The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Metropolitan Books, 2007, 576 pp., $28.00 A strange contradiction afflicts nonhierarchical social movements. Those activists who are most hesitant to create formal mechanisms for naming leaders give the media …
After a period of relative impotence, the Hindu-supremacist right in India has rebounded, with the December reelection of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Narendra Modi as chief minister in Gujarat. Modi’s role in the mass murders of Muslims in that state …
His involvement with Dissent was, so to speak, one of Norman Mailer’s more improbable marriages, and by no means the shortest. A member of the founding editorial board, he was on this journal’s masthead for most of four decades. The …
These last forty years, as each decade grinds to a close, there arrives the anniversary of 1968, with its invitation to nostalgia, the reconsideration of dashed hopes, or a pondering of the paradoxes of frustrated rebellion. Already in 1978 Régis …
History has issued a definitive verdict on the events of October 2, 1968, in the capital city of Mexico, at least for its horrendous moral significance. Although we will never know the exact number of those killed on that afternoon …
Charles Dickens, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized “the best of times” and “the worst of times” within itself. Living through 1968 in …
At an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group “the Diggers” burst into the middle of Tom Hayden’s keynote speech, screaming that the people …
Larry Hardesty is correct about “Norwegian Wood,” and I apologize for the error. But I believe my general argument still holds. Hardesty’s analysis either parallels or is derived from Wilfrid Mellers’s analysis of “Norwegian Wood” in his 1973 book, The …
Dissent’s editors asked a number of leading writers and intellectuals of the left to respond to the following questions: “Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the modern left. In this, its fortieth-anniversary year, …
It’s tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx’s axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around. In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, …
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army Jeremy Scahill Nation Books, 2007 464 pp $26.95 Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry P.W. Singer Cornell University Press, 2007 (first edition, …
IN THE EVER-EVOLVING and convoluted story of affirmative action in the United States, June 28, 2007 will stand out as a paradox. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority managed in one ruling to undermine racial integration in primary and secondary education …
Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the …
Norman Mailer came to public attention as the young author of a best-selling novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of that generation was likely to …
We are in the middle of the most politically gripping Democratic primary campaign in recent memory, and, with a lead time of almost two months, there is nothing that we can say about it that will be readable or relevant …
