The “After Vietnam” in the title says something about the American mood, not about the military realities of America's war in Indochina. This reminder is unfortunately necessary, for too many of us seem able to forget the brutal air war in which our country has dropped more than six and a half million tons of bombs (more than three times the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Africa and Asia in all of World War II) on a region about the size of Texas. There is a fearful deja vu about accepting an invitation to speak to “American conscience and consciousness after Vietnam,” for the first time I spoke to the “post-Vietnam” situation was in 1968, and one cannot help wondering if in 1976 this present statement will seem as naively sanguine as does that of 1968. Nonetheless, and if for no other reason than to maintain our sanity, it is inevitable that we reach beyond the present horror and try to anticipate the shape of American conscience and consciousness after these years of madness.

In the past two decades most discussions about Indian foreign policy dealt with the nature and limitations of nonalignment. The discussions usually had an air of remoteness. In American perceptions, India as a policy area was peripheral to America's immediate political and strategic interests. Even when humanitarian motives were invoked as factors for political consideration there was a feeling that India was too bulky, too riddled with immense problems. Thus, Americans were never sure whether intimate political ties with India were probable or even desirable from America's point of view. If this was the general picture accepted by liberals in America, conservatives asserted that India was “wishy-washy” toward the Communist bloc. India's refusal to join the American alliance system confirmed this suspicion.

My first reaction to James Reston's remarks is to marvel at their naiveté Here is an exceedingly sophisticated working journalist, the author of that extraordinary series on Mao's China who conducted a brilliant interview with Chou, indulging himself in a banal sadness. So I would respond initially by saying "of course."

Of course history is and has been immoral. It has always been the scene of self-interested conflicts between classes and nations. Of course people of religious faith kill one another, usually reserving the greatest enthusiasm for a slaughter conducted in the name of different interpretations of the same God, as in Ulster, but also avenging one deity against another, as in West Pakistan's genocidal attack on the Hindu minority of Bangladesh. I would add only that these theologically inspired enormities are usually based upon a substratum of class or national interest too.

American Protestantism, long something of a sacred cow in American life and politics, now finds itself seriously threatened by government on several fronts. The battle is shaping up over church tax exemptions, and the stakes, for both church and society, are breathtakingly high.

In July, 1909, the Communications Office of the United Church of Christ announced that it intended to testify before a Senate subcommittee on legislation regarding the renewal of television licenses. Two weeks later the good churchmen received notice from the Internal Revenue Service that “substantial” efforts to influence legislation could “jeopardize” the church's tax exemption.

There was a time during the sixties when Catholics, intoxicated with what we were convinced had come to us bottled in bond from Vatican II, were among the most optimistic predictors around. In our more extravagant moments some of us talked and wrote as if we were inspired by a scenario drawn up at a summit meeting presided over by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. Some of this optimism was still present when Commonweal brought out its “Church in the Year 2000” issue (October 31, 1969), though by then the more pronounced thing was the wrath of those who had begun to discover how laggard the Church was in its efforts to live up to the scenario that had been prepared for it.

When Dean Acheson was appointed Under Secretary of State in September, 1945, I. F. Stone wrote in The Nation: “He has been pro-De Gaulle, anti-Franco, strongly opposed to the admission of Argentina to the U.N., and friendly to the Soviet Union … of all the men now in the Departrrient, Acheson was by far the best choice for Under Secretary, and it is no small advantage to pick a man who already knows a good deal about the inner workings.” Stone went on to note that one of Acheson's strongest assets was “in his relations with Congress. He deserves a generous share of the credit for the passage of the Bretton Woods legislation, and he played no inconsiderable part in the Senate's approval of the Charter.” In order to placate Acheson's reactionary critics, Tom Connally reassured trie Senate that he would “never have voted for Mr. Acheson's confirmation [as Under Secretary] unless it had been implicitly understood that he would not have a predominant voice in foreign policy.”

The idea of decadence is intriguing. It conjures up visions of languor, mental if not physical harems, sensuous tedium, affluence past the point of satiety.

It is also an artful term with which to articulate our distaste for the present. It imbues our outrage with a certan Puritan vigor and, at the same time, a millennial grandeur, as we liken our condition to Rome or Byzantium on the eve of annihilation. We can entertain the idea of decadence—so-called decadent art and literature are enjoying a vogue, late-Victorian pornography, Beardsiey, art nouveau— while at the same time we disparage it.

But just what exactly is decadence, how do we deline it? Is it a useful phrase? Does it rightfully characterize the period through which we are living? Is America in the seventies decadent?

