In my view, the true significance of 1968 lies not in the student radicalism usually associated with this year, but in the events of Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow where dissidence and political opposition within the Soviet communist empire was reborn.
Democratiya 12 featured an article serving as a double-review of Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Daniel Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. The review was written by David Zarnett, whose unrelentingly …
It’s now been a year since Nicolas Sarkozy, by a wide margin, swept into France’s presidential palace with promises of sweeping reforms of everything from the country’s finances to its national character. You will remember the trajectory. After a skittering …
For those of us who support the growth of democracy in the world, it almost goes without saying that we support workers’ rights and trade unions. But sometimes that support is only perfunctory.
The events of 1968 came forty years after the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution, which would be reissued three years later with the new title What are We to Do with Our Lives. …
Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars to avoid loving their neighbor. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau The victims most interesting to us are always those …
In his great novel Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol imagined Russia as a troika, a carriage pulled by three-abreast horses, speeding through the countryside. Gogol admitted no knowledge of where Russia was going – ‘Russia, where are you flying to? Answer! …
Sixty years after the founding of Israel, America and the Jewish state maintain a close and unique relationship. Americans, for the most part, tend to accept this as something natural and long-standing. Foreign observers, however, do not always comprehend the …
C.A.J. (Tony) Coady is an Australian philosopher with a deservedly distinguished local and international reputation. His book is the outcome of a long period of attention to the topics discussed under the general heading of the book’s title. The fourteen …
The arguments over Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi are well-trodden ground. Since his visit to London in 2004, his views on suicide bombing, women and gays – in soundbite form at least – have been committed to memory by those who oppose …
The role of al-Qaeda and the foreign mujahedin in the wars in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s remains controversial, but the controversy is not over whether the phenomenon was a positive one or not. Reading some of the coverage …
In 1959, Alfred Kazin wrote ‘The Alone Generation,’ an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. The critic who would later describe himself as a ‘cultural conservative’ and, semi-seriously, a ‘literary reactionary’ uttered this cri de coeur: …
For those who find John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy persuasive, Ruth Wisse’s Jews and Power is the perfect antidote. In contrast to Walt and Mearsheimer’s account of a shadowy Jewish cabal manipulating US …
There are many diverse and competing accounts of the 1960s and the legacies of that decade. None can lay claim to comprehensiveness, including the one discussed here: there are always other stories. However the narrative of the 1960s presented here …
Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist based in Hamburg, Germany. From 1984 to 1988 he was a senior advisor to the Federal Parliamentary Fraction of Germany’s Green Party and is the author of Bonn and the Bomb: German Politics and …
