What should have been the Soviet Union's great lesson—that beautiful Socialist dreams can easily turn into something far worse than a repressively tolerant bourgeois society, while those with eyes to see refuse to look—is an example that many with eyes to see and ears to hear have yet to consider. The prevailing cold war consensus was responsible for policy errors and misapprehensions of serious consequence, but its perception of Stalin's Soviet Union as an evil and dangerous despotism was correct. Those who had thought otherwise before Khrushchev's famous speech of 1956 were wrong.

Hard facts and disturbing clues were available long years before Stalin's fans flip-flopped on cue. The more sophisticated had deliberately refrained from looking at the ugly truth, or had looked and were not repelled. But a majority simply were incapable of assimilating information incompatible with their political mindset, unless it was directly related to matters of personal concern.

A resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated January 31, 1977, declares that “the victory of October |1917| is the main event of the twentieth century, one that radically changed the course of development for all humanity.” The reason is simple: That victory produced the world's first Socialist state.

“Under Communist Party leadership the workers of our country successfully coped with the main and most complicated task of the socialist revolution—the creative.” This was done, we are told, under most difficult conditions, starting with the low level of productive forces and culture inherited from czarist Russia and including the hardships imposed by a series of external attacks.

Thursday, June 10, 1976, was a memorable day in Lyons, France. The press had prepared the local population for the event. From cities and towns throughout the Rhone Valley^special buses, trains, and cars had brought thousands into the city. The Gerland Sports Palace was packed with well over ten thousand enthusiasts. Georges Marchais, Secretary- General of the French Communist Party, would begin his highly publicized speech to the Christians of France at 8:30 that evening.

The Café Zoracabana sits off the Plaza Libertad in the center of downtown Montevideo. With nineteenth-century decor and white-smocked waiters, it is one of the city's last remaining traditional cafés. Here old friends meet and talk for hours while nursing a cup of tea or cafe con leche. I have come here this evening to meet a former correspondent named Paco, to whom I have been referred by an exiled Uruguayan congressman.

From time to time my companion interrupts our conversation to greet friends who pass by our table. Late in the evening he rises to hug yet another person in a traditional Latin American abrazo. His friend squeezes his hand, speaks for a moment, and moves on. After a discreet pause Paco unfolds a small piece of paper that had been placed surreptitiously in his hand.

A specter is haunting Europe again, the specter of a revived German menace. To an ever increasing extent commentators on me European political scene are conjuring the horrible vision of a Europe under the yoke of West Germany's rule. West Germany has come through the worldwide recession better than anyone else. It ranks fifth in the world in per capita income, second lowest with regard to both inflation and unemployment, and second lowest in work days lost through strikes. What is more, the deutsche mark is one of the hardest currencies of the world, and Bonn's foreign currency reserves are the greatest in the world.

Cata had moved the children's beds out of the front room; no alarm motivated her, rather calm prudence. The house stood next to a union hall. "Someone might put a bomb," she said. That was in January, 1975, high summer in Argentina, when everyone was preoccupied with bombs. Late one night Susana, Cata's daughter, sprang from her bed. There had been a clap of thunder. "They've bombed Government House!" she exclaimed, still groggy.

Late one night Susana, Cata's daughter, sprang from her bed. There had been a clap of thunder. "They've bombed Government House!" she exclaimed, still groggy.

The last thing the peace movement needs at this moment of diminished strength and influence is dissension in its dwindling ranks. The long-awaited end of the Indochina hostilities has left most of the most active opponents of that war in a state of nearly total exhaustion. Many have turned to the more routine pursuits necessarily neglected in those years of personal trial and disruption.

Do you remember telling me you couldn't possibly be an anti-Semite because as a child you played with adreidel, a familiar Chanukah game? 1 wonder if you—with your finely tuned Third World sensitivities—would have said to a black person who accused you of being a white racist that no, you couldn't be, because as a toddler you ate watermelon?

Whether religion significantly influenced the results of the 1976 Presidential election, and specifically whether Jimmy Carter had a "Catholic problem" stemming from the abortion issue or other less tangible considerations, will no doubt be debated for some time to come. The recent election did, however, raise other kinds of questions regarding the relationship between religion and politics that have scarcely been recognized but that may have serious meanings for the future of religion in America.

Violence and instability, punctuated by terrorism and subversion, characterize political life in many nations today. Throughout most of the postwar period few countries, and this includes the liberal democracies, have been spared the many faces of violence and terrorism, whether from the Left, the Right, or both.

With the continuing spread of terror and counterterror, with increasing violence and instability, personal insecurity and fear become widespread. Then hard-won gains in human rights come under heavy attack. In this situation violence and terror become self-justifying because through them society will be purged of its alleged evils. Or so it is argued.

Yet the moral conscience of the Americas originates in, and is built upon, respect for human rights. Our Hemisphere differs in a privileged way from other regions of the globe in that this is the guiding principle under which our nations came into being.

There is an awkwardness here. Your "certain young Christian radical" isn't me. My radicalism is a sometime thing. As Christian, I'm often aberrant. And I'm not so young: I was twenty-nine when Israel came to be. Still, I suppose an open letter can be answered by anyone interested. I feel especially eligible because many of the things you say here have been said to me.

On one level it seems that you and I have few grounds to quarrel. I know, for example, that anti-Semitism is real. Besides the classical Christian form and the modern racist version that you describe, I'll suggest a third—the corporate, petroleum-fueled variety.

With the possible exception of Chile no other country in 1976 received as much critical American public and press attention as did Korea. Almost to the exclusion of other issues, the criticism has been directed to the denial of human rights. Press stories, editorials, letters to the editor, Congressional hearings and legislative restrictions, TV documentaries, church newsletters—all have deplored the erosion of civil liberties in South Korea. And as the criticisms mounted, more and more voices, including those from among the ranks of Korea's traditional friends, began calling for a reduction of United States military and economic support to this country, the rebirth of whose independence was gained, at a tremendous cost in American blood and treasure.

Henry Kissinger's main contribution in Southern Africa appears to have been more in the realm of technique than of principle. Critics of the Kissinger era of American foreign policy will find little reason in Africa to stop their criticism. This is not to say there was no achievement. Perhaps that technique, which was refined in the Middle East before its export to Africa, will eventually prepare the way for principle in the Carter Administration. And perhaps not. Much depends on whether Kissinger's fast-moving diplomacy somehow preempted policy based on principle. That may be the price he had to pay South Africa's Vorster for making the "Kissinger Agreement" an immediate reality.

As I started out that December morning along the riverfront at Benares, the long arch of river, the cremation ghats, and the towering buifdings stretched as far as the eye could see, like a mighty encrusted bow catching the morning sun and embracing the wide, empty sandbank across the river to the east.

Passing a woman squatting in front of her fragile hut of rushes, roasting chapattis on the usual concave brown metal disc over her small fire, I leaped across the trickle of the Asi, which gives Benares the latter half of its Indian name of Varanasi.

From June 16 until the end of this year there will be 618 individual moments of silent protest in South Africa. That is the number of people known to have been killed during six months of low-level disruption, which exploded a hundred times into full-scale uprising. There is even a published list: alphabetized, date and cause of death, home address, age.