Spring 2025

I participated in what may well turn out to have been an historic occasion, the first “teach-in” at the University of Michigan. This originated as a protest movement against the escalation of the war in Vietnam, by a group of …

I Virtually all parties, except the most narrowly doctrinaire or authoritarian, are coalitions of a sort. In Europe the broad coalitions have developed inside parties which operate within a general ideological, very much a class, alignment for which we have …

Seymour Melman’s book is a bit disconcerting. It is repetitious, at times it screams at the reader, and it is seriously wanting in sustained analysis. What Melman needed most was a good editor. The recurrent theme is that American emphasis …

The following article is adapted from a speech delivered at a conference of “Turn Toward Peace.” I will be talking about direct action as a nonparliamentary, nonelectoral form of struggle for social change—that is, as a political act. I mean …

Episcopal Seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels was shot dead at Hayneville, Alabama, near Selma, on Friday, August 20, 1965. The man accused and tried for the murder was freed by a Hayneville jury—all white, of course. This article, of which we …

Last October Western correspondents reported from Moscow that two Soviet writers, Andrei Sinyayski and Yuli Daniel, had been arrested and that they would be charged under article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code with “dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda.” Most of …

We propose that the U.S. government declare in favor of an immediate cease-fire. Nothing less will do if the mounting slaughter is to be stopped, nothing less than a forthright declaration to the world that as of a certain date …

Most of the reactions to the self-immolations of Roger LaPorte and Norman Morirson have been fatuous defensive, or at best, beside the point. Their acts have been seen largely in terms of individual psychology, when in fact they might serve …

1. Tea in Ambush Villages in the Delta are laid out mainly along the canals and rivers. “Village” may be the wrong term. The houses stand side by side, strung out for hundreds of yards along a road or path …

Among participants in the recent demonstrations for peace, especially the younger activists, dismay over the position of the unions on the Vietnam war has a way, at times, of spilling over into impatience, even hostility, toward the whole idea of …

My own disenchantment with American society was not caused by its racial bigotry, its warlike posturing, its supreme respect for money. All these might be understood as irrationalities which could be struck from the national character if only rational men …

I have never met William Buckley, and the only place I’d care to would be on a public platform, in debate. But for some time I’ve been hearing about his attractive qualities: he is charming, witty, literate, a cultivated man …

The use of draftees to fight “little wars”—colonial repressions, police actions, counter-insurgency operations—is relatively new. Before World War II, these sorts of wars were fought by volunteer or mercenary armies, often recruited from foreign or colonial populations. The French Foreign …

This intervention is an act that must be repudiated.—Romulo Betancourt, former president of Venezuela. No matter how one looks at it—politically, morally, tactically—the American armed intervention in the Dominican Republic cries out for the sharpest condemnation. The poet Robert Lowell …