Till now, mankind has either taken it as a matter of course that it is going to survive, or, alternatively, assumed that its destiny will be decided by forces beyond human control: the gods or God or Nature. We have now woken up to the truth that, today, we are in greater danger of extinction than we have been at any time since the date —perhaps 30,000 years ago—at which our ancestors gained the upper hand over all other forms of life on this planet except microbes and viruses. In the present age we have discovered and conquered the microbes, and we have hopes of getting the better of the viruses. But our recent victories over non-human menaces to human life are far outweighed by new threats to us from ourselves. These threats have no precedents; for man, armed with the power of science applied to technology, is a vastly more formidable enemy for man than any non-human enemy that man has yet encountered.

An occurrence in 1968 far from China's borders may have contributed substantially to bringing about a change in Peking's foreign policy. On August 20-21, there was the startling intervention in Czechoslovakia by the USSR and four other Warsaw Pact powers. A warning letter the five had sent previously to the Czechoslovak Communist Party set forth a significant rationale: “… we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country away from the road of socialism and create the danger of Czechoslovakia being severed from the socialist community… . The frontiers of the socialist world have moved … to the Elbe and the Bohemian Forest. We shall never agree to these historic gains of socialism … being placed in jeopardy.” The Brezhnev Doctrine of “limited sovereignty” had been born, and if it were judged warrant for taking action against unorthodoxy in Czechoslovakia, it was in logic equally applicable to China. In any event, Moscow's military action against the deviant Communist state was by itself an indication that, in some circumstances, the Soviet Union might be prepared to employ its armed forces elsewhere outside its borders.

In 1966 I spent fifty-five days in Vietnam observing the air war firsthand and wrote a book, Air War—Vietnam. It went to six editions. It was reprinted almost in its entirety in the official Pentagon publication to show how well our troops were doing and how just our case was; it was quoted extensively in liberal publications and by campus protestors to show how badly our troops were doing and how unjust our cause was. American fighter pilots in one F-100 squadron elected me to their inner circle of gungho operators which they called “Sierra Hotel” (decorum forbids a translation of the code words). I. F. Stone reprinted my napalm sequence; Dr. Spock's lawyers phoned to ask me to appear at his trial in his behalf; my local American Legion Post invited me to speak at their annual Memorial Day ceremony.

The literature of contemporary Africa is more than a response to the politics of Africa. It is an aspect of the political debate, of course, but it is also an intrinsically important element in the total African renaissance of our times. True, the earliest beginnings of literature in contemporary Africa are rooted in politics and political protest. (I exclude the African writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the simple reason that most of them did not see fiction, poetry or drama as possible vehicles for their anti-colonial and antislavery protests.)

Négritude, the literary movement of the French African and Antillean deracine, was created as a literary response to European cultural imperialism (defined by Gallicism) Its prophets, Césaire of Martinique, Damas of Guyana, and L. S. Senghor of Sengal, expressed the anguish of their delirious alienation, frustration, protest against European culture, and against that romantic glorification of Africa, the Sartrean imaginary continent.

Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is pockmarked with ideologies gone bad. With the Utopian thinking of the Enlightenment came the conviction that “Ideals can transform reality.” But ideologies that undermined one repressive order in the name of progress became the zealous gods of another. Ideologists credit their Idea with omnipotence, borrowing the techniques of medieval casuistry) to reduce the more blatant discrepancies between the ideal and real.

It is true, streets plastered with slogans and millions of people waving little red books are frightening. But the possibility that the technocrats shall inherit the earth is also somewhat disconcerting. The excesses to which “total” ideologies lend themselves should not blind us to other aspects of the ideological enterprise; bloody revolutions and totalitarian regimes do not exhaust the possibilities.

When Dean Acheson was appointed Under Secretary of State in September, 1945, I. F. Stone wrote in The Nation: “He has been pro-De Gaulle, anti-Franco, strongly opposed to the admission of Argentina to the U.N., and friendly to the Soviet Union … of all the men now in the Departrrient, Acheson was by far the best choice for Under Secretary, and it is no small advantage to pick a man who already knows a good deal about the inner workings.” Stone went on to note that one of Acheson's strongest assets was “in his relations with Congress. He deserves a generous share of the credit for the passage of the Bretton Woods legislation, and he played no inconsiderable part in the Senate's approval of the Charter.” In order to placate Acheson's reactionary critics, Tom Connally reassured trie Senate that he would “never have voted for Mr. Acheson's confirmation [as Under Secretary] unless it had been implicitly understood that he would not have a predominant voice in foreign policy.”

Dean Acheson, who died at age 78 on October 12, 1971, was the fiercest of American leaders during the formative years of the cold war. As Under Secretary of State and Secretary of State for President Harry S. Truman, he was (to use the arrogant but perfectly accurate title of his memoirs) Present at the Creation of the basic policies which guided American foreign policv for a quarter of a century. In most instances he was the principal author of those policies.

Should we view his career with the unstinting admiration naturally expressed by his old boss, Harry Truman, and by President Nixon? Or with condemnation for his militant role in perpetuating the cold war? More appropriately, we should feel sadness that a man of such extraordinary intellectual ability, and the finest master of the English language to serve as Secretary of State since Jefferson, should have applied his talents to waging a form of war rather than searching for peace.

When we arrive in a wealthy nation and denounce oppressive structures which exist in poor nations; when we say that some of the rich in poor countries live at the expense of the misery of thousands and even millions of their fellow citizens; when we describe the subhuman situation in which millions of God's children in the underdeveloped world continue to vegetate, it is easy to obtain understanding, svmpathy, and generosity on the part of wealthy nations.

But we dare not go further. For if we wish to say that together with wrong structures which should be changed in poor countries there are also wrong structures to be changed in rich nations as well, the first impression is that we are joking: Why change, if everything is going well, the country is rich and grows more prosperous each day?