Punch recently published a cartoon that shows three frightened little men storming into a launching station for guided missiles and shouting, “It’s coming back!” John Foster Dulles must have had similar feelings during the last few months as his whole …
Having digested the current issue of DISSENT in the comparative isolation of Puerto Rico, I am moved to sum up impressions on the publication’s relevance in the last two years. A lot of theoretical debris has been cleared away. Issues …
IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the …
Some time ago the Fund for the Republic sponsored a poll to discover how Americans felt about “Communism, conformity and civil liberties.” The general findings of the study make highly illuminating reading; they are available in book form (Communism, Conformity …
In the first days of the Hungarian Revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Vercors and 19 other well-known French writers and intellectuals associated with the Communist movement produced a statement which, timidly and with much circumlocution, nevertheless questioned the Russian …
The television show Person to Person employs a technician whose job is to hide a small microphone in the bosoms of women who appear on the show so that the women may be heard without the apparatus being visible to the …
Few claims concerning the direction of the American economy have been more important to social and political theory than the assertion that income has been radically redistributed. The theoretical systems built around this theme have captured the imagination of a …
The recent events in Russia, particularly a number of references made at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, have brought back into public discussion issues and problems concerning the history of 20th century radicalism that for a good many years had been …
R.H.S. Crossman, reviewing John Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism* last summer, began by observing that British socialists have run out of fresh ideas. This is true, but the explanation lies not, as he seems to think, in their overwhelmingly successful concentration upon …
At the end of March 1949 a number of us were transferred from Camp Zaiarsk to “our” headquarters at Bratsk, Siberia. We were each given two kilo and 400 grams of black bread, four herrings and 60 grams of sugar—our …
Editors: The [Summer] issue, on Africa, was highly revealing and dramatic. I was impressed with the eloquence of Peter Abrahams’ statements. There was, however, one remark to which I objected. In replying to a question as to his opinion on …
The modern historian generally recognizes that his writings are to some degree tied to the contemporary climate of opinion, zeitgebunden as the Germans say. The common assumptions of the time are all-pervasive; for the scholar to filter all of them …
The crisis of the Communist world has not come to an end; it has only begun. That the Russians, by spilling enough blood, could reestablish military control over Budapest, was never in doubt. But their reduction of Hungary to the …
The combined, and probably premeditated, Anglo-French Israeli punitive expedition against Egypt has again illuminated the narrow track we walk between survival and extinction. If, for many of us, this information has become fearfully redundant, for others it may have the …
