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.

At the Christmas day, 1979, dinner held in Chengdu,- the capital of Sichuan province, to honor visiting delegates of the Italian-Chinese Institute for Economic and Cultural Relations there were two Chinese Catholic bishops present. One was Li Hsiting, whose name does not appear in the official Annuario Pontificio, Bishop Li was elected to the Chengdu post in 1958 by the Catholic Patriotic Association without approval of the Holy See. The other bishop was Mathew Tuan In-min of Wanxian, a city along the Yangtze River some three hundred miles from Chengdu. Tuan, appointed by Pius XII, has been a bishop for thirty years now. At seventy-two he is the only surviving legitimate bishop in Sichuan province.

The SALT II debate has revealed a growing acceptance among anti-SALT strategists that we must be prepared to fight a nuclear war. The "war fighters" advocate strategies and force levels that reflect the traditional belief that weapons exist to fight wars, not just deter them, and nuclear war is like any other in this respect. There is little recognition by this group that events leading up to a crossroads in human history— the firing of thousands of nuclear weapons— would be anything other than a neat, mechanical, step-by-step procession to confrontation, from which the two sides could easily disengage. Civil defense, programs are prescribed as an integral part of a credible war-fighting capability, and Protection in the Nuclear Age, the government's most recent public information film on the subject (produced for the Federal Emergency Management Agency), accepts this assumption.

Internal colonialism has beeome a popular term in academic parlance. Although suggested in the writings of Lenin, it was probably first developed by the Mexican intellectual Pablo Gonzales Casanova, who employed the term in his Democracy in Mexico to describe the relationship between the Mexican Government and the Indian population. In the United States it has since been used to characterize the status of virtually every minority. The charge is made that blacks, Mexican- Americans, Indians, and even women have been colonized. Virtually all culturally pluralistic societies— outside the socialist bloc—are now stigmatized as instances of internal colonialism.