Moonies I met in the Barrytown, New York, seminary of the Unification Church is a young man I will call Tom Kellogg, now in his mid-twenties. We became friends, and it was when I was talking with Tom that the seriousness of this question struck me with great force. Tom comes from one of New York's prominent families; he graduated, first in his class, from one of New England's most prestigious preparatory schools; and he has a baccalaureate degree in biochemistry. Obviously he is a young man who, by all standards of American culture, has a “future“; one would also think Tom would know that he has a past. In short, he “belongs.” For several minutes I ceased being an investigative researcher and became a father, the father of two sons. If Tom Kellogg could become a Moonie, so could my own twelve-year-old preppie! My twenty-year-old son, who is somewhat lonely, living without a systematic ideology and concerned about his vocation, probably is in the ninety-seventh percentile of those who could be persuaded to join one of the religious cults.

When you served in the State Department, did you ever envision that within a few years we would have either Menachem Begin as the Israeli prime minister or an Anwar Sadat recognizing Israel in a dramatic visit to Jerusalem?

I never assumed that the situation would develop in such a way that the Likud party would supplant the Labor party in the leadership of Israel. But I think a more interesting response to your question is that Menachem Begin himself never expected to be prime minister. I spoke with him shortly after he became prime minister and we focused, very briefly, on the matter. He had been in opposition twenty-nine years and now found himself in this very critical position at a very important time.

One day last February Ian Smith, head of the Rhodesian Government, sat down with three black leaders and signed an agreement that is designed to bring a majority-ruled Zimbabwe into being by the end of this year. After signing, Smith extended his hands upward and shrugged his shoulders, as though to signal his resignation to the inevitable. The black leaders were jubilant. Much of the rest of the world expressed relief that one of the nastiest conflicts in a race-conscious universe was apparently on its way to peaceful resolution. Resignation, jubilation, relief—but these are not the only reactions to what has come to be called “the internal settlement.” In Africa and elsewhere, especially at the United Nations, the settlement has been condemned by many as a sellout to continued white racism. Because it is important to understand the objections to the settlement, we will begin there.

According to a recent publication of the U.S. State Department, “The Canadian record in protection of human rights is one of the finest in the world.” Although President Carter has frequently spoken about threats to human rights in Communist and Third World countries, he has seemingly endorsed the State Department view by not saying a word about problems in Canada. Carter's silence has been largely matched by that of the American press, with the result that few Americans know that within the last year Canada has been rocked by a continuing scandal in which it has been revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP—yes, the “Mounties“) has for decades been systematically and secretly opening mail, breaking into homes and offices, and obtaining confidential tax, unemployment, and medical records, and checking into all candidates for political office.

Day after day after day the dreary drumfire of belligerent words and deeds rolled out of Jimmy Carter's Washington while the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament was meeting in New York during May and June. This first world disarmament assembly in forty-six years was made hostage to a small retinue of image-makers who persuaded a besieged president that, for domestic reasons, he must keep up a relentless fusillade of tough anti-Soviet talk and gestures, avoiding any taint of appeasement.

So Jimmy Carter came to believe he could not risk offering any significant policy initiatives toward a new international disarmament program. He was even persuaded that he should personally boycott the Special Session—though he was president of the host country for the largest U.N. aggregation of summit-level personalities since Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe eighteen years ago. As press secretary Jody Powell explained it, the president was “too busy” preparing major addresses for NATO and the U.S. Naval Academy to appear at the United Nations. The fact that the dates for the Special Session had been set before Carter's inauguration—and spread from May 23 to the end of June—did not find any reflection in Powell's announcement.

We who have dared associate ourselves with the cause of “the least of these,” our brethren around the world, those of us who, by circumstance or choice, find ourselves in sympathy with the struggling aspirations of the poor, the moans and cries of the oppressed, the pain and suffering of the diseased, know that somehow we on this earth have got to learn to live together as brothers.

Many of us learned these lessons at the side of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We saw how things happened to him. One of the reasons that 1 am able to be involved at the United Nations is because of the inspiration I drew from the association with Dr. King and the strength and understanding I saw him draw from ordinary people and the people who strengthened him to carry on.

Stanislaw Pyjas said goodbye to his friends late in the afternoon of of May 6, 1977. After that no one is exactly sure what happened to him. Early the next morning a waitress hurrying to work found his crumpled body lying face down inside the dingy passageway of a ramshackle Krakow apartment building. It was raining, and a political crisis began to brew in Poland.

When Tunisian Prime Minister Hedi Nouira visits Washington in the final days of November, issues of human rights, American aid, and evolution toward a multiparty democracy are sure to arise.

Both constitutionally and politically Nouira is Tunisia's crown prince—the designated successor of ailing Habib Bourguiba, "president for life" of this Mediterranean country of six million.

But the events of last January, which saw more than a hundred deaths and brought the imprisonment of Tunisia's powerful trade union movement leadership, have left a certain tension in their wake. Unemployment, rising expectations, and a growing alienation from the single-party regime—the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD)—are contributing to destabilization in Tunisia.

