Any large public event in New York City is bound to attract some unstable types. But almost no other subject would be as likely to do so as a public forum on the Holocaust. And on June 3 through 6 a symposium entitled “Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era” was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. There were moments when one felt the symposium had become a public Rorschach Test: fundamentalist Christians, crackpots of all flavors, Jews for Jesus, slightly manic civil libertarians struggling to get their message across, sweet little old English ladies quoting the Prophets, and, of course, survivors of the campsall turned up. Members of the radical National Committee of Labor Caucuses disrupted Elie Wiesel's lecture and seized the microphone on several other occasions. In part the turnout may have been due to an incredible ad run in the Village Voice, telling people:

Who discovered human rights, not as a U.S. policy, but as a fundamental aspiration of human beings everywhere, to which all are entitled? If the challenging thrust of President Jimmy Carter's human rights policy is meeting resistance in his own country, is it perhaps because of conveniently comforting doubts about the universality of human rights—for instance, the notion that in too many places on this planet, rights have not yet been “discovered“?

I call this collection of doubts and fears the BHK syndrome, because it is suggested by three principal sources, the first two predictable—William Buckley, Jr., and William Randolph Hearst, Jr.—the third not quite expected—George F. Kennan.

The BHK syndrome would begin by dismissing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, that inventory of the rights of man that is the total substance of democracy, as a document not quite fully understood by people from its non-Western signatories.

The current passion for a “theology of ecology” got its chief start with the appearance in Scietice in March, 1967, of an article titfed- The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.“ Its .author, medieval historian Lynn White, Jr., of UCLA, is an engaging raconteur with a gift for the memorable phrase and the arresting thought. He is professionally adept at rummaging through heaps of historical scraps and making sense of them, frequently rather novel sense. Specializing in the development of technology in the Middle Ages, he links happenings from seemingly different realms, particularly ideas and artifacts, so that once familiar history suddenly looks quite different, rather like the shock one gets when old stories of kings and armies and conquests are retold from the medical point of view.

A specter is haunting the Western world— the specter of the New Class. The apparition is new, as yet not clearly perceived; even the language by which it is to be described is only beginning to be constructed. This is not surprising. Whenever a class makes its debut on the societal stage it is at first not recognized as such, either by outside observers or by those- who are themselves part of it. Instead, society continues for a while to be perceived and interpreted in terms that were appropriate to the class system that is already passing away. This was very much so during the last great transformation of the Western class system, as the bourgeoisie rose to power under the facade of the ancien regime and, until the very moment of its victory, continued to be seen as the "third estate" of a feudal order. Then as now it is the hard facticity of power rather than the play of ideas that finally must shatter the old perceptions. Then as now it is the antagonists of the rising class who have the clearer vision of what is going on.

Why have many economists missed the fact of persistent malnutrition, hunger, and famine in the People's Republic of China? The fault is certainly not in their expertise (remarkably sophisticated in application, given the dubious nature of the data available) but in their interpretive comments and conclusions, which often seem gratuitous, deriving neither from estimates of per capita grain consumption nor from any visible basis in fact.

In the early days of April, 1968, ten months after the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.

Beyond the bland facade- of China's great open cities and the green abundance of its showplace communes lies a vast country in obscuro —a China through the looking glass. In this, some say imaginary, country, people do not converse in People's Daily platitudes, but use a distractingly earthy language, enriched with sly puns and ancient proverbs; young men sing melancholy songs and brood over lovers and lost illusions; sons and daughters esteem their families above the Party; there are thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes; vilage cadres keep “one eye open and one eye shut” to sideline business activities; women quarrel hysterically over their woks in communal kitchens; speculators slip in and out of towns buying and selling ration coupons; underground factories operate; farmers lavish care on their private plots while neglecting the collective lands; and massive numbers of the Chinese peasantry, immemorially patient and industrious, labor daily under hardship and deprivation for three meals of rice gruel and sweet potatoes a day.