Editor’s Page

This special issue, long in preparation, concerns bloody business-although not Osama bin Laden’s. It grapples, as Nicolaus Mills writes, with “the moral and political issues raised by the widespread mass killing and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor.” These “New Killing Fields” may have been displaced by Afghanistan in the news; their memory and the problems they pose must not be. Dissent offers some forceful takes on this past fall’s painful events in a separate opening section.

Since September 11, I’ve pondered repeatedly a passage by Max Weber. You have a calling for politics, he wrote, only if you won’t “crumble” before a world that seems “too stupid or too base” for what you want to offer it. A formidable warning. Nowadays it should trouble anyone who identifies him- or herself as “left.” No, my politics hasn’t transmuted. I’m “left” because I believe that liberty, equality, and solidarity-linked together sensibly if fitfully-should regulate any morally intelligent politics. But I also think that the responses to September 11 by parts of the left-Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, the “critical” minds who are always predictable-threaten to dissociate the word “left” from morally intelligent politics. One almost expects them to explain that bin Laden’s crew attacked the World Trade Center because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves (sold to him, undoubtedly, by “Zionists”).

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