“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the sideshow barker to iiis customers. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the economist to the developing countries. If you don't hurry there will be disaster, echoed the President of the World Bank. Only military governments are capable of stability and order, observed the Rockefeller Report on Latin America.

You must move forward. Democracy is too slow. Human rights can wait.

It was a stirring message, and it reached the executive mansions of Southeast Asia. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, whenever the head of a government there tired of coping with legal opposition, began to fear the people, and decided to run things permanently on his own he engaged in the amusing practice of issuing a proclamation blaming all his country's ills on “Western-style democracy”—and immediately instituted Western-style repression. He imprisoned the opposition, muzzled the press, and silenced the population by putting the fear of predawn raids in their hearts, devices all so terribly Western and so terribly effective.

At Moscow on June 29 President Nixon joined with Soviet leader Brezhnev in signing a ten-year pact. Building upon the three-year commercial agreement of October, 1972, between the two countries, the pact proposed the further promotion of Soviet-American comrfierce by providing a framework for the discovery of new economic opportunities and the fostering of trade activities, including cooperation by American and Soviet organizations in joint enterprises.

In assessing the prospects of Soviet-American trade relations, it is essential to consider carefully the world economic situation, the Soviet Union's role as a world trader, and also the stance of the United States vis-à-vis the contemplated commerce.

The fact that Christians and Jews are together able to take up a topic such as “speaking of God after Auschwitz” indicates that a certain stage of maturity has been reached in our conversations. Especially on theological and biblical topics there was so definite a body of conviction on both sides, worked out through centuries and even millennia of discussion, that the spokesmen for the two faith communities could do little more than serve as reporters of the received doctrine on the matter. But with a topic such as the present one we confront a question to which there are no readymade answers.

Watersheds of human history are often given symbolic recognition through radical breaks in the way we date things. Thus in Christendom reference is made to B.C. and A.D.; some Jews and Christians have agreed on a mutual resort to BCE and C.E.; while in Islam H.A. stands for the alldecisive year of Mohammed's Hijra (Migration). Perhaps 1941 is to be identified as Year One of the Holocaust (basing it upon the “killing phase” of the program against the Jews). On this reckoning the present analysis is offered in the year 34 of the Holocaust. But the symbology A.H. would mean confusion with Muslim usage. An alternative, for English usage, is BFS, before the Final Solution, and F.S., in the year of the Final Solution. (Any symbology faces the criticism of being either arbitrary or contrived. A still further alternative is B.A. and A.A., before and after Auschwitz. There are substantive objections to singling out Auschwitz, and yet there is no doubt that this name has become the single most powerful symbol of the Holocaust.)

Any large public event in New York City is bound to attract some unstable types. But almost no other subject would be as likely to do so as a public forum on the Holocaust. And on June 3 through 6 a symposium entitled “Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era” was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. There were moments when one felt the symposium had become a public Rorschach Test: fundamentalist Christians, crackpots of all flavors, Jews for Jesus, slightly manic civil libertarians struggling to get their message across, sweet little old English ladies quoting the Prophets, and, of course, survivors of the campsall turned up. Members of the radical National Committee of Labor Caucuses disrupted Elie Wiesel's lecture and seized the microphone on several other occasions. In part the turnout may have been due to an incredible ad run in the Village Voice, telling people:

The ownership of affiliates of international companies has become a critical issue in many host countries. Inevitably, the issue of ownership has become a serious matter for the parent companies. In the discussion that has developed, things are not always what they seem, or what is presumed to be the case. Reality diverges from several unexamined presumptions.

That host countries take the question of ownership very seriously is evident from the increasing requirements that foreign shareholdings be sold to locals or to the government itself, from the regulations preventing new acquisitions of existing companies (thereby reducing the shifts in ownership to foreigners), and from the moves toward bringing labor into ownership. This last item is represented by the comtnunidad industrial of Peru, which progressively hands over1 to labor larger percentages of the shares, and by those in Europe who advocate that labor take over ownership and control of some companies or industries.

Americans are no longer so sure as they once were about what is meant by “the free world.” As Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us when he came in out of the cold, however, the distinction between free and unfree is not entirely obscured. Though he does not like everything he sees in the democratic nations, he immediately experienced the differences in the quality of freedom. There are discernible differences that make it possible to speak of “free,” “partially free,” and “not free” nations. Every nation is’ in fact marked by a “mix” of civil and political liberties granted, threatened, or withheld from its citizens. The obvious pitfall for the serious analyst of freedom is to weave complex criteria into a simplistic scheme by which one country is pronounced “free” and another “not free.” The determination of who is and who is not free is more complicated than that. A serious survey of freedom is a matter of weighing each nation against the scales of freedom in other nations. When it comes to human freedom] no nation has finally “arrived.” “Comparative” is the key word.

Tie American Left helped win some extraordinary battles during the 1960's and early 1970's. All it lost was the war.

Its two most important achievements during that period are obvious enough. The Left made a significant contribution, in militancy as well as theory, to a civil rights movement which swept away the juridical system of Jim Crow (even though the economic infrastructure of racism was left pretty much intact). And it provided activists and ideas to the teach-ins, the marches, and the political campaigns of 1968 and 1972 which turned American opinion around on the issue of Vietnam. There were other victories: for example, the destruction of the doctrine of in loco parentis on the American campus; the delegitimatizating of the House Un-American Activities Committee; participation in a woman's movement which is still demonstrating great vitality and potential; the opening up of the Democratic Party to entire new constituencies.