In mid-October the Nicaraguan government announced a suspension of civil liberties, including the rights to free expression, free assembly, and privacy in the use of postal services. With these measures has come a new stringency in the censorship of the …
The March 1985 Encounter features an address to Western Europe by Irving Kristol. A warning in three parts, with the logical structure of a syllogism backed by a gun, Kristol’s article is entitled “A Transatlantic ‘Misunderstanding’: The Case of Central …
Bitburg, Germany, 1945; Managua, Nicaragua, 1985. The two appear to be so far apart that no occurrence could possibly bring them together. But in March and April, 1985, Ronald Reagan asked himself a question, Whom shall I honor? And his …
Smuggle a thousand rifles, submachine guns, and grenade launchers into the 20 largest American cities, distribute them among known criminals, excops, the hard core of left- and right-wing lunatic sects, and assure a continuous supply of ammunition and tactical intelligence, leaving …
Left-wing literary people talk more these days about criticism than about fiction or poetry or plays. The statement sounds too flat to be true, and it is fair to ask what “left-wing” signifies in the context. I am using it …
On October 21, 1981 much of the world outside Washington was dismayed by two statements, from leading U.S. policy-makers, which revealed that in inner government circles the prospect of nuclear war with Russia is looked on with increasing equanimity. The …
Any five minutes of Truffaut show his quickness, his intelligence, his authority in matching images with words, or using them to surprise each other, and his unrelaxed interest in the progress of a story. He sets the pace better than …
Two weeks before the election, I was surprised by a small story in the back pages of the New York Times. “McCarthy Is Said to Back Reagan”—that was the headline. The brief but unambiguous dispatch told how McCarthy had met …
Apocalypse Now is a piece of visionary propaganda about the Vietnamese war— oppressively ugly for most of its length, with an emotional sordidness that teases and at last wears down and baffles the audience—a confidently brutal film, grating in its …
Both Joan Baez and Jane Fonda are to some extent public figures in their art because they are public figures outside it: Ms. Baez for her marches against the H-bomb and the war, her marriage to a draft resister, and …
On March 28, the water used to cool a “containment vessel” in the atomic plant at Three Mile Island, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, grew dangerously hot and gave every sign of growing hotter. The consequences were as follows. The company that …
We are not likely to have a critic on the scale of Edmund Wilson ever again. He taught modernism, American literature, and “the writing and acting of history” to three generations of readers, and if his example as a journalist …
A curious feature of Solzhenitsyn’s Commencement Speech at Harvard (National Review, July 7, 1978) is its attack on freedom of the press. The untoward liberties that American journalists are known to take have been shocking to Solzhenitsyn, and he responds with something between petulance and indignation. …
Considered as an allegory, The Magic Flute has skeptical things to say about the fate of art in society. (It fights a winning battle against any spectator because it says them playfully.) On a different level, the opera, among the …
Albert Speer has an absorbed and patient look as he answers questions about his complicity in Hitler’s war crimes, through hour after hour of Marcel Ophuls’s documentary, The Memory of Justice. “What makes you do this?” Ophuls finally asks. “It …
