It is difficult to evaluate a document intended to justify the slaughter and summary imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens of what was one of the world's most vibrant democracies. It is hard to be impartial toward a regime that commandeered air raids on the presidential palace, oversaw the wholesale burning of books, bookstores and publishing houses, executed citizens whose crime was the possession of leftist literature and dismantled one of the most distinguished university systems in Latin America, replacing rectors with military officers and abolishing sociology and journalism departments. Libro Blanco, the Chilean junta's apologia for last year's coup, is issued by men who have installed a reign of terror with the professed purpose of purging the country of an entire political sector.

In 1967 the American Christian community was criticized for its lack of support for Israel during those terrible weeks of dread when the publicly threatened Arab invasion of Israel drew closer with each passing day. But in 1973 it was different. This time there was no long period of escalating warlike actions coming from Israel's Arab neighbors. Instead, Egypt and Syria shattered the internationally sanctioned ceasefire by commencing full-scale armed hostilities on Judaism's holiest day, Yom Kippur. Almost immediately many American Christians reacted in shock and outrage. Dr. Robert Campbell, the general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, said: “The attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria as reported by our government and the United Nations observation group was a violation of international law and a threat to the right of Israel to exist as a state.” Some Christians condemned the Arab attack as a “travesty,” a “profanation” and a “criminal act of war.”

My first visit to England was in 1921, when the Macdonald Labor government had its first but brief reign by sufferance of the Liberals. I married an English girl in 1931, and my wife and I subsequently spent every other summer in Britain until 1939. I met the late Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of York, in a preparatory meeting for the Oxford Conference on “Church, Community and State” in 1938. My contacts with Britain were chiefly on the Left in both Church and State. Dr. Temple was a member of the Labor Party and, with Professor R. H. Tawney, one of the founders of the Workers Education Association. Temple was certainly partly responsible for the general diffusion of “labor” opinion through the middle classes of Britain and beyond the limits of the industrial classes to which socialism was confined on the Continent. This diffusion laid the foundation for the victory of Labor after the War, in spite of Churchill's great eminence as the architect of British victory. The slogan “Fair shares for all” represented the conscience of the whole war-impoverished nation.

The memory of Japanese imperialism in Southeast Asia never quite fades away. There are regular reminders, it seems, of the depth and possibly the permanence of the hatred engendered by the excesses of Japanese soldiers a generation ago. At the beginning of January, 1974, for instance, there were demonstrations against Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in Bangkok—and riots, burning and killing when he arrived in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. There was a special irony in these displays in that neither Thailand nor Indonesia was really brutalized by the Japanese during the war. The rulers of Thailand prudently “allied” witji the Japanese soon after they “invaded” in 1941, and Indonesia's future leaders, including an ambitious young man named Suharto, trained in Japanese-run military units while the Dutch colonialists waited for their chance to return. President Suharto's revolutionary predecessor, Sukarno, collaborated politically with the Japanese. He, along with many Indonesian activists, preferred the Japanese to the Dutch.

In the perspective of a few thousand years of Indochinese history the decade of direct American military intervention that so wrenched our own country is little more than a minor subtitle in a rather brief chapter. Contrary to the declarations of those who opposed policy and those who made it, the United States neither started nor ended the warfare in Indochina. Although the U.S. inflicted great agony and destruction on some small countries, the suffering yielded no conclusion. Even after their withdrawal, Americans could find no satisfaction in a neat end to a bloody game.

Has Machiavelli been translated into Arabic?" From this question, Servan- Schreiber goes on to cite the ways in which the oil embargo exposed Western European vulnerability and “isolated the only power which, in this hellish game, is to be feared, namely, America.” Combined with this, the October war in the Middle East brought new supremacy to Soviet arms and “upset the ratio of forces.” The effect is that “all the industrial countries have been grabbed by their jugular vein.” Servan-Schreiber cites the French analyst, Jean Fourastié, who claims: “A new phase of economic history, of the cultural history, of ideologies and political strategies declared itself in October, 1973. It started with a blockade … there remains only force.” The consequence may be the rule of brute force everywhere in domestic and international life. The Planet of the Apes. Servan-Schreiber contrasts Fourastié's view with that of Samuel Pisar, an American, who sees a collective progression of the planet through conflict. The course of reason may be a supreme challenge, but it is not superhuman. Servan-Schreiber admits to being torn between the two scenarios offered by Fourastié and Pisar.

When the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party met in February, 1973, PCI Secretary Enrico Berlinguer reported that “membership in the party and, to a less satisfactory extent, in the Youth Federation (FGCI), shows a constant increase.” During the past several years the PCI has again become a point of reference for an increasingly high number of people who either join the Party or at least gravitate around it. Such a “return”— to be understood literally in some cases—is particularly interesting because it involves a high proportion of Italian youth, especially students, and some prestigious representatives of the Italian cultural world.

These are times that try men's Anglophilia. Britain is in the midst of a largely self-made energy crisis, owing very little to the Arab oil cutbacks. The threat of massive unemployment, the lost production, the cold and darkness as winter goes on is largely a part of Britain's continuing saga of bloody-minded industrial relations. But while many of the elements here are, at the moment, peculiarly British, there is reason to fear a repetition of events like these elsewhere and, eventually, globally.

