In 1980, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a scholar whose specialty was Peronist Argentina, presented a full-blown theory, published in Commentary magazine, attributing the fall of the Nicaraguan and Iranian autocrats to the Carter administration’s “lack of realism.” She derided the idea that …
The first part of my report from Nicaragua in the Spring 1986 Dissent ended with a promise that I would deal with some of the countervailing forces that serve to moderate the centralizing tendencies within Nicaragua—what they are, and to …
My very extensive and varied experience of psychoanalysis as a patient in both Europe and the United States corroborates much that Henry Abelove writes in “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans” [Dissent, Winter 1986]. I indeed agree with him that …
AUSTIN, MINNESOTA: 6:15 and they have at last dropped off the wood for the fire barrels. But until the sun comes up, nothing is going to be enough to keep us warm. The picket lines left the Austin Labor Center …
In the new novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa there is an arresting sequence in which the protagonist and his revolutionary comrades stop at the ancient mountain community of Quero. They rest there for two hours before continuing their …
There are many things wrong with destroying humankind—the lives lost, the suffering and pain, the futures denied. But these terrible things are also wrong with wars that spare the species. What makes the nuclear nightmare different is not simply the …
At first glance, George Kateb’s stirring plea for renewed moral reflection on the subject of human extinction seems utterly unobjectionable. The nuclear situation does create a radical discontinuity with the past: for the first time human extinction is conceivable not …
The response of Jean L. Cohen and Erazim Kohák are, for the most part, polemical. I have no wish to defend my views against polemical attack, or to answer an attack with an attack. Cohen’s response does, however, raise some …
Selling state-owned industries has become a policy throughout the world. In Britain, “privatization” is nothing less than a bid for a new Conservative hegemony. By looking at three prime goals of the policy—depoliticization of industrial policy, weakening the base of …
My book, American Communism and Soviet Russia, was first published a quarter of a century ago. Its republication has made me think back to the circumstances that helped to bring it about. As I have reread it after all these …
Peter Glotz is the national secretary of the German Social Democratic party, a member of the Bundestag, and author of the recent book Manifest für eine Neue Europäische Linke (Berlin: Siedler, 1985). This article has been translated into a number …
Many of our readers will remember that Muriel Gardiner, together with her husband Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian Socialist underground in the 1930s, were among the early and then continuing supporters of Dissent. The following interview with her …
At this moment, the “Government of National Unity” has been in office here in Jerusalem for almost a year and a half. It almost came apart in April, and whether it will still be in existence by the time this …
Belatedly, the world recognizes the peculiar evil of terrorism—the murder of innocent people, the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the sense of personal vulnerability, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public places, the coerciveness of precaution. All …
The welfare state was designed for a more insular world, a time when national policies were effective because the nation was the relevant unit. But that is now a subject for history classes. We have all been drawn into a …
