The light of scrutiny.

• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial - Conference notes

On my desk lies a heavy black paperweight, shaped like a baseball, with the continents carved into it.

This globe belonged to my beloved predecessor, Erwin Knoll, who died fifteen years ago. It reminds me of him every day.

At our 100th anniversary conference, Howard Zinn invoked Erwin's name, and his categorical opposition to war. Howard was referring to Erwin's essay "Not a Just War, Just a War," which we reprinted in our anthology, Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 .

"Erwin was making the distinction between a just cause and a just war," Howard noted. "He was the only other person I found who was thinking exactly along the very same lines as me." Howard added, with his trademark drollness, "I'm always looking for somebody who's thinking along the same lines as me."

So, on the closing evening of our conference, rather than confining himself to pleasantries about the magazine, Howard took the difficult path of elaborating on their shared conviction that no war--not even the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, or World War II--is a just war.

Many people who heard Howard's speech came up to me afterward and said how thought-provoking it was, even if they didn't entirely agree with it. I'm not quite there myself. But Howard raises crucial questions we need to grapple with, questions that rarely get a hearing. He takes things that most people accept as givens, and holds them up to the light of scrutiny.

That's what we try to do here.

W hen Representative Dennis Kucinich came up to speak at our conference, he brought with him a plaque containing the statement he read on the House floor shortly before coming to Madison.

"Madame Speaker, I rise today in honor and recognition of The Progressive on the joyous culmination of its 100-year anniversary celebration of...