The memory of Japanese imperialism in Southeast Asia never quite fades away. There are regular reminders, it seems, of the depth and possibly the permanence of the hatred engendered by the excesses of Japanese soldiers a generation ago. At the beginning of January, 1974, for instance, there were demonstrations against Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in Bangkok—and riots, burning and killing when he arrived in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. There was a special irony in these displays in that neither Thailand nor Indonesia was really brutalized by the Japanese during the war. The rulers of Thailand prudently “allied” witji the Japanese soon after they “invaded” in 1941, and Indonesia's future leaders, including an ambitious young man named Suharto, trained in Japanese-run military units while the Dutch colonialists waited for their chance to return. President Suharto's revolutionary predecessor, Sukarno, collaborated politically with the Japanese. He, along with many Indonesian activists, preferred the Japanese to the Dutch.

Well, what does the future hold for the Palestinians? How can self-determination be achieved? This is a question that should disturb us, but too often this question, at the very core of the Middle East conflict, is swept away by the mechanics of war, of peace, of oil and of troop disengagement. Such irony is hard to stomach and is a bare reward for those many Palestinians of varying political beliefs who support the involvement of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the Geneva peace talks and speak encouragingly about a separate Palestine state.

The idea of such a state needs to be scrutinized against the backgrounds of both Israeli and Jordanian policies regarding the Palestinians, in order to understand fully why these policies are quite inadequate and why it is impossible to imagine a Palestinian state linked either to Israel or Jordan. The idea of an independent state pinned between Israel and Jordan is acceptable only with radical changes and concessions—from Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians alike—that will ensure peace and harmony from border to border.

Depending on the definition of terms, the Arab-Israeli war is either not a religious war or it is a religious war a dozen times over in a dozen elusive senses. In the remarks that follow we shall review Jewish and Muslim claims not to spiritual privilege or national destiny but, more narrowly, to territory. These territorial claims would become causa belli only in the unlikely event that the National Religious Party of Israel and, say, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia were to become the sole voices for, respectively, Israel and “the Arab nation.” Short of that, they are a rhetorical and psychological factor in a broader and usually more pragmatic conflict, but as such they are easily overlooked by Christian and secular observers.

We have been waging a battle to improve the quality of life in the developing world for twenty-five years. Today this battle is being lost. As the world's military powers seek to reduce the risks of nuclear holocaust, new dangers to political and economic stability have arisen.

The threat of widespread famine is on the increase. Fertilizer shortages grow, and the affluent continue to consume a disproportionate amount of the world's food resources. Worldwide inflation continues to take a heavy toll on the developing and the developed countries alike. This