Sri Lanka's Post-war Crisis

THE DEATH of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Velupillai Prabhakaran on May 19 was met with jubilation within much of the majority Sinhalese community. For many, it signaled the end of over twenty-six years of war and violence and offered the possibility of an almost unprecedented era of peace in post-colonial Sri Lanka. In some Tamil enclaves, the news was received with trepidation. While many Tamils were thankful that the war was over, the elimination of the LTTE meant that now there was no one to stand up for them. Many were frightened that the government, riding a wave of ... More

Who's Afriad of Shari'a?

IN MARCH 2009, the delicate matter of apostasy came before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). During a discussion of freedom of religion, the floor was opened to comments from representatives of the many non-governmental organizations affiliated with the Council. One such group, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, presented a brief statement about the discrimination suffered by Egyptian members of the Baha’i faith and converts from Islam when attempting to obtain mandatory identification documents such as birth certificates and identity cards.

“Wi... More

In Place of a Hero (Spring, 1960)

J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) died on January 28, 2010. We are reprinting Michael Walzer’s 1960 consideration of Salinger’s fiction. - The Editors

YOUNG PEOPLE today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that the young have heroes—models of courage, skill, commitment or self-sacrifice. Bright middle-class teenagers often have a developed sensitivity to each other’s problems, but are very... More

Obama's First Year: It Could Have Been Worse

AFTER OUTRAGE, disappointment is probably the easiest emotion of the left. I am always disappointed before the fact, so as not to be too disappointed afterwards. Right now, though, I am resisting disappointment. Granted, Obama’s first year has not seen a radical transformation of American society—not even the transformation that Roosevelt wrought in his first one hundred days. But there is a reason for that. Roosevelt came into office after three years of severe depression and frighteningly high unemployment. The country was ready for radical experiments. Obama came into office after only a... More

Obama's First Year: The Great Overlap and the Stall

IT IS an ancient assumption that tribulation is the threshold to deliverance. George Bush’s rule was so deeply ruinous in so many different ways and for so long that his successor’s campaign automatically lent itself to messianic hopes. It wasn’t that Barack Obama declared himself the messiah—to the contrary—but that many of his supporters tended to project onto him all their pent-up desires, while he practiced not only the politics of overlap but the politics of strategic vagueness. (“Hope.” “Change.” “Change You Can Believe In.”) It was as if in Barack Obama all the desires inter... More

Obama's First Year: Who is Obama?

GRANTED WE projected our fantasies onto him.  But it wasn’t just that we deluded ourselves; it was more like a tango, a seductive dance in which we both played a part. We needed to believe, he needed believers. We were a perfect match: our hunger and his promise. After eight years of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, and the rest, he was like the coming of spring after a treacherous winter—the embodiment of a new era, a new politics, a sense of redemption and renewal. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and he was the perfect vessel into which to deposit our progressive hopes: a sl... More

Obama’s First Year: Why He Deserves a More Enthusiastic Endorsement from the Left

THERE ARE two sets of questions one must ask about the first year of the Obama presidency and its disappointments. First, to what extent is the discontent on the left the product of Obama’s own hesitancies, limitations, and proposals? And to what extent are his low poll numbers and the obvious skittishness of Democrats and liberals a product of a program that is inadequate and misdirected?

Second, to what extent are the difficulties of the Obama presidency the product of forces and structures outside his control—the political opposition, the dysfunction of American political institu... More

Moral Icon

MORGAN FREEMAN was asked many years ago by Nelson Mandela to create a film based on No Easy Walk To Freedom, his 1994 autobiography. It never got made, but Freeman got his chance with Invictus, a big-budget Hollywood film, where he indeed plays one who is the “master of his fate.” Director Clint Eastwood uses sports, in this case rugby, to dramatize Mandela’s courageous political leadership. Rugby was the sport of the white Afrikaner minority (soccer was the game of black South Africans), and their nearly all-white team the “Springboks” was a symbol of aparth... More

Dear Mr. President: Make Lemonade

I’m wholeheartedly with Theda Skocpol at Talking Points Memo: Whether Martha Coakley loses to Scott Brown or squeaks out a win, Barack Obama, the empiricist, must learn from what is—one way or the other—a defeat.

He should take a hard, hard look at the last year. He tried post-partisanship, disdained the all-out fight, and the Republicans wouldn’t play. They preferred to organize for his Waterloo. The Obama movement, f... More

Deconstructing Palin

I HATE Sarah Palin. There, I said it. I hate her in a way that I’ve rarely hated a politician, although George W. Bush came close. When I hear the ex-governor of Alaska speak I suppress bile. Here she is when Katie Couric asked what other Supreme Court decision upset her besides Roe v. Wade: “Well, let’s see.  There’s, of course, in the great history of America there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American.”

