The Discourse On Immigration: Myths And Principles
To discuss any issue of social rights seriously, we have to begin not only with the “practical possibilities,” or the contending policy proposals on national legislative agendas, but also with governing ethical principles, whatever they may be and wherever that discussion may take us. This is not to say that principles ought to govern policies,…
Read MoreAbout Saving Darfur: Reflections On The Carrot And The Stick
He who wills the end wills the means thereto. —Immanuel Kant Revulsion has gripped the world over the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Terrible civil wars between Northern and Southern Sudan have been taking place since independence was achieved more than fifty years ago. Nearly 300,000 people have died due to illness, violence, and starvation while…
Read MoreIn Defense of The Destruction of Reason
Twenty years ago for the 1985 Lukács centenary I wrote an article in defense of The Destruction of Reason. [1] The title suggested that Lukacs’ book had been taken so badly that anyone finding anything positive in it was necessarily on the defensive. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. The conditions, or…
Read MoreWhy Is Washington Holding Back On Darfur?
In 1984, when the Sudan’s civil war was just beginning, I testified before the House Sub-Committee on African Affairs, urging Congress not to see the Sudanese conflict through a Cold War lens. The fighting in the Southern Sudan was a product of internal political grievances, I argued, and not the meddling of Sudan’s enemies-at that…
Read MoreIs It Too Late For Darfur?
Darfur is a typical north-east African civil war. Local disputes were exacerbated by the breakdown of local governance and combined with the ambitions of a frustrated provincial elite to fuel an insurgency, which escalated more quickly and bloodily than its proponents ever imagined. The government response was characteristically ham-fisted and ruthless. The result was massacre,…
Read MoreThe Pope And The Ethics Of Exclusion
A move is being made by many Christian’ thinkers and political actors to paint Islam and, thus European Muslims, as inherently violent. The recent comments of Pope Benedict XVI may be seen as part of a renewed anti-Muslim discourse used to draw together and defend the heritage of Christian Europe’. How should the Left respond…
Read MoreFrom Pericles To Petraeus?
No one should have been surprised that general Petraeus and ambassador Crocker’s presentation to the House of Representatives was scheduled for September 11, exactly six years after the fall of the World Trade Center. What was perhaps surprising was that, while the public was waiting for this report, the president had managed to hold at…
Read MoreCreative Genius Or Crazy Scientist? – Delusional Or Defamed? – Paranoid Or Persecuted?: A Biographical Essay Commemorating The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Death Of Wilhelm Reich
In a diary entry of December 1935 Wilhelm Reich described his state of internal exile as “a burden to heavy to bear” when, “for the sake of the cause one becomes increasingly alone and is no longer a human being among others”. At that time Reichfound himself not only in an internal but also an…
Read MoreSixty Years of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann completed the manuscript of Doktor Faustus on January 29, 1947. Later that year, the novel was published in Sweden, in the original German. The first English translation[1] was in print only a couple of months later, in early 1948. Ever since, it may possibly have been the novel by Mann that was the…
Read MoreLife And Work Of Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He died on March 18, 1980, in Locarno, Switzerland. The world in which Fromm was brought up was directed to traditional learning, to the perfection of man, to spiritual values–goals that were just opposed to the cliché…
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