Elegant Tombstone Editor: In “Elegant Tombstones” (DISSENT, January – February 1969) Professor Macpherson’s major contention is that a “moment’s thought will show” Milton Friedman’s view, that under capitalism transactions are voluntary, to be wrong. For Macpherson argues “the proviso that …
A. Philip Randolph Throughout my life I have drawn much of my inspiration as a socialist from Norman Thomas. I learned from him, as well as from Eugene Victor Debs, that the struggle for racial justice is organically tied to …
It has been over three years since the young draft resister, David Henry Mitchell, III, launched his effort to persuade our courts to enforce the principles of international law proclaimed at Nuremberg. Unfortunately, that effort has not been a particularly successful …
A Friend Editors: Every time a copy of Dissent arrives at our desk we feel thrilled. All of us are so eager to go through it. It is a pity that such a fine venture has to ask for funds. Or, …
On Holy Thursday, 1968, a youth named Bachmann, an admirer of Hitler, shot and critically wounded Rudi Dutschke, the leader of a militant Berlin student group. As a result of this attempted murder, there were violent student demonstrations during Easter …
Like other minorities, black Americans have a history of their own—peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion. But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in that …
In his latest film, Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard attacks the phenomenon of violence. He piles horror on horror—adds gore, callousness, perversion, brutality, all culminating in cannibalism. Not since Hieronymus Bosch and Goya have we been exposed to such ghastly pictorial visions. …
The hippies are merely the latest in a continuous series of revolts by a younger generation against its fathers, both literal and symbolic. The process has become so much a natural development that it no longer occasions surprise—although always some …
The open society—insofar as it actually is open and fulfills its claims—is a standing invitation to trouble. Its liberties, tolerance, and constraints upon powerful minorities invite attack, license, and violence by the aggrieved, short-tempered, and politically unskilled. Its ideological commitment …
With much skill, Peter Brock has sought to tie together the many strands in the history of American pacifism from colonial times to 1914. Much of the material will be familiar to the students of the American peace movement, and …
First, let me provide some necessary background, and then discuss Nixon’s assuming the Presidency, and how his choice of Henry Kissinger as chief foreign policy adviser may affect the Paris negotiations. At the end of October 1968, after 28 sessions, …
Recently, confronted by the renewed repression of intellectual life in the Soviet Union and the rebellious movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the following argument has often been repeated in conversation and advanced in the press: The protest of intellectuals and …
Trying to understand the world we live in can drive a man out of his mind. The different levels of public life we can more or less make out. It’s the connections among them that are hard to grasp. Here …
The debate between Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis over demands by Negro students for separate black studies departments has major implications. The question they are arguing is whether separatism is a condition that black Americans should desire and, in fact, …
One afternoon last summer I happened to be watching a TV discussion among five or six black teenagers. All were speaking out of a deep pride in their blackness, as it is almost mandatory to do today, and also out of …