But as liberals, we need to push beyond this reaction. We need to know why this ex-governor draws crowds who wait in the col... More

I Predict a Riot: Italy After Berlusconi

LATE LAST month, Silvio Berlusconi was at last struck by the full force of the opposition to his premiership. It was a literal blow—a statuette to the nose—and as he tumbled to the floor, even il cavaliere, as the flamboyant Berlusconi is known, was forced to recognize the violent passions that have been aroused by his dogged refusal to resign.

The attack deserved condemnation, but it is hard not to agree with Antonio di Pietro—the leader of the centrist Italia dei Valori—that the climate of hatred that provoked the attack had been generated by il cav... More

What Happened to Canada's Liberals?

WHEN MICHAEL Ignatieff spoke at the Liberal Party convention in 2005, he was the country’s most buzzed-about politician since Pierre Trudeau. He was introduced as “the voice of our conscience” and seemed capable of uniting and broadening the ruling Liberal Party as well as expanding Canadian liberalism into a coherent philosophy instead of a laundry list of decades-old social programs.

But much has changed over the past five years. The Liberals now stand double-digits below the governing Conservative Party and in the November by-elections, the Conservatives unexpectedly won two seat... More

Support Dissent As We Celebrate Our 56th Year!

Dear Friends,

You know that any time is the right time for dissent, because no matter who is in power, someone has to speak up for fairness and equality and justice.

But this time of year always has special significance for Dissent because it was fifty-six years ago this month that a group of politically engaged intellectuals sent the first issue of the magazine to the printer. It’s also a time when we ask you to renew their—and your—commitment to “to speak for the spirit of democratic utop... More

Evergreen Season

FOR MOST New Yorkers, the Christmas season starts with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. In the city’s heart, “Miracle on 34th Street” lives on.

For me, the Christmas season starts more modestly. It begins when the Christmas tree stands start showing up on the street corners. Wreaths, sprigs of holly, and a small forest of evergreens transform the otherwise drab sidewalks near my apartment. On windy days the smell of pine carries from block to block.

But for the men and occasional woman who sell the Christmas trees, it is a different story. In rain and snow, they watch t... More

The Best Argument for the Afghan War--and What's Wrong with It

FOR THOSE of us on the left, the best argument in favor of the Afghan war is not Obama’s claim that we need to stop al Qaeda from returning to its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda doesn’t need to be in Afghanistan, the 9-11 plot was hatched by Saudis in Hamburg and Miami, and they can relocate to Somalia or Yemen or someplace else if they need to. (They have already relocated to Pakistan.)

The best argument is that we have an obligation to the Afghan people – especially to the feminists, secular teachers, labor organizers, health workers, democrats, all those working to bu... More

"There Is No Simple Formula": Obama's Nobel Speech and Just War Theory

President Obama gave a pretty good speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe it was a little too eloquent. I don’t much like soaring rhetoric; I know there are times to soar, but Obama does it, or tries to do it, every time. Plain speech is also useful, and there was some plain speech in Norway—particularly the reiterated insistence, directed, I think, to our European friends, that sometimes making war is the only way to a just peace. He said this not once but three or four times, “because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the ca... More

Is Rio de Janeiro Ready for the Olympics?

ON OCTOBER 1 of this year, the International Olympic Committee announced Rio de Janeiro as the winner of the competition to host the 2016 summer games. Two weeks later, a turf battle between two rival criminal networks erupted on the city’s north side in the favela—a neighborhood of irregular occupation and haphazard housing—of Morro dos Macacos. Police responded with a botched invasion. The traficantes, or drug-traffickers, shot down a police helicopter, rallied their troops, and engaged in prolonged shootouts while residents cowered in improvised bunkers. Days later, the nei... More

Curbing Carbon, Sustaining Development: The Tensions in Climate Change Mitigation

THE LONG-AWAITED meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen is upon us. There was considerable hope that a comprehensive successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be negotiated at this meeting, a new treaty that would reconcile two of the most important projects confronting humanity: mitigating climate change and raising billions of people out of poverty through energy-intensive economic development. There was also hope that the United States would join the global community in a good faith effort to complete those negotiations.

President Obama’s r... More

The Neoconservative Père et Fils

EARLIER THIS year, a new think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative was launched by the well-known neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In September, the organization held a luxurious conference at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C. titled “Advancing and Defending Democracy,” featuring Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich.

Over a spread of grilled chicken salad served with avocado and fresh French rolls, Romney inveighed against Barack Obama as a “reluctant and timid defender of freedom.” Heads nodded approvingly; sparkling water was poured; cheers spontaneous... More

Is Obama's War in Afghanistan Just?

WELL, IT was a just war in the beginning, and it is worth remembering why. It wasn’t because the Taliban regime was “harboring” al Qaeda, as President Obama said on Tuesday night. Lots of countries harbor terrorists, and we are not going to war (and should not) with all of them. Afghanistan was different: the Taliban and al Qaeda were full partners, and because of that partnership, al Qaeda enjoyed all the benefits of sovereignty—most important, a territorial base. A military attack aimed at eliminating that base, and its political basis, was therefore justified.

I never felt much s... More