EDITOR—Mass culture, Hannah Arendt observed, was not culture but personal entertainment, or, better-stated, self-aggrandizement. Our civilizational collapse into intellectual darkness and the catastrophic failure in democracy were presciently predicted by many of our wisest cultural critics such as Lewis Lapham, Morris Berman, and Robert Kaplan two decades ago.
EDITOR—The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God. The documentary was first broadcast in January 2006, in the form of two 45-minute episodes (excluding advertisement breaks), on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. Dawkins did not think The Root of All Evil? was an ideal title. His book The God Delusion, published in September 2006, explores topics from the documentary in more detail.
MAX BLUMENTHAL—According to Kennedy, “everybody [in Jenin] is involved in bomb making” – there are no civilians there at all, therefore all are legitimate targets. He did not seem to know that the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing ended well over 15 years ago, or that Israel’s primary concern in Jenin was with the proliferation of armed militias defending their territory from settler and military incursions.
MIKE KRUPA—In the statement quoted above, Robert F. Kennedy went on to state: “Our objective is clear. It is to facilitate the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Europe in association with the United States. This is the only sure guarantee against nuclear war whether by design or by accident. It is also the surest means of fostering our common prosperity.” These are words that in no way have lost their relevance and there is no better place to make the case for rescuing civilization from the apocalypse of nuclear war than Warsaw, which still bears the scars of total annihilation resulting from a politics of genocide, terror, subordination, hubris, and totalitarian ideology.
DAVE LINDORFF—Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was America’s ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb — the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb — a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be.
