In six years of conducting research on America's poor Jews I have met no one more delightful than the seventy-year-old man I will call Yankel Kanter. As the sort of research I do is based on speaking with people over a long period of time, it is only natural that I would be especially attracted to such a man as Yankel. If the purpose of my work is to allow people to describe in their own words how their lives are being led, then Yankel, eager to talk, was the perfect person to participate in the research.

Over the years of our friendship Yankel has talked about a great many things, although never once about the death of his wife and children in a death camp in Poland. He is in his way, although he would never say this, a scholarly and learned gentleman whose immediate response to almost any question of mine was: “Oh you know, just the other night I was reading a book on that very subject.“

During the last two centuries or so, Western intellectuals have experienced a considerable rise in status and employment. A research fellow today normally occupies a more enviable position than the average author in the early eighteenth century, who commonly had to fawn on an aristocratic patron for his daily bread. From the second part of the eighteenth century the market for writers and teachers vastly expanded. The miseries once experienced by ill-paid scribblers in “Grub Street” in early Georgian London became a matter of legend. Education has now become one of the world's major growth industries.

In Great Britain—despite the country's economic difficulties—the annual rate of growth of educational expenditure has consistently exceeded the average annual growth of the Gross National Product.

A few months ago President Carter's human rights stature took a dive when the Department of State rejected the requests of a group of American citizens to have “Tibet,” instead of China, listed as their birthplace on their U.S. passports. The decision came on the heels of an announcement that Zbigniew Brzezinski would be visiting China a few weeks later.

Despite the president's repeated assertions about his impartial application of human rights to all nations, the administration has been silent when it comes to human rights violations by the People's Republic of China. Evidently Washington does not want to offend Peking and thus lets China dictate, at least indirectly, an internal policy decision of the United States. The action by the State Department regarding American citizens of Tibetan origin has carried this unequal application of human rights principles to an absurd degree.

In the course of the last quarter century or so the United States has become a nearly universal scapegoat symbol. The United States has been denounced and blamed in countless speeches and editorials, on posters, in.radio broadcasts, and over television, as well as in private conversations, for the ills of the world, for the problems of particular societies, and even for the myriad unhappiness of individuals. No country has had more hostile demonstrations in front of its embassies around the world, or more of its libraries and cultural missions abroad ransacked, or more of its policies routinely denounced in the United Nations and other international organizations. More American flags have been burned, in and outside the United States, than the flags of any other country.

Since its inception in 1972 Index on Censorship, a bi-monthly journal, has been wreaking havoc wherever possible with those who wield blue pencils and worse weapons. Index publishes writing of literary merit that has been banned and exposes cases of suppression and censorship wherever they occur.

The founding of Index represents the happy but all too rare situation of people mobilizing promptly in the service of a dream. In 1968 Pavel Litvinov, the wellknown Soviet dissident, and Larisa Bogoraz wrote an open letter protesting the contravention of Soviet laws by judicial authorities during the trial of Galanskov, Ginsberg, Dobrovolsky, and Lashkova. In response to their appeal, published in newspapers of various countries, the English poet Stephen Spender sent a telegram to Litvinov expressing his sympathy and saying he would like to assist these people in their plight.

Ten years have passed since those brief, happy months in the sunshine of the Prague spring. Alexander Dubcek and the new leadership tried to move toward greater personal freedom and create “socialism with a human face,” but these buoyant expectations of a better future for the fifteen million people of Czechoslovakia were shattered by the massive surprise attack launched by the Soviet Union in August, 1968. During the last forty years Czechoslovakia has been a victim and a symbol of the aggressive power of the twin totalitarian scourges of this century — fascism and communism. In 1938 the divided and fearful democracies tried to appease Hitler by going back on their commitments to defend little Czechoslovakia. That action cost them the support of a brave nation and its fifty well-armed divisions. It also set the stage for a devastating world war that began less than one year later.

Greetings: As you are a practical group, yet with a philosophical turn of mind, you have sought my opinion on basic questions of government. I answer that leaders have but two duties: internally, to promulgate just laws and maintain order; externally, to provide for the security of the state in defending it from strangers. Of these two, I turn my attention in this testimony to the problem of maintaining the security of the state, for without this all other questions of government are moot. The first question, therefore, is how best to maintain the security of the state, whether through arms or by some other means.

To answer this one must look to the very nature of men. The history of all nations has been conflict and warfare. Therefore at all times and in all places men have found it necessary to arm themselves for defense against the attacks of their enemies.

Dudko: I received your questions and I think that they are quite interesting and relevant, so I am glad to respond.

Question: Do you think that the young people's interest in religion is now increasing and growing stronger, or declining? How could you explain it?

I believe that the interest in religion on the part of the young people at the present time is increasing and growing stronger, not declining. The increased interest may be explained by many motives; however, the most important explanation is the complete disillusionment with irreligiosity, even on the part of the so-called atheists,, I presented the essential motive from the human point of view, but from my religious point of view the essential explanation is as follows: the process of faith has taken place and is spreading.