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.

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.

Once upon a time, earlier in the twentieth century, individualism was a doctrine that could be readily dismissed as archaic, idiosyncratic, and simply out of phase with the modern fashion. Even those who wanted to make a place for the individual were compelled to speak apologetically about the “new individualism” as a kind of hybrid of social welfare economy in contradistinction to the old individualism. Henry Steele Commager reminded us in 1950 that “the phenomenon of socialization was a logical expression of the American temperament in the new century. It reflected that decline of the importance of individualism and that growing awareness of social responsibility that could be noted similarly in law, education, business, and legislation.“

Mr. Morarji Desai once complained of having been dismissed by the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi as a peon. When he took the oath as India's oldest prime minister on March 24, 1977, it marked the end of monopoly rule of the Indian Congress party extending over a period of thirty years. Earlier, the people of India, by their active participation in a silent revolution of the ballot box, had thrown away the authoritarian and dictatorial rule of Mrs. Gandhi, replacing her party by the Janata party, an organization that brought together men with different ideological affiliations.

My home town, called Sakya, is located in Western Tibet. The news about the Chinese invasion of 1950 reached us sometime in 1952. A soldier whose family lived in a house next to ours brought the astounding news. He announced that the “enemies of our faith” were advancing rapidly from the east and that there would be no peace and happiness in the land of snow.

Despite the alarming news, no one in Sakya sharpened his sword or dusted his bow and arrows. Our government neither declared a state of emergency nor conscripted the young into the army. Instead, we witnessed quite a few unusual religious rites of the sort called mangdog, meaning prevent or negate war. After the revolt against the Chinese in 1959, a number of leading monks were imprisoned, charged with mangdog, which was interpreted as treason against China.

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.

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.

There are those of us whose job seems always to be immediate problem-solving. We are like people frantically busy piling up rocks with the fleeting notion that perhaps they are building something. To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (American Enterprise Institute, 1977) offers a portrait in which resemblances can be seen between the haphazard rock pile and the city of good “mediating structures” there portrayed.

Approaching the subject as a lawyer, the question at once comes to mind: Do we need mediating structures (family, church, voluntary association, neighborhood, racial and ethnic subgroups) in a society governed by the American Constitution? If the “mediating structures“ are thought to be necessary to protect the individual from the state, is that not precisely the function of the Constitution?