Innehållsförteckning för Feb-09-15 från The Nation

As American as… Torture? The outrage of Tim Weiner, The Nation and the rest of us on the left about the government’s use of torture in the “global war on terror” is, sadly, a minority position. When it comes to national-security issues, most Americans really don’t care what the CIA or the military do—the more and the meaner, the better. In “The American Way of Torture” [Jan. 5], Weiner wrote, “In part, the blame lies with Congress, which became a sleeping watchdog after the Cold War.” The other part is with the people who elect Congress. Chris Nielsen Seattle * * * In “The American Way of Torture,” Tim Weiner paraphrases CIA director John Brennan’s defense of torture in chillingly familiar terms: “[T]he president told us to do it, and…

For 150 years, The Nation has kept readers informed about what we called, in our very first issue, “the conflict of ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword.” Founded by abolitionists, The Nation has never shied away from taking sides in that conflict, and throughout this year, we will mark our 150th anniversary with a variety of special print and digital products, a nationwide series of live events, and a documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple. 
 At TheNation.com, a new daily feature called “The Almanac” highlights major historical events and The Nation’s coverage of them. In March, we’ll publish a history of The Nation written by our London correspondent, D.D. Guttenplan, followed…

On January 9, undocumented students and their allies protested Georgia’s decision to ban such students from the state’s top five public universities by holding an integrated class at the University of Georgia in Athens.
 The date marked the fifty-fourth anniversary of the desegregation of UGA, and the class featured lectures by human-rights activists Lonnie King and Loretta Ross. The students, who study at Georgia’s Freedom University, which offers college coursework to undocumented people, identified themselves by wearing monarch-butterfly wings on their backs.
 When the building closed, the students refused to leave. By 8 pm, police arrived and arrested nine activists, including four undocumented students. The students remain determined to fight for the human right to education.
 —Jacqueline 
Delgadillo…

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act approaches, the right to vote is under siege. From 2011 to 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with nineteen states rolling back voting rights in some way. Then, in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), freeing those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination from having to approve their voting changes with the federal government. The result has been the greatest effort to restrict access to the ballot since the end of Reconstruction. The federal government and civil-rights groups have been struggling to respond ever since. 
 In the wake of Shelby County, the Justice Department and groups like the American Civil…

Writing History in the Global Era By Lynn Hunt. Norton. 196 pp. $25.95. The History Manifesto By Jo Guldi and David Armitage. Cambridge. 165 pp. Paper $19.99. historymanifesto.cambridge.org The Practical Past By Hayden White. Edited by Ed Dimendberg. Northwestern. 134 pp. $35. History has a history, and historians rarely tire of quarreling over it. Yet for the past few centuries, historians have maintained an uneasy truce over the assumption that the search for “facts” should always take precedence over the more fractious difficulty of interpreting them. According to Arnaldo Momigliano, the great twentieth-century Italian scholar of ancient history, it was the Renaissance antiquarians who, though they did not write history, inadvertently made the modern historical profession possible by repudiating grand theory in order to establish cherished fact. The antiquarians collected…

President Obama kicked off what he refers to as the fourth quarter of his presidency with a self-assured State of the Union address that detailed a pragmatic progressive agenda—one that could influence much of this year’s wrangling in DC and all of next year’s presidential race. In so doing, Obama rejected the lame-duck status that Republicans were hoping he’d embrace. 
 The president’s rhetoric was often bolder than his proposals. Yet there’s good reason to cheer an address that recognizes that any serious effort to take on income inequality must redistribute some of the wealth that has been locked up by the billionaire class. With common-sense proposals to hike capital-gains taxes and close loopholes in order to fund tax breaks for working families and provide free access to community college,…

The first excursion that my husband and I made after we arrived in Paris on a cold and rainy morning six days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre was a visit to the memorial for the murdered editors and cartoonists. “Catastrophe,” murmured one elderly woman, pointing us down the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. The memorial was a huge heap of sodden flowers—including an expensive potted orchid bravely blossoming in the January air—mixed with Tibetan prayer flags, posters and cartoons. “Je Suis Charlie” was everywhere; someone had even made a piece of art in which the phrase was fashioned from real pens and pencils. One wall was covered with index cards featuring messages of sympathy from all over the world: Sri Lanka, Italy, Alabama. There were two big turquoise binders in which people…

