Most of our teachers were not intellectuals, they were only experts. They had no engagement, only careers. When one was found in the strange state of political motion, he most often seemed to feel a bit fallen: “I speak not …
White ignorance of the Negro is always good for a laugh. That, of course, is to be expected. What upper class has ever known members of its lower class? Knowing them would break up the game. It is their functions, …
There was a time not so long ago, at the end of the Second World War, when people expected the whole world to go Socialist. Throughout the world there seemed to be an inevitable trend toward a more egalitarian society. …
After ten months of Labor Government one has entirely lost that confidence so widespread on the Left prior to the election, and reflected in our earlier DISSENT article. There we sketched a version of Labor’s strategy, an optimistic view of …
What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communist leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained …
The United States today is an astonishingly powerful nation. Yet it is a nation increasingly unable to apply its power effectively or in a manner satisfactory either to itself or to the rest of the world. This is less because …
Can poverty in the United States be abolished within the limits of the welfare state? Or does the present commitment to end the scandal of economic misery in the richest nation history has known require measures which will go beyond …
Adlai Stevenson was surely the most attractive human being to figure prominently in American politics since the second world war. He was a cultivated man in the tradition of an older America that seems almost to have disappeared. His wit …
The heritage of colonialism in Vietnam is Communism. The strength of the Communist party of Vietnam is a unique phenomenon in the developing world. Vietnam was the only country where a Communist-led government was established at the end of World …
Though I feel that the U.S. will have to withdraw all of its military forces from Vietnam if this disastrous chapter in our history is finally to be closed, I do not favor “immediate withdrawal.” There are no major political …
I think all opponents of our war in Vietnam, and certainly the Left, should take what seems to me the most promising and reasonable line: Put every conceivable and possible effective pressure on the President to get him to implement …
I assume each of the respondents will begin by rejecting your condition—to discuss the Vietnam war “apart from urgent expressions of anxiety and indignation.” That would be like talking about hell without fire. The conduct of this war is inseparable …
MAY, 1965 Letters from India, as a rule, are written by “outsiders” trying to appear as “insiders.” A Westerner visits India for six weeks, is touched and appalled by the sights, sounds, and smells, and goes home to write a …
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 …
Some people have asked whether the French municipal elections of 1965 would produce another Popular Front—even if this phrase could hardly mean today what it did in 1984. More precisely, the question has been raised whether the French Socialist party, …
