In late August, a couple of weeks after a U.S. drone strike incinerated Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s most popular televised chat show, “Capital Talk,” hosted a panel to discuss national security. Among the guests was a squat, middle-aged woman with short black hair, streaked with silver dye, named Shireen Mazari. A defense analyst and public intellectual, Mazari is known for her hawkish nationalism--and deep suspicions of India and the United States. Her presence in the studio suggested that, despite the enormous threat her country faced from homegrown terrorists, the conversation that night wouldn’t center around Mehsud or the Pakistani Taliban.
Anne Applebaum does a fine job at pointing out the disingenuousness of Victor Navasky's letter. The man simply can't bring himself to admit the extent of American spying for the Soviets--and both the moral and political implications of that crime. Is that pathological?
Conceding that the Rosenbergs “shouldn’t have done what they did” and that they “thought they were helping our ally in wartime” hardly amounts to a full recognition of their crimes. Remember, the Rosenbergs knowingly gave atomic technology to Stalin--technology that was used to keep half of Europe under brutal occupation for half a century, and helped fuel a costly and wasteful arms race, and helped a stupid and vicious communist dictatorship stay in power, too.
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
By Jennifer Burns
(Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
By Anne C. Heller
(Doubleday, 559 pp., $35)
I.
The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.
The past few years haven't been kind to foreign policy idealism--the belief that when authoritarian states mistreat their own people, it is a matter of concern for all of us. We idealists can largely blame ourselves for this.
With the primary race finally wrapped up, we asked a few friends of the magazine to consider the type of campaign Barack Obama should run against John McCain. Up here is Lakshmi Chaudhry, a contributing writer for The Nation, whose work has also appeared in Wired, In These Times, the Village Voice, and Salon.
With the primary race finally wrapped up, we asked a few friends of the magazine to consider the type of campaign Barack Obama should run against John McCain. Up here is Lakshmi Chaudhry, a contributing writer for The Nation, whose work has also appeared in Wired, In These Times, the Village Voice, and Salon.
