Involuntary disappearance within the Latin American region has been a frightening phenomenon over the past decade. Here I will deal with the two salient cases of Chile and Argentina, with briefer reference to other countries.

Involuntary disappearances, in the sense I will use the term, involve the arrest or surreptitious kidnapping of persons thought to be out of sympathy with the regime in power, carried out by agents of the government or by semi-legal organizations abetted by, if not fully responsible to, the authorities; the disappeared person is not heard from again, and the fact of his or her arrest, incarceration, or assassination is, in the situations we are dealing with, routinely denied by the agencies of government. In numerous instances, especially in Chile, the person's very existence is officially denied until government documents attesting to the person's birth, identity card number, etc. are brought forth.

We went to two theatrical performances during our visit to South Africa in July, 1979. One was at a faintly sleazy nightclub in the stylish Hillbrow section of Johannesburg, whose familiar aspect was puzzling until we realized that it reminded us of the Kit-Kat Klub in Ccbaiet.

There is no doubt that the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is a crisis, and a different sort of crisis than the kind we have been accustomed to over the years of the cold war and the period that came to be known as detente. The condition that we now confront is unlikely to be confined in time and space in the same manner that many of the postwar crises had been. The Berlin crises were serious and worrisome, but they came and went and some degree of normality was restored.

October 19, 1977, was described by one of South Africa's best-known newspapers, the Rnnd Daily Mail, as "the bleakest day in South Africa's history." On that day the government banned the country's only black newspaper, The World, eighteen organizations (including most groups in the Black Consciousness Movement that had come to be associated with the name of Steve Biko), and seven individuals. Forty-two black leaders were imprisoned without trial, nineteen homes and offices were raided. "What it has done," wrote the editor of the Mail, "is to leave the Black people who reject separate development with no outlet, no organization, no mouthpiece even, through which to express themselves." And so it remains today.

For several decades the West has tended to view Mideast dynamics mainly through the prism of the Arab- Israeli conflict. While the conflict has definitely played a role, it would be dangerous to minimize the importance of other destabilizing factors that are preponderant— especially as far as Western access to Middle East oil is concerned. As demonstrated recently in Iran, these factors do endanger Western interests and are likely to affect them increasingly in the future.

Seventy-three-year-old Sam Fischman, while not a poor man, is certainly not rich, and is never going to be rich. Over and over he insists that this fact doesn't bother him, for he's had all the rich friends a man ever needed. But it takes no special sensitivity to recognize how disappointed he is with his own lack of success, and what he perceives as his son's preordained series of failures.

There is much talk lately about the rising level of defense interest in Japan. So far as I know, there is no country in the world over the size of 200,000 that does not have something in the nature of an armed force. At the extreme we have the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and perhaps China. The range is from wide-scale, virtually all-spectrum military capacity to extremely limited capacity. Japan lies very much at the lower end of the scale: very limited in terms of possible missions, in terms of its own security doctrine, in terms of what domestic public opinion would permit, and in terms of Japan's perception of its position in the world.

Scott Reynolds ndia, the world's largest democracy, held its eighth national election in the first week of January. It was an election surrounded by extraordinary excitement: the failure of two governments to secure the confidence of the Lok Sabha, the House of Representatives; disputed constitutional decisions by India's head of state, President Sanjiva Reddy; a midterm dissolution of Parliament; an unusually long period of caretaker government between last August's dissolution and the January polls. The results were equally exciting: an overwhelming victory for Indira Gandhi—and, not incidentally, a complementary victory for Sanjay Gandhi.

As the election date drew near, Sanjay Gandhi had become the most controversial public personality for one-sixth of the world's population, the 650 million people of India. In the labyrinthine world of Indian politics, where images are often etched in the muted tones of consensus appeal, Sanjay stands in bold relief; neutrality is an emotion he rarely evokes.

At the bottom of the Persian Gulf, controlling the Western approaches to the waterway now so crucial to the wellbeing and existence of the Western world, stands the virtually unknown country of Oman. Once, two hundred years ago, the legendary seafaring empire of Muscat and Oman, it stretched from Mozambique and Zanzibar to Pakistan. Today, it is a vast land span of a thousand miles of sea line with a small population of approximately 1.5 million Omanis and about 100,000 Pakistani and Indian laborers.

Only ten years ago—in 1969 and 70—Oman was one of the most backward countries in the entire world. The old sultan kept his people in medieval times. The gates to Muscat, which lies in an easily encompassable half-moon surrounded by jagged mountains, were closed every night at seven, and anyone caught outside was summarily shot, for why would he be outside if he were not making trouble? Poverty was Oriental in its intensity, and the modern world—whether sun glasses or cigarettes or bicycles or the most minimal of health care and education—was banned, often on pain of death.

Huber Matos, Cuba's best-known political prisoner, was released on October 21, 1979, after completing "every minute" of a twenty-year prison sentence. Matos had helped make Fidel Castro's revolution, not only as a military commander in the rebel army, but by persuading the then president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, to send arms to Castro. When Matos asked to resign from Castro's government because he disapproved of its increasingly Marxist direction, he was charged with "slandering the Revolution," an accusation later changed to "treason."

We can count on injustice in human affairs; on privilege, exploitation, and violence. Violence, which in its ability to turn a human being into a thing, inflicts the final injustice.

But we can count, too, on men and social movements to challenge and so to limit this grim reality. In one era a revived religious or political tradition, in another a movement of the oppressed, but in every time some men will affirm dignity and brotherhood and the possibility of community across national, racial, and ideological barriers.

It is a tragic moment in history when such people lose their bearings; when the ideas and goals that inspired them fundamentally alter; when an accurate assessment of their spiritual health is Nietzsche's “1 have forgotten why ever I began.”

The United States has maintained consistently since the Arablsraeli war of 1967 that Jewish settlements on lands inhabited by Palestinian Arabs are illegal, and in June, 1980, legislation was proposed that would deduct a portion of American aid that goes to pay for such illegal settlements.

Like Nixon, Kissinger uses the slippery phrase to sell the shoddy. "I believed in the moral significance of my adopted country," he writes, defending his zeal for Nixon's Vietnam policy. Do not all nations, all things human, possess "moral significance"? But Kissinger means to slip by another idea, a moral valuation of American power. "America, alone of the free countries," he continues, "was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity." My!.

A psychologist has observed that when a man gets lost in a dense forest, he tends to run faster and faster. It seems this is what all of mankind is doing in today's crisis-ridden world. In recent years we have witnessed a great many commissions and conferences along with a flood of reports and documents, all purporting to solve the grave problems of our times. Yet it would be no exaggeration to say, borrowing a phrase from Churchill, they have been "less luminous than voluminous."

You may remember the event. In October, 1977, German commandos rescuing hijacked hostages in Mogadishu. I watched the televised reports of the venture in somewhat idyllic circumstances: in the local tavern of a small Spanish village whose name means, in the regional dialect, "a forgotten nook away from the world," an atmosphere so innocent that one has to remind oneself, sometimes, that some of the most serious matters are really serious.