There is no textbook for this course. You have a choice of either acquiring the reading assignments from the web site or paying DocuZip in the student center to run off a copy of all the reading assignments (ask for file 30--costs about $17). There is one reading assignment for each week of the semester. For each reading assignment, you are to hand in, at minimum, a full page, double-spaced, type written (Times New Roman 12 point font, margins 1 inch all around) intellectual and/or emotional response to what you have read. Your response should be clearly related to what you have read. You will get full credit if you complete the assignment. You will not receive credit if you do not follow the specified format, if you turn in less than a full page, if it seems to me that you have not read the assignment, or if you insist upon telling me that the article was "too long" and/or "boring." (Example as to how your papers should be set up) These writing assignments are due on Thursday for T&R class and Saturday for the Saturday class. If you are absent, the assignment should be turned in the day that you return to class. Late work is accepted, but twenty points will be deducted from the score. You must complete at least 12 reading/writing assignments to pass this course. (A list of the reading assignments)

Week 1
 Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week13
Week14
Week 15

2) Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Albert Einstein said, "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." And Elie Wiesel's has said: "Indifference to evil is evil. If evil strikes one people and others do not react, the dynamic of evil continues. Evil lies in indifference. That indifference to evil allows it to grow, expand, take root. In a period of crisis, neutrality only feeds the evil." There will always be a small minority of people who torture and kill to get what they want, but this can go on only because the great mass of decent people do nothing to stop it. With the understanding that the tortures and killers may target those who try to do something to stop them, what can and should the decent people do to stop state terrorism? (This topic concerns "state terrorism" not "individual terrorism." If you intend to write on this topic, make sure you write on state terrorism.)

3) The people of the U.S. have been led to believe that the U.S. has always been the champion of human rights. The Jesuit journal in El Salvador, the Proceso, compared how the Soviet Union and its satellites treated their dissidents with the way the US and its satellites treated their dissidents: "If Lech Walesa [the leader of the Solidarity union in Poland] had been doing his organizing work in El Salvador, he would have already entered into the ranks of the disappeared at the hands of heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes; or have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek [a reformer in Czechoslovakia] were a politician in El Salvador or Guatemala, he would have been assassinated like Héctor Oquelí [the social democratic leader assassinated in Guatemala by Salvadoran death squads]. If Andrei Sakharov [the Russian dissident] had worked here in favor of human rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadoran Human Rights Commission] If Václav Havel [the literary dissident in Communist East Europe] had been carrying out his intellectual work in El Salvador, he would have woken up one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with his head destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion." Do you believe this to be true? If so, why do you think that the American people have been blind to it so long? Are the American people still responsible for what their government did even though they were not aware of what was going on? And what could be done to change the U.S. to really become a champion of human rights? (Do not repeat this question in your paper).

4) Is neoliberalism and globalization creating a better world? What economic options do the countries of Latin American have to try to develop their countries?  Can free market globalism succeed without the exploitation of people and the environment?