The subject of nuclear energy, arousing hope and anxiety in almost equal degree, is of interest to all mankind. Of late, however, attention has focused on the implications of the spread of nuclear power and technology to Third World countries, and in that context the views of Pakistan—a developing country with similar economic compulsions—may be of some general interest.

Thirty years after Hiroshima-Nagasaki one sees nuclear energy being used beneficently all over the world in research institutions and hospitals, in farms and factories. But a number of recent developments have reawakened the fear and moral doubt concerning man's capacity to make wise use of the terrible power his intelligence has unleashed: the explosion by India of a nuclear device in 1974; disclosures about the real risks of accidents in power reactors; and the fear that terrorists, political or’ criminal, may obtain recourse to nuclear bombs to further their ends.

Believe me,” President Sadat understated recently, “we are in an era of wonders.” Despite all the hopeful allusions to pensive deserts, moody mirages, monumental pyramids, and lifesustaining rivers, it is still hard to express the sheer audacity of President Sadat's pilgrimage to Jerusalem— not primarily a pilgrimage to Al Aksa for Greater Bairam, but one to the Knesset for peace. We will not likely in our lifetime see again an event so Tolstoian; a single man, a single act of will, and a history that, with the unlikely exception of an assassination followed by a complete and immediate reversal, can never be quite the same again.

After almost two years of the Carter administration the commitment to human rights, which represents a key aspect of its policies, has become a topic for much discussion and interest but seems still to be inadequately understood. The main reason for this failure, I feel, is that very few earnest efforts have been made to determine the actual scope and significance of the administration's approach as it emerges from the way it operates and from the way it developed out of the principles of freedom and morality that have inspired the best traditions and beliefs of the American people.

Long before Mr. Carter announced his candidacy Richard N. Gardner, our present ambassador to Italy, had become one of his closest advisors on foreign affairs, with special regard to human rights. During recent conversations in Rome, Ambassador Gardner recalled that “an active commitment to the promotion of human rights everywhere in the world is not a novel feature in American foreign policy.

While Juan Felix. Bogado was attending patients in his shantytown medical office outside Asuncion, Paraguay, last July 19, police broke in and hustled away the thirty-two-year-old doctor, claiming he was a subversive. As most Paraguayan political prisoners, Bogado was subjected to “intensive therapy,” the local euphemism for torture.

“They tried to get him to confess he was a Communist and threatened to torture me before his eyes,” says his wife, who at the time was four months pregnant.

Eliav: I'm supposed to be the numberone Israeli dove. I am the chairman of Sheli. I am one of the leaders of the Israeli realists', moderates who are preaching for the last ten years that Israel should go a different way, an entirely different way on its road to peace.

I am saying in essence two things. Israel should have declared—and this was said ten years ago—that in return for full-fledged peace Israel should return the territories, but for minor adjustments agreed on both sides, to all parties concerned. And, two, that Israel should recognize the rights of the Palestinians for self-determination. These are the two basic things we were saying for the last ten years.

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.

One day last February Ian Smith, head of the Rhodesian Government, sat down with three black leaders and signed an agreement that is designed to bring a majority-ruled Zimbabwe into being by the end of this year. After signing, Smith extended his hands upward and shrugged his shoulders, as though to signal his resignation to the inevitable. The black leaders were jubilant. Much of the rest of the world expressed relief that one of the nastiest conflicts in a race-conscious universe was apparently on its way to peaceful resolution. Resignation, jubilation, relief—but these are not the only reactions to what has come to be called “the internal settlement.” In Africa and elsewhere, especially at the United Nations, the settlement has been condemned by many as a sellout to continued white racism. Because it is important to understand the objections to the settlement, we will begin there.

The independence movement in Puerto Rico has been formed in reaction to the cultural and economic dominance of the mainland, and thus it has been anti-Yanqui and anticapitalist. Radicals and nonfriends of the United States, from Castro through many Latin American and Third World leaders, have taken up the cause of Puerto Rican independence as one of the easiest ways, after Vietnam, of discrediting America. Puerto Rican advocates of independence express -themselves with bombs. But causes should not suffer guilt by association, and nonradical Americans might well reconsider the issue. It has been remarkably little examined in the American press except from a usually emotional leftist viewpoint, but there is a good case for amicable separation or divorce on grounds of incompatibility.

The oppressed peoples of Latin America are abundantly represented these days in Washington. A human rights lobby, motivated by idealism of ideology rather than economic gain, carries an often eloquent approximation of the Latins’ case to Congress and the executive branch. These efforts are low-budget but high-key and, according to those being lobbied, can be every bit as influential as those of the sugar or arms interests.

Whether the lobby is truly effective at saving lives and protecting rights depends ultimately on whether the government it seeks to influence is effective at those tasks—and that remains an open issue in this contentious capital. The lobby, which already had established a rapport with sympathetic congressmen during Gerald Ford's presidency, now has at least as intimate a working relationship with the expanded human rights section of President Carter's State Department.