Word: dissents
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that, freedom of dissent has made steady progress, particularly since the Supreme Court extended the First Amendment to the states in 1925. The right to criticize public officials in print, in speech and in the streets is now firmly rooted throughout U.S. law. The draft cannot be used to conscript critics; a conscientious objector can rely on any God he chooses. The civil rights movement has taught Americans to accept nonviolent demonstrations in pursuit of constitutional rights. The rejection of McCarthyism, the civilizing of U.S. criminal justice-such milestones have moved America ever closer to its professed ideals. Few today...
Such logic is not new, and it is not stifling dissent now any more than it did in the past. Rusk's words could have been used by President McKinley during the so-called Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the century, when 70,000 U.S. troops sought to "Christianize" Aguinaldo's guerrillas, and safeguard U.S.-Asian commerce in the process. Home-front critics of that war included Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and ex-Presidents Harrison and Cleveland. A Negro editor called it "a sinful extravagance to waste our civilizing influence upon the unappreciative Filipinos when...
...this sophisticated stage of U.S. law and politics, such extreme measures are unlikely. But while President Johnson bows to no man in vocal defense of dissent, he obviously takes a dim view of it in practice. He has called his critics "Nervous Nellies," and implied that all dissenters-even men of reason-are killing American boys. Clearly, he would like it a lot better if his critics would simply shut...
What is needed by both the dissenters and the dissented against is not more repression but more expression. "When a nation silences criticism and dissent," says Historian Henry Steele Commager, "it deprives itself of the power to correct its errors." Johnson likes to add that the need for correction cuts both ways. "We must guard every man's right to speak," he says, "but we must defend every man's right to answer." His point is well taken-as far as it goes. He too often seems to forget that without right answers, the right to answer...
Just as the Government should replace cant with candor, so the dissenters need a strong dose of realism and responsibility. Among the great legal lessons of the civil rights movement, for example, is the rule that a demonstration must be reasonably related to a specific target of protest. Demonstrators who glorify the Viet Cong, burn flags or draft cards, urge the world in general to "make love, not war," are indulging in dissent for dissent's sake. They are staging a mindless happening devoid of rational ideas...