Socialism, it appears, is like the Volvo: the thinking person's ideology. It is, according to Irving Howe in World of Our Fathers, the vital inheritance of Jewish immigrants. It attracts many dissidents of Catholic origin, like Michael Harrington, Garry Wills, Rosemary Ruether, and the busy workers at the Center for Concern. According to Henry Ford II, it has come to dominate in the bosom of the Ford Foundation. On television shows corporate tycoons and small businessmen are invariably corrupt, and on the television news—that lucrative portion of one of the most profitable of all industries—profits in other industries are reported on with faint whiffs of moral disapproval.

If Secretary of State Vance's “exploratory” trip to China proved nothing else, it demonstrated once again that because our relations with Taiwan are the main obstacles to recognizing the People's Republic of China, it is Taiwan, not mainland China, that poses the main problem for American foreign policy in Asia. To a man the Chinese reiterated their conditions for establishing relations: abrogate the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954; break diplomatic relations with Taiwan; and withdraw the American military personnel from the island. With respect to the general question of Taiwan, they all referred back to the PRC section of the Shanghai Communique (published jointly with our own):

These ideas, if prominently expressed in the United States, would draw loud protests. In Argentina, which has the second largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere, they stir little critical comment. This is not a speculative judgment but a fact, for these sentiments, illustrated with photos of dollar bills and Argentine coins, appeared in a lengthy editorial article by the progovernment Carta Politico (Political Letter), one of Argentina's most respected and influential monthly magazines in June of this year.

In Cuba, political prisoners wear yellow uniforms,"the wife of one prisoner told me in Havana. Originally, the color was meant, to be punitive—the same color worn by the army of defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista, with obvious implications. In the late 1960's," said another political prisoner's relative, "when my father was with Huber Matos and others in Cinco Y Medio prison, located five-and-a-half miles from Pinar Del Rio, a prison director tried to require political prisoners to change to the blue uniforms worn by common criminals. Led by Matos and his cell mates, political prisoners protested being lumped with common criminals, and refused to wear the blue uniforms. They were severely beaten." Some political prisoners then accepted the new color, but Matos and his followers never relented. "They were forced to go without any clothes at all for four months. The guards said that if they refused the blue uniforms they must go naked.

There will always be people to minimize violations of human rights and to justify those they acknowledge. This is happening now in the case of Vietnam.

At the end of the war in April, 1975, there was no bloodbath, as some of the more harsh antagonists of North Vietnam predicted. That terrible possibility not having come to pass, many Americans were pleased to turn their attention elsewhere.

I have read and heard it said that the fact and specter of the Holocaust have rendered morally obsolete the traditional notion of Tragedy, once considered mankind's most painfully noble mode of art. Tragedy assumed a morally ordered and rational universe—so the argument goes—which contained and structured in some ultimately reassuring way our reactions to the tragic event, no matter how painful. The Holocaust has destroyed that universe, or that orderly conception; consequently, Tragedy cannot speak to us of our particular dislocations, the Holocaust included. Individual works may work for us, but as something other than Tragedy: melodrama, minor psychological intuitions, pure form moving like music, If they work as Tragedy, they do so as the still-pleasing archaic form of another age, revealing that older peoples had their depths too, even though they hadn't experienced the terrible knowledge we have.

Americans of almost every variety want to believe again in the goodness and vitality of our nation. This hope was expressed in the 1976 Bicentennial observance and, for many, was strengthened by the election of Washington outsider Jimmy Carter, signaling a new era in our politics. It is with misgiving, therefore, that I add a skeptical note to this hopeful mood.

The flames of political passion and cultural frenzy that recently scorched our body politic have not been extinguished. Our discontents and disorientations may not rage, but they do smolder, hidden beneath dense clouds of bitter smoke. This situation may not comfort most Americans, but it does console genuine radicals who habitually fantasize about a mass radical movement in America. An American history full of aborted crusades and faded causes has put the radical faith to test, but never to rest.

Few if any of America's relationships with its allies are likely to present the Carter administration with more complex and difficult dilemmas than does South Korea. During his drive for the presidency Jimmy Carter was critical of the Republic of Korea (ROK) for its suppression of human rights and said he would remove the U.S. ground troops there over the next several years. (The 42,000 U.S. forces in Korea include about 7,000 air force personnel and a few hundred sailors. About half of the 35,000 ground forces are in combat units, and the others provide logistical support.)

Kto kovo? according to Lenin, is the fundamental question of politics. "Who's going to do in whom?" Lenin and others plotting against the czar came steadily to this zero-sum conception of politics. One side or the other could win—not both. Though Americans tend to expect a harmony of interests among nations, the zero-sum conception also exists in this country; it is, in fact, a prominent factor in the ongoing debate about Soviet strategic objectives and capabilities—for instance, in statements by the Committee on the Present Danger.

Grim accounts of human rights violations in Vietnam, once fragmentary and unconfirmed, are now increasingly provided by consistent eyewitness accounts. Opponents of the former Saigon Tegime—some of them victims of its police and prison atrocities—are now in "reeducation" detention centers and prisons throughout Vietnam. Others imprisoned include largely nonpolitical artists, writers, journalists, lawyers, professors, and doctors. Judges and civil servants who once held apolitical jobs are also detained.

Indira Gandhi looks more frail than when I last saw her almost two years ago. Running a vast, complex nation almost singlehandedly has left telling marks. The demands of power, the trauma of political setbacks, and the surprise of postelection vituperation extract a high price from psychological and intellectual resources. Yet Mrs. Gandhi's cool intelligence and incisive manner are unimpaired, and her overloaded appointment schedule testifies to her physical stamina. In a long and discursive discussion she developed what she now thought about both domestic and international events and about the themes that underlie her worldview. All together an unusual blend of detail and vision, of minor fact and large-scale concept, they present revealing insights into personality, policies, and contemporary political happenings.

Sponsored by the Catholic bishops of the United States and attended by Ca'tholics from around the country, the Detroit "Call to Action" conference provides an excellent opportunity to take the pulse of American Catholicism, to see what it thinks of itself and where it thinks it is going.

In 1913, when Woodrow Wilson was assuming the duties of President of the United States, Joseph Stalin was in exile in Siberia and Lenin in Galicia. When Union and Confederate veterans were meeting to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Henry Ford was about to set up the first modern assembly line, the newly established Union of South Africa promulgated the Natives Land Act. A world preoccupied with the decay of great empires and apprehensive about the onset of world conflict was only dimly aware of this law enacted in a distant corner of a remote continent. The law prescribed the apportionment of territory of the Union into areas of exclusive settlement by whites and blacks.

Despite the accelerated decline of America's position in the world in the intervening years, the United States remains the world's most powerful and influential nation. (Even those who measure power in terms of military strength appear more concerned about an upward trend in-Soviet military strength and a relative decline in America's strength and its willingness to use it than about current U.S. inferiority.) The position of the United States has eroded because of its own follies and the growing strength of other countries; the latter development would have occurred irrespective of U.S. actions.

After delivering the Encyclopaedia Britannica lecture early in 1974, Ivan Illich has been identified with the paradoxical thesis that "the medical establishment has become a major threat to health." Central to his positjon then (later elaborated in his Medical Nemesis) is the medical establishment's responsibility "for the individual's growing demand for institutional management of his pain." Pain, by becoming uhnecessary, has become unbearable. It seems eminently reasonable then "to eliminate pain, even at the cost of health." So we have become addicted to whatever ambrosia promises that god-like but essentially negative state of being—painlessness.