It's easy enough to comprehend the shooting of 14 Serbian farmers in the Kosovan village of Gracko as part of the aftermath of NATO's war against Yugoslavia. These farmers – along with hundreds, perhaps thousands of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs before, during...
In 1987-91 I must have had too much time on my hands. I actually did an informal survey of what was going on British sociology. It wasn't pretty. British sociology was "eat up" with Structural Marxism, that French imposture made up by Louis Althusser...
The flap over Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's comment that Taiwan's relations with mainland China should properly be viewed as "country-to-country, or at least as special state-to-state" relations has been curious and amusing at one level. After all, it...
About a year ago, I took part in a heated debate over U.S. foreign policy on a historians' e-mail list to which I belong. One side, whom I unkindly dubbed "the militarists," took the Goldwater/Buckley/etc. position that Presidents can pretty much do whatever...
The war in Kashmir between India and Pakistan seems to have calmed down for the moment, but it could still present rich opportunities for the United States to do the wrong thing. President Clinton casually – almost cavalierly? – meddled at an early stage of...
It has been said that "there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes." Whether this is true or not will not detain us here. Matthew Arnold called Oxford University "the home of lost causes," referring in particular, one assumes, to...
Many of the Kosovo war's most active cheerleaders are having second thoughts now that the bombing phase of the war has ended, the "rebuilding" phase has begun and the general uselessness of the campaign has become increasingly apparent. Some of the second thoughts are...
One shouldn't read too much into deviations from prepared texts, and in fact the prepared text of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's remarks distributed to newsies during his California fundraising swing this week carried a warning right at the top "[Note: Governor Bush...