Once again the American public is subjected to reports about the sensational effects of bombing against North Vietnam and its offensive in the South. New guided, or “smart,” bombs and the hitting of targets far beyond anything authorized at the height of the 1965-68 campaign have led to spectacular claims for the efficacy of air power in blunting the thrust of North Vietnam's Easter offensive. The Pentagon emphasis is now almost exclusively upon the success of air power in achieveing military goals; far less is claimed, at least publicly,, for bombing as a means of ending the war.

For the first time since Yalta Europe is in the process of being fundamentally reorganized. The bipolar world of U.S. USSR hegemony is rapidly passing. As Europeans, we can no longer evade the task of defining the distinct European reality. In the first part of this essay I described some of the new definitions being proposed by those who envision a united and socialist Europe. It is not enough, however, simply to expose the dangerous fallacies in the proposals set forth by others. Conservatives are called upon to clarify the assumptions on which they would build an alternative definition of the European reality.

Westerners tend to think of Islam as a “political religion,” or at least as a religion which has an important political component. We speak too about “Islamic history” and “Islamic civilization” and we know that what we are referring to is not purely ecclesiastical or purely religious. Perhaps at the basis of this way of thinking and speaking is the fact that Muhammad was not only a prophet but also a statesman and political leader, and that his influence gave birth to a social entity which is both religious community and body politic.

Nonetheless, it is not altogether correct to think of Islam as a political religion.

The 1971 war between India and Pakistan, and the subsequent establishment of Bangladesh, has forced a general rethinking of world politics. The war is too recent to judge any long-range consequences, but the resulting new atmosphere in India itself has raised fundamental issues of theory and practice to which non-Indians should be alerted.

The moral conception that India had of herself— the heritage of nonalignment, Gandhism and neutralism—has been transformed radically by India's newly discovered power and military achievements. In light of Goa, the earlier Pakistan conflicts and the China invasion, her ambiguous tradition has made India seem hypocritical, preaching one thing and readily practicing another.

It is not easy for a European to take a dispassionate stance toward the USA. The waves of idiotic anti-Americanism and the (smaller) waves of undiscriminating glorification have distorted the face of the America seen by many Europeans. My remarks are those of a. European, more particularly of an Austrian from Vienna, a city that decisively stamped the character of a Sigmund Freud and of an Adolf Hitler. Mine is a stance rooted in the experience of critical love which feels itself co-responsible for both the super-strength and the super-weakness of this American dinosaur, this giant baby that, in its relatively brief history, has contributed notably and bloodily to the world's genocide and ecocide; first and foremost in exterminating the Indians and the buffalo. A look into Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York, 1970) brings into view abysses, abysses in man, in the beast man (the animal is never bestial). America has added its contribution to the genocidal destruction of peoples and to the desolation of landscapes, just as practiced in Europe for over 2,500 years, ever since the days of the Roman Empire.

We are forced now to return to an earlier, Pascalian pessimism, to a model of history whose logic derives from a postulate of original sin. We can subscribe today, all too readily, to De Maistre's view that the barbarism of modern politics, the regress of educated, technologically inventive man into slaughter enact a working out of the eschatology of the Fall.” Thus George Steiner in his remarkable In Bluebeards Castle. Unfortunately, the return and subscription mentioned are only a literary flourish, for Steiner does not imagine that anyone would seriously agree with Pascal and De Maistre. He is wrong. Those for whom the dogma of Original Sin is not mere metaphor have always seen the landscape differently. The believer lives in a world he finds familiar but in which he does not feel at home. Where does an alien go to register?

I presented the following views at the American Jewish Congress Dialogue held at the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot, Israel, during the summer of 1971. Nothing was said during the Dialogue either to confront or confound my remarks, but—I hasten to add—the stated goals of the Dialogue were considerably at variance with my own remarks. This eccentric point of view may yet serve to stimulate real dialogue.

Dean Acheson, who died at age 78 on October 12, 1971, was the fiercest of American leaders during the formative years of the cold war. As Under Secretary of State and Secretary of State for President Harry S. Truman, he was (to use the arrogant but perfectly accurate title of his memoirs) Present at the Creation of the basic policies which guided American foreign policv for a quarter of a century. In most instances he was the principal author of those policies.

Should we view his career with the unstinting admiration naturally expressed by his old boss, Harry Truman, and by President Nixon? Or with condemnation for his militant role in perpetuating the cold war? More appropriately, we should feel sadness that a man of such extraordinary intellectual ability, and the finest master of the English language to serve as Secretary of State since Jefferson, should have applied his talents to waging a form of war rather than searching for peace.