, we were aware that Shostakovich had led a life dominated by the vicissitudes of Soviet politics, that his art was frequently manipulated for the party’s anti-artistic purposes. It seemed to us that his works, …
The document below is a somewhat abridged translation of a report on the meeting of Solidarity’s highest body, the National Coordinating Committee (KKP), which took place in the western Polish town of Bydgoszcz this year on March 23-24. The report …
At one point in The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow’s larky protagonist gets hooked up with an eccentric millionaire named Robey. Augie will, presumably, be his research assistant and, presumably, Robey will write a “survey or history of human …
Last year, on the night of December 10, our friend and long-time member of the Dissent editorial board Henry Pachter died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three. His “rich and active life,” in the words of his …
