We live in an ever-widening circle of genocides, achieved and attempted, perpetrated in the present and discovered in the past. But we see and care about few of them. Such selective perception is, I believe, encouraged by the often-repeated claim …
When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, pundits predicted that it would end up like Yugoslavia, with ethnic wars tearing the union into fragments. Russians left “abroad”—in Central Asia, Crimea, and the Baltic Republics—would become tinder for …
I have come back here to die,” Desta Abdissa told me in Addis Ababa, “and the sooner the better.” Desta is an Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia’s eighty ethnic groups, comprising as much as half the population. He comes from …
Books on economic affairs don’t sell well in Britain. I should know. In 1982 I presented an eight-part television series for the BBC entitled Whatever Happened to Britain? There was a book of the show, and every evening that the …
One of the most useful things intellectuals can do is to invent a term or phrase that flood-lights a new social situation. Society is constantly throwing up problems that are too diffuse and too complex to grasp until someone comes …
That taxes cannot be legitimately established except by the consent of the people or its representatives, is a truth generally admitted by all philosophers and jurists of any repute on questions of public right. Contributions levied on the people are …
Black America finds itself looking down a cold and poorly lit road toward an uncertain political and economic future as the early months of 1996 focus attention on this fall’s presidential and congressional elections. Black America is now in the …
There are two tendencies in the American economy that many have noticed as isolated phenomena but that few connect with each other. The first is the enduring decline of most U.S. workers’ real wages. The second is the top-heavy, bloated …
A young dissertation student at the University of Chicago, I first came to Howard to teach composition in the Department of English. From 1978 to 1983, I taught four writing courses a semester for five difficult years. The campus on …
There is no more Czechoslovakia, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future. The governments of the two rump states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, do not like to be reminded that there ever was …
I was preparing to drive from Cambridge, Massachusetts to my alma mater, Lincoln University, near Oxford, Pennsylvania, the day last fall that General Colin Powell announced his exit from what was a kind of presidential campaign. His decision not to …
In contrast with the headlines generated by the original GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) controversy of two years ago, the news from Geneva on January 17 made barely a ripple; small items in the business pages reporting that …
Leftists generally respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect toward prostitute organizations or their political activists and intellectuals. For the most part, such groups and individuals are ignored. Again, why?
Many on the left are befuddled by the American public’s staunch resistance to taxes— a seemingly irrational hostility that often paralyzes public policy. Americans are convinced that they are overtaxed, although their tax burden is lower than those of other …
The best antidote to feminist despair is knowledge of our own history. With each new skirmish in the gender wars, feminists fall into greater despair. We lose so often that we forget how greatly we have transformed American political culture. …