The Nation of April 12, 1947, included 22-year-old James Baldwin’s first published piece, a critical review of Maxim Gorky’s short stories. Gorky’s limitations, Baldwin wrote, were typical of “the even more dismal failure of present-day realistic novelists.” Even so, he admitted that Gorky “sometimes succeeded in projecting…the unpredictability and the occasional and amazing splendor of the human being. It is a concept which today…is dismissed as mystic or unreal. Without the insight into the mainsprings of human needs, desperations, and desires, the concern with squalor remains merely squalid and acts to brutalize the reader rather than to purge him. If literature is not to drop completely to the intellectual and moral level of the daily papers we must recognize the need for further and honest exploration of those provinces, the…

The headquarters of the Greek left-wing party Syriza is a small, drab, gray building on a corner of Eleftherias Square in downtown Athens. Only the party’s banner and a small police presence outside hint that this isn’t just another aging office block in a rundown part of town. Two blocks away, a city-run soup kitchen is bustling with people who never dreamed, five years ago, that they would need such a thing. But this unprepossessing base is home to a diverse group of politicians, academics and activists who now look poised to win Greece’s snap election on January 25. As the left’s first anti-austerity party to come to power in Europe, Syriza may be about to change much more than Greece’s future.
 Mercilessly beaten down by both the debt crisis…

The Confidence Trap A History of Democracy in Crisis From World War I to the Present. By David Runciman. Princeton. 381 pp. $29.95. The word “democracy” has been bruised and beaten during the last few centuries. It has been pressed into the service of dictators and demagogues, of dewy-eyed imperialists and utopian prophets of consumer sovereignty. It has been routinely used to endow power grabs with an aura of righteousness and to recast the pursuit of particular economic interests as a defense of universal principles. After all the ill use, there are gray moments when democracy seems to be more of a phantom than a foundation. 
 David Runciman is not discouraged. In The Confidence Trap, he returns to the project pioneered by Alexis de Tocqueville: to take democracy seriously…

These are ripe times to read Baldwin. Not just the essays on racist policing; those are, in a way, too easy. “A Report From Occupied Territory,” which appeared in The Nation, burns hot a half-century after it was published. That its depiction of black vulnerability and police volatility could describe the contemporary scene; that its central metaphor of occupation is not too hyperbolic to have been echoed by Eric Holder last year, nor its concern with personal disintegration too dated to anticipate Ismaaiyl Brinsley; that even its particulars (“If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess anything”) feel gruesomely fresh in light of known CIA torture regimens—all of these, enraging as they are, only confirm what we already…

One of the works appearing prominently in the Egyptian artist Ganzeer’s first US solo show has already been displayed to the thousands who attended this fall’s anti-police brutality protests. It’s a silkscreened print in yellow and blue, with a picture of Eric Garner being choked by an NYPD officer. Along the side, bold lettering reads: BE BRUTAL. The mock recruiting poster carries contact information at the bottom: NYPDKILLS.COM / 212-KILL-PEOPLE. 
 Mohamed Fahmy, 32, who goes by the name Ganzeer (or “bicycle chain”) achieved international fame during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt. For many foreign artists, a New York show might be viewed as an opportunity to focus an audience’s attention on their home country, but Ganzeer wasn’t interested. “I think that’s what they were expecting: ‘This guy’s from…

With the exception of the early 1960s, the right to vote in the United States is arguably more embattled today than at any time since Reconstruction. In a quick succession of rulings in October, voter-ID laws, residency requirements, and the curtailment of early voting hours and same-day registration were upheld or overturned in states across the country. The Supreme Court permitted restrictions in some states for the midterm elections and prohibited them in others, but it refused to rule on the merits of the laws.
 Amid the turmoil, voting-rights advocates cheered every small victory, however local or tenuous, and rued the many losses. The movement is still staggering from the body blow of Shelby County v. Holder (2013), in which the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the…

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio stood at a podium inside a church on Staten Island and told reporters of the “pain and frustration and confusion” in his city. It was December 3, less than a year into his first term, and the streets were alive with protests against the New York Police Department after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man. The mayor evoked his teenage son Dante, the star of his campaign, whose smiling face and natural hair had reminded New Yorkers that thousands of kids just like him were routinely stopped and frisked by the police for doing nothing but having brown skin. The burgeoning energy of a movement against stop-and-frisk had…

For Mihály, the antihero of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (New York Review Books; Paper $16.95), translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, the important question is whether to conform. Should he spend his life working at his father’s company? Does he care about fitting in with polite Hungarian society? Or should he abandon such possibilities and do something else entirely? The question pulses through this transfixing novel like a heartbeat. Even though the plot is almost too ramshackle to deserve the name, we always know what is at stake: everything. 
 Today, in America at least, this narrative mood is most associated with stories about “young adults,” one of the last demographics allowed to feel that everyday life brims with questions of enormous importance. But Mihály is a grown-up.…