The New York Times
Cameras Shoot Where Uzis Can’t
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, by releasing audio- and videotapes of themselves, have given new life to their movements of rebellion — or at least the illusion of new life — which, in the age of mass media, may amount to the same thing. Defying reports of their own deaths, they appear to speak…
Continue readingThe Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters
A few years after the end of World War II, George Orwell wrote that the ”the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” Since then the term fascist has gone in and out of fashion several times. In the late 1960’s, the time of civil…
Continue readingExperts Can Help Rebuild A Country
When the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was asked to write a report on Japan in the spring of 1945 for the American Office of War Information, she was working under difficult conditions. She had never been to Japan and had no chance of going there during wartime. She did her ”field research” among Japanese-Americans living…
Continue readingHistorians Trace an Unholy Alliance; Religion as the Root Of Nationalist Feeling
When Shiite Muslims in Iraq took to the streets to protest the presence of American troops as well as Saddam Hussein, was the world witnessing the birth of nationalism? When President Bush used the term crusade to describe the war on terrorism, was he inadvertently revealing religious roots in American patriotism? In short, is religious…
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