What explains the genius of the American Founders?
By Gordon S. Wood

English politics were dominated by about 400 noble families whose fabulous scale of landed wealth, political influence and aristocratic grandeur was unmatched by anyone in North America. The English aristocrats were arrogant, complacent about their constitution and unwilling to think freshly about most things. When they thought about the outlying and underdeveloped provinces of their greater British world at all, they tended to look down upon them with disdain. In the eyes of the English ruling class, not only North America but also Scotland was contemptible and barely civilized.

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The Revolt of the Elites
By Christopher Lasch

The radical movements that disturbed the peace of the twentieth century have failed one by one, and no successors have appeared on the horizon. The industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has become a pitiful remnant of itself. The hope that “new social movements” would take its place in the struggle against capitalism, which briefly sustained the left in the late Seventies and early Eighties, has come to nothing. Not only do the new social movements–feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, agitation against racial discrimination–have nothing in common; their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than at a revolutionary transformation of social relations.

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Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order
By Agnès Callamard

Universality, the principle that all of us, without exception, are endowed with human rights equally, no matter who we are or where we live, lies at the heart of the international human rights system. It was the foundation of the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both adopted in 1948, and it continued to inform new means of accountability over the years, including the International Criminal Court, established in 2002. For decades, that legal infrastructure has helped ensure that states uphold their human rights obligations. It has defined human rights movements globally and underpinned the twentieth century’s greatest human rights achievements.

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The Unsung Hero Who Coined the Term “Genocide”
By Michael Ignatieff

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin—and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word “genocide.” He was also its victim. Forty-nine members of Lemkin’s family, including his mother and father, were rounded up in eastern Poland and gassed in Treblinka in 1943. Lemkin escaped to America, and in wartime Washington gave a name to Hitler’s crimes in his monumental study of the jurisprudence of Nazi occupation, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944.

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Lemkin belongs historically to a select list of humanitarians such as Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross in 1863, and Eglantyne Jebb, who created Save the Children after World War I—or going farther back, to John Howard, the eighteenth-century sheriff of Bedfordshire who single-handedly awoke Europeans to the cruelty of their prison systems. These were all people who by their own solitary efforts, with an obsessional devotion to a private cause, changed the moral climate of their times.

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Those Who Don’t Investigate the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It
By Stephen M. Walt

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a day and a half on board the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt as it conducted exercises off the coast of Florida in preparation for an extended deployment. It was a fascinating experience, and one of the activities that impressed me most was watching night landings by the ship’s F-18 squadron. An especially interesting part, at least for me, was observing the debriefing each pilot had to undergo after every flight, in which members of the crew went over each landing and explained what the pilot had done correctly and what needed to be improved. The purpose of these sessions was clear: To maintain a high level of performance, you had to learn from any mistakes you made so you could do better in the future.

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