“The Negro has been the only American who has constantly made an issue of democracy,” wrote Philip Berrigan, S. J. last year. That he did not overstate his case by very much was shown by the Court’s decision obliterating the …
In the late nineteenth century, Marxism was superimposed on an already formidable revolutionary movement in France. Marxism claimed the faith of proletarians and revolutionary intellectuals alike, as the union of theory and practice which the movement required but would not …
As lonely sectarian politics goes into eclipse and “coalitionism” comes to the fore, it behooves radicals to watch their step. The terrain is tricky and full of traps. One danger is a permanent by-product of the New Deal, the phenomenon …
Those who do not know the name Mihajlov, will have to conjure with it before long. Not since Milovan Djilas, a symbol of much that is best in politics, has a Yugoslav citizen asserted his humanity with such conviction and …
1. The Betrayal of the French Left The Indochina War was, no doubt, one of the great errors of French policy in this century. That is why the question of responsibility for this costly and futile venture will agitate all …
This story, written in 1923 under the Russian title “They Were Nine,” has never been published in either the Soviet Union or abroad. It appears here in translation for the first time. Although the story clearly belongs to the Red …
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, in his latest essay into the abuses of psychiatry, considers what he calls the psychiatric denial of the right of trial: the procedure by which the accused is denied trial on the grounds of mental incompetence. …
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote New York: Random House 343 pp. $5.95. Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of …
Editors: In his interesting discussion on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (DISSENT, May-June 1966) Lewis Coser expresses the hope that Fanon’s “destructive vision” may lead Western men to compassion, to a sense of fraternity and a lack of …
Selma and the March to Montgomery, so full of the hyperbole of hope, the promise that democracy would at last come to the South, marked an end to the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement. Since then, the emphasis …
You ask for my top-of-the-head thoughts on “the enrages or the beat or simply the deviant,” and one of the first things that occurs to me is that it is precisely that sort of question—and the purpose for which it …
In foreign affairs, no rule applies over long periods of time. Only the simple-minded imagine that, once committed to a crusade, a government must continue it until either victory or defeat. Or like children watching a Western, they assume that …
Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of thoughts and questions. To take the success first, can it primarily be attributed …
When I first wrote a review-article for DISSENT on Venezuela,* I advanced the idea that the Betancourt “democratic” revolution, which enjoyed enthusiastic U.S. support, was really the beginning of a genuine “counter-revolutionary” movement in Latin America. I took it that …
“You, Serge, are an intellectual, and you’re polite, we all know that. That’s why you keep quiet and don’t ask any questions. But our boys from the factory, they ask right away. ‘Well, Vaska,’ they say, ‘so you got drunk …
