There are now two stylish things to say about Populism. One is that the Populists were bad guys, the other that the Populists are again among us in such figures as John Lindsay and George McGovern, on the one hand, and George Wallace on the other. Unfortunately, the intellectuals talking about Populism know very little about it. Even Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield, in their wellintentioned but superficial little book, A Populist Manifesto, shudder at the nineteenth-century Populist reality which, they say, was “afflicted” with “paranoia and racism.”

The Populists, it will be remembered, were members of the People's Party, which existed from 1889 through the election of 1896.

Just so there is no misunderstanding: I do not believe economic policies can make much of a contribution to peacekeeping. During the nineteenth century and up to the present there has been a tendency to stress too much the economic factors in international relations. Liberal economic theory, from the classical writers on, is in this respect strikingly similar to what we now identify as the “Marxist” tradition. It is glibly assumed in both camps that trade is an important contributor to peaceful relations on the political level. That trade and economic relations generally worked for peace was an important corollary to the free-trade doctrine, and as a general proposition it now receives almost universal acclaim.

Today, July 25, 1972, is Constitution Day. It is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or, more accurately, of “The Free Associated State” that links a speck in the Caribbean, 110 by 35 miles of subtropical hills and beaches, to the United States of America. It is also the seventy-fourth anniversary of the day when American troops landed in Guanica, Puerto Rico—just about where Columbus landed on his second voyage in 1493—to take possession of the former Spanish colony, ceded at the Treaty of Paris, America's victory prize in the Spanish-American War.

Until a few years ago the term “racism” seemed to have a fairly precise meaning. It meant the attribution of various forms of social inferiority or superiority to certain groups of people by virtue of their biological makeup. In its more developed and systematic form, racism was a theory of genetic determination postulating a causal link between the physical appearance (phenotype) of people and their social behavior and attitudes. While ethnocentrism (preference for one's own culture) is universal, racism is exceptional, though not unique, to Western cultures. The overwhelming power and wealth of Western societies, however, made Western racism by far the most widespread and violent strain of the virus.

The “After Vietnam” in the title says something about the American mood, not about the military realities of America's war in Indochina. This reminder is unfortunately necessary, for too many of us seem able to forget the brutal air war in which our country has dropped more than six and a half million tons of bombs (more than three times the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Africa and Asia in all of World War II) on a region about the size of Texas. There is a fearful deja vu about accepting an invitation to speak to “American conscience and consciousness after Vietnam,” for the first time I spoke to the “post-Vietnam” situation was in 1968, and one cannot help wondering if in 1976 this present statement will seem as naively sanguine as does that of 1968. Nonetheless, and if for no other reason than to maintain our sanity, it is inevitable that we reach beyond the present horror and try to anticipate the shape of American conscience and consciousness after these years of madness.

Westerners tend to think of Islam as a “political religion,” or at least as a religion which has an important political component. We speak too about “Islamic history” and “Islamic civilization” and we know that what we are referring to is not purely ecclesiastical or purely religious. Perhaps at the basis of this way of thinking and speaking is the fact that Muhammad was not only a prophet but also a statesman and political leader, and that his influence gave birth to a social entity which is both religious community and body politic.

Nonetheless, it is not altogether correct to think of Islam as a political religion.

When I started working for SANE in February, 1960, there was no question in my mind that I was working on foreign policy issues. International confrontations—the Bay or Pigs, Berlin, the Congo, the Cuban missile crisis—engulfed us like ocean waves. The superpowers were testing H-bombs in the atmosphere. China was considered an international outlaw. The cold war was in full swing.

References to “the religions of Asia” usually mean Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, and secondarily, Shintoism, Taoism, and Confucianism, or even the Jainism of India. Frequently we speak simply of the “Wisdom of the East” or of “the” Asian religion, from which Islam is as a rule excluded. This is an important clue: Islam, which twice deeply alarmed Europe on the threshold of the modern age when it advanced militarily to the gates of Vienna, has not been able to fascinate occidental man in the same exotic way as the religions of the East and the Far East. Evidently Islam offered no enticement; Muslims in Europe are either relics of the age of Turkish imperialism (as in Bulgaria, Albania or Yugoslavia) or they immigrated in times of free trade and of open labor and skill markets.