When Party Chairman Hu Yao-bang chose the centennial of China's famous author Lu Hsun (1881-1936) to launch a condemnation of the “bourgeois liberalism” among China's contemporary writers, he acted within an established tradition of the Communist party to claim Lu Hsun as its own. In 1939, three years after Lu Hsun's death, Mao Tse-tung issued a statement praising “Lu Hsun the Communist, the giant of China's cultural Revolution,” ignoring the fact that the writer never joined the Party and never accepted the precepts of Marx and Lenin.

Born Chou Shu-jen, Lu Hsun received a classical education, revealing an early affinity for books and art. He entered the Kiangnan Naval Academy and shortly thereafter transferred to the Army Academy, both in Nanking. Here he was introduced to translations of Western literature, notably the works of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.

Modern physicists have penetrated far beyond vision into an ultimate pantheon of mesons and muons and other demiurges of matter. We have managed to turn their poetic penetration into the physical threats of Three Mile Island and a nuclear arms race. American statesmen after World War II, with uncommon and far-reaching vision, set about restoring a devastated world. The world they produced, a world of free, interdependent, and disputatious nations, seems to many Americans and myopic political leaders a source of embarrassment rather than the fruit of our own farsighted statesmanship.

Columnist Alvaro Contreras Velez waved a blunt, black pistol. He held it with firm delicacy, his little finger extended elegantly. “I take this everywhere I go,” he said. He slipped the piece back into his desk drawer then seated himself on the couch. He talked about Guatemala, the most beautiful of the Central American states, the most populous, yet a dark and dangerous place. He said he thought his people were tired of military rule. It has been interminable in their history. They would probably vote against General Anibal Guevara and for one of his three civilian opponents in the elections of March 7, three days away.

General Romeo Lucas Garcia's time in office had run out and General Guevara was the government's hand-picked candidate. Urgent needs were pressing upon the regime: helicopters, possibly napalm, and weapons of a heavier order than they could get from Israel, their regular supplier.

It has come as a surprise to me that quite a number of the reviewers of my book The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview (Columbia University Press, 1981) classify my views as “nonliberal” and inconsonant with pluralistic democracy. “Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose disdain for parliamentary democracy is well documented,” contends Joshua Rubenstein in The New Republic. “Turchin's ideas reflect a fundamental distrust of conventional politics.” Says David Paul Rebovich in Worldview: “While he advocates democratic rights, he has little affection for Western-style liberalism.” And Michael Scammell asserts quite unequivocally in the London Times that “Turchin…disagrees with political pluralism.”

A number of church activities in the United States and in various Third World nations bring issues involving the separation of Church and State once again to the fore. Certainly any serious inquiry into the relationship of the U.S. Government and American missionary groups abroad—particularly with regard to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—must first consider the historical record. Only after a thorough examination of the inconsistencies and constradictions between theory and practice over the nation's more than two hundred-year history can one hope to assess present policies. This, then, is just such an historical overview.

The United States is currently laboring for national security by wedding its nuclear strategy to an incomprehensibly futile set of policies. Among the separate elements of this set, none is more dangerous and misconceived than the “relocation option,” also called Crisis Relocation Planning (CRP). What exactly is this option? According to an official statement, Protection in the Nuclear Age (Department of Defense, 1977):

The search for virtue in the Western world had its origins in ancient Greece and Rome, where-lhe terms arete and virtu embodied valor, courage, chivalry, manliness, fortitude, loyalty, rectitude and excellence. Perhaps our word magnanimity comes closer than any other to these connotations. Virtue was, for the most part, secular, not religious; its implications were public rather than private. It applied to those who, in the words of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, “knew that the secret of happiness was freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, and who did not stand aside from the onset of the enemy.”

Last fall the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, attempted to draw worldwide attention to the “savagery” of Ethiopia's Marxist regime. “It is estimated that some 30,000 persons in Ethiopia were summarily executed for political reasons between 1974 and 1978,” she told the U.N. General Assembly on October 2, 1981. “Twelve-year-old children were among those immersed in hot oil. sexually tortured, or flung out of windows and left to die in the street.”

At about the same time Ambassador Kirkpatrick was detailing the horrors of the Mengistu government, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was busy preparing a review of the residency status of Ethiopians living in the United Stales.

For the past half-dozen years I made my living as an ambassador. People have not stopped asking, “Just what does an ambassador do?” The question is something of an improvement on the one encountered by former ambassador to Great Britain, Kingman Brewster, as reported in Newsweek a year ago: “Do you think ambassadors matter any more?” Perhaps my acquaintences are simply kinder—or less sophisticated— than Brewster's.

Most of the classic books on diplomacy try to answer such questions by describing ambassadors as analysts, reporters, and negotiators. The American public favors another, simpler response. So do many top administrators in Washington—especially when they are new to office. They conclude that in this age of jet aircraft, instant communication, summits, and special envoys, ambassadors are mere post office boxes and innkeepers.

In El Salvador I think that President Duarte is trying hard. Fidel Chavez Mena, his foreign minister, and José Antonio Morales Ehrlich, the other Christian Democratic member of the junta, are both good men. Manuel Ungo [of the FDR] is not bad and not good. I looked at the agrarian reform and inspected a farm and it seemed to be well run, but they can't make a cent because of the world price of coffee. The price of coffee is Salvador's number one problem. Cayetano Carpio, the top Communist in El Salvador, is a very stubborn man—very hard to deal with. You can deal with some Communists. Fidel Castro is a real bastard, but you can deal with him.

The people in Washington think they know what they are doing, but they don't. I have had hundreds of experiences with the U.S. Government.

Sunday, August 15, 1971. It is 8 o'clock in the evening, television prime time. Suddenly the president appears on the screen, tense and unsmiling as ever, and makes a three-point announcement: The gold window will be closed, a wage-and-price freeze will be imposed, and a blanket 10 per cent surcharge will be levied on imports — all to take effect immediately. The world is stunned. Almost instantly the shock waves cross the globe. A dazed fapan cries out against what it calls — in a memorable phrase — the “Nixon shokku.”

History has few examples of such a blitz-like turnabout and of such blatant disregard of promises and commitments publicly made and of international obligations solemnly undertaken. The twenty-six-year-old Bretton Woods agreement was cast overboard without the least qualm; the dollar, which for all those years had enjoyed the privileges of the world's foremost reserve currency, was delinked unilaterally from gold and set afloat.