Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE, long in preparation, concerns bloody business—although not Osama bin Laden's. It grapples, as Nicolaus Mills writes, with "the moral and political issues raised by the...
...Changing the subject signifies evasion...
...We need credible critics...
...Confront Stalinist atrocities...
...Global inequalities, corporate power, social suffering, religious and racial bias—these are real, urgent issues...
...It grapples, as Nicolaus Mills writes, with "the moral and political issues raised by the widespread mass killing and 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor...
...The attorney general, a zealot, is fashioning some disquieting measures in the name of security...
...Well, let's talk about "the real issue," globalization...
...A formidable warning...
...George W. Bush, under cover of the war, is facilitating profoundly regressive economic policies...
...Censure terror...
...But if you treat terror as little more than an invitation, albeit irksome, to talk about them, you won't, and should not, have credibility...
...Ask about a crisis within Islam...
...No, my politics hasn't transmuted...
...Nowadays it should trouble anyone who identifies himor herself as "left...
...Dissent offers some forceful takes on this past fall's painful events in a separate opening section...
...n Hasn't the left been through something like this before—and been discredited by it...
...One almost expects them to explain that bin Laden's crew attacked the World Trade Center because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves (sold to him, undoubtedly, by "Zionists...
...No, that's bigoted, let's discuss the "real" issue, Orientalism...
...They cannot be challenged credibly by anyone who treats terror and public safety as nonissues, distractions from what he or she wants to offer the world...
...I'm "left" because I believe that liberty, equality, and solidarity—linked together sensibly if fitfully—should regulate any morally intelligent politics...
...n The Tobin tax was never the rational kernel within al Qaeda's murderous cells...
...their memory and the problems they pose must not be...
...These "New Killing Fields" may have been displaced by Afghanistan in the news...
...n A rhetorical tactic is at play: always change the subject...
...You have a calling for politics, he wrote, only if you won't "crumble" before a world that seems "too stupid or too base" for what you want to offer it...
...Ummm...
...n Since September 11, I've pondered repeatedly a passage by Max Weber...
...Jefs address "the real issues," czarism, capitalism, and imperialism...
...But I also think that the responses to September 11 by parts of the left—Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, the "critical" minds who are always predictable—threaten to dissociate the word "left" from morally intelligent politics...
...Sometimes it's evasion of what means imply for ends and sometimes of the fact that the world doesn't always present to us comforting choices...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
