Jeremy Kessler is a doctoral student at Yale Law School and Yale University’s Department of History, where he writes about the history of conscientious objection. His non-academic work has appeared in The Daily and The New Atlantis.
Articles by Jeremy Kessler
Occupy Wall Street’s coordinated chaos at the Stock Exchange
A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange. It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.
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Good war, bad war: an interview with Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild is a National Book Award-nominated author and co-founder of Mother Jones. His work has brought alive the plight of history’s victims, from the Belgian Congo to Stalin’s Russia. In his new book, To End All Wars, Hochschild, an American, turns to the British experience of the First World War.
While the horrors that faced the ordinary soldier on the Western Front occupy a central place in the popular history of modern war, Hochschild focuses on a less-well known group of losers—those British citizens who passionately resisted the war, from socialist agitators to radical suffragettes to embittered enlisted men. In a montage of personal portraits and family dramas, Hochschild shows us how a relatively few, outspoken women and men from every class of society sought to prevent, and then to end quickly and fairly, what they saw as a hopeless conflict organized by out-of-touch men of privilege.
World War I famously inaugurated the modern age of total war, but Hochschild’s protagonists believed in an alternative modernity, one characterized by transnationalism, sexual and racial equality, and economic justice. To End All Wars takes us back to a time when such an enlightened world could seem less a utopia than a reasonable alternative to the ruling class’s livid fantasies of imperial and colonial dominion.
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