With this issue, Dissent inaugurates a new concern with the politics of the environment. The following essays have been specially commissioned to broach this theme, as have additional ones that will appear in the Summer issue. Thereafter, we expect to …
The bipolar world is gone. The world’s states are careening toward some new equilibrium— or so we imagine, for no one can foretell what the new order will be. All that we know for sure is that it won’t resemble …
The news from the USSR is ominous. The Soviet Interior ministry has attacked institutions of representative government in Lithuania and Latvia; Estonia waits nervously. Unarmed supporters of the elected governments of these republics have been shot or crushed under tanks. …
Returning to Warsaw after a lapse of nine years, a visitor expects visual changes as dramatic as the political. That expectation is quickly dashed. The Polish capital simply looks more tired than ever, with its heartbreaking Stalinist architecture, mercifully relieved …
Violence in America, Volume 1: The History of Crime in America edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., $17.95 Violence in America, Volume 2: Protest, Rebellion, Reform edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., …
The trouble with undercover police operations, Gary Marx’s excellent new book might lead us to conclude, is that they breed government waste: not waste of time or money so much as of human personality and integrity of the law itself. …
American universities in the 1980s have witnessed some striking developments at that tender point where academic research meets big business and big government. Some of the most dramatic of these have involved technologies of genetic engineering—biotechnology, for short—with their much-contested …
Having failed at reducing unemployment, reviving the Middle East peace process, stopping the burgeoning national debt and controlling the arms race, the Reagan administration has evidently decided to take on something it can handle: pornography. Last summer, to much fanfare, …
JANUARY 1986: See if you can guess the trouble spot for U.S. foreign policy I am describing: A poor country, struggling to industrialize, richly endowed with natural resources but suffering from decades of retrograde political leadership. The United States, in …
Remember candidate Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the great American people”? It was one of his most effective rhetorical thrusts in the 1980 television debates with Jimmy Carter. Spokespeople for the Administration have flourished …
The pattern repeats itself every generation or so in America. Things go wrong, at home or abroad, and an explanation is demanded. For some, it is inconceivable that the source of the difficulties might lie within the American system itself. …
A merica has an orgy of emotional reckoning still to come over its involvement in Vietnam. The eight or so years we spent tearing that country to pieces wrought commensurate destruction to our own shared cultural and emotional life. When …
General Jaruzelski’s desperate coup against his own people bought his bankrupt regime some time. It also had the effect, no doubt quite unintended, of freezing Solidarity in time, and of ensuring that movement a permanent place in Poland’s national mythology. …
Surely no literary vision of the future can match the power and enduring influence of Orwell’s 1984. Perhaps the most provocative element of that vision is the prospect of using sophisticated technologies of intrusion and manipulation to consolidate totalitarian power. …
I left Warsaw after a recent eight-day stay impressed above all with the fluidity of the situation and the lack of precedent for what is taking place. Yet about several important things I am sure. First, Poland is experiencing a …