The immediate problem is a threat to the nation's coal and electricity supplies due to “industrial action” by the coal miners and railroad engineers. One says industrial action because the “actions” are not strikes but yet have effects almost as severe. Perhaps because they were so long excluded from effective political power, British working men developed over the decades the art of industrial action to a refinement unsurpassed anywhere.

“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the sideshow barker to iiis customers. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the economist to the developing countries. If you don't hurry there will be disaster, echoed the President of the World Bank. Only military governments are capable of stability and order, observed the Rockefeller Report on Latin America.

You must move forward. Democracy is too slow. Human rights can wait.

It was a stirring message, and it reached the executive mansions of Southeast Asia. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, whenever the head of a government there tired of coping with legal opposition, began to fear the people, and decided to run things permanently on his own he engaged in the amusing practice of issuing a proclamation blaming all his country's ills on “Western-style democracy”—and immediately instituted Western-style repression. He imprisoned the opposition, muzzled the press, and silenced the population by putting the fear of predawn raids in their hearts, devices all so terribly Western and so terribly effective.

The recent Middle East armed conflict has been a paramount occasion for many American Catholics and Jews to realize that their dialogue, begun in the early sixties, was at an end. That conflict did not end the dialogue; but the dialogue, such as it was envisaged by its initiators, had in fact ended sometime between the June, 1967, Six-Day War and the November, 1973, ceasefire.

The reasons for its end now appear obvious: the primary aims entertained by both Catholics and Jews were achieved; and, quite importantly, the chief participants in that dialogue—Catholics, their Church, American Jews and Israel—all had undergone an evolution. They are no longer what they were in 1960.

As Americans celebrated Christmas in 1972 they read about national disasters in Nicaragua and North Vietnam. The capitals of both countries had to be evacuated. Communications and power facilities were crippled. Hospital complexes were reduced to rubble. An earthquake caused the damage in Nicaragua; American bombers were responsible in North Vietnam.

In the wake of worldwide humanitarian concern for both countries, the initial response of the United States was to announce the release of paramedical teams and a mobile field hospital for Nicaragua and to deny that the Bach Mai hospital facility in Hanoi existed and that it had been hit by American planes.

Well, what does the future hold for the Palestinians? How can self-determination be achieved? This is a question that should disturb us, but too often this question, at the very core of the Middle East conflict, is swept away by the mechanics of war, of peace, of oil and of troop disengagement. Such irony is hard to stomach and is a bare reward for those many Palestinians of varying political beliefs who support the involvement of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the Geneva peace talks and speak encouragingly about a separate Palestine state.

The idea of such a state needs to be scrutinized against the backgrounds of both Israeli and Jordanian policies regarding the Palestinians, in order to understand fully why these policies are quite inadequate and why it is impossible to imagine a Palestinian state linked either to Israel or Jordan. The idea of an independent state pinned between Israel and Jordan is acceptable only with radical changes and concessions—from Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians alike—that will ensure peace and harmony from border to border.

The problem in judging M. Servan-Schreiber's message is that he reaches some sound conclusions on the basis of dubious premises, from which he derives recommendations which could be disastrous.

There may be some satisfaction in seeing a Frenchman concerned with le défi, russe instead of le défi américain, but his interpretation of one is as crude as was his interpretation of the other. The shock of revelation that there are common interests of the Atlantic countries in economic as well as strategic matters is understandably more startling to a Frenchman than to others. It was all set out in 1949 in Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty and was restated eloquently in 1973 by Mr. Kissinger. But last spring European leaders were included to see the latter as a self-interested plea from a weak United States to a prosperous Europe. The North American countries were reminded that their role in Europe was simply to defend it on request.

Mao Tse-tung composed the verse in 1925 before organizing the farmers of his native village into an “association to clean up the shame” of Japanese “invasion” of parts of northern China—the precursor to the spreading occupation of the Chinese mainland in the 1930's. A negotiator for China's Five-Metal Company presented a scroll, with the characters for the verse gracefully brushed in black ink, to Hosai Hyuga, president of Sumitomo Metal Industries, Ltd., in December, 1972, three months after Japan and the People's Republic opened diplomatic relations.

The role of higher education is crucial in a world that seems torn apart by cultural, economic, political and social differences, and yet is, at the same time, ever more closely drawn together by technology, travel, social and economic needs. Higher education offers no panacea for the disunity of this complex and confusing world. It should, however, contribute to a kind of understanding that spans the differences among the people of the world, or at least those within one country. In this connection liberal arts education is today in jeopardy, unsure of its competence to serve the ideal of humanitas that at one time was conceded to be both the stable ground and the ever elusive goal of higher education.

There was a large, liberal, miseducated audience waiting for Alistair Cooke. It wasn't just that he was a delightful English-bred type who's been in the public eye for many years; it wasn't just the fact that he'd broadcast his version of American history to a national TV audience for weeks before he polished it up and published it as Alistair Cooke's America. No, his book swept the country (that is, if the country is buyers of $15 books, all the book clubs in sight, and the critics) because for a hundred years a liberal audience had been miseducated to welcome Alistair Cooke's America, or at least to welcome its history of race relations, which is what I shall deal with here.