EDITOR'S PAGE

...And finally, in the first days of September, the leaders of the West, no doubt for their own political reasons and not for mine, though perhaps driven also by shame or the fear of dishonor, have acted forcefully enough, maybe, to open the way for serious negotiations...

...Acknowledging a similar slowness with regard to feminism, we plan to reconsider Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (1973) next...

...I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, against unfulfilled promises and empty threats, against military actions that were always too little, too late...

...q FALL • 1995 • 435...

...We are inaugurating this fall an occasional series called "Reconsiderations," in which we will look back on books important in the intellectual and political history of the left...

...In an inegalitarian society like ours, efforts to help the most disadvantaged groups with programs like those currently in operation do so largely (not entirely) at the expense of the next most disadvantaged groups...

...Lin Chun's memoir is the most powerful piece of writing on China that we have carried in a long time...

...Yaakov Garb begins with an essay on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a book ignored in these pages when it first appeared in 1962, despite the sharp debate that it generated...

...In this case, especially, the gains we seek when we support affirmative action programs (which, mostly, I think we ought to do) carry real losses with them, and it is crucial to the future of the left that the losses be acknowledged...

...It is taken from a much longer introduction to a book she is writing on Chinese women and communist politics...

...My own position is closest to Joanne Barkan's, and I am grateful to her for describing the genuine dilemma that affirmative action poses for people like us...

...Hers is an exemplary journey from revolutionary enthusiasm to a sober, critical, and sustained democratic and egalitarian commitment...

...I don't know how often that journey has been repeated in the modern world—more often, perhaps, than the contemporary political scene would suggest...

...And why did our leaders hesitate for so long—while the killing went on and on, and the number of refugees mounted, and the UN looked and acted like the League of Nations in Ethiopia...

...M.W...

...And we will try in all of them to attend to what so often gets lost in international politics: the interests and concerns of the victims, the men and women at risk...

...The debate over affirmative action is our main focus this fall, with short pieces written mostly by editors and writers familiar to our readers— for we are, and the left in general is, divided on this issue, even if the divisions are commonly concealed...

...But a proper diatribe depends on local and timely reference, so I kept postponing the writing...

...We were slow to recognize the value of ecological politics—a slowness we shared with most but not all leftists, as Garb makes clear...

...The moral world is not a harmonious place (no more than the political world is) where all good things—all the policies we want to support, all the values we want to affirm—fit neatly together...

...That much will come of them is still doubtful, for we have no reason to be sure of the stamina or courage of our leaders (or, for that matter, of the readiness for compromise of the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats...

...We have to be honest with ourselves about that—and honest also with those "next most" groups, with whom we still seek a political alliance...

...We will continue to print articles on nationalism, "ethnic cleansing," state formation, and military intervention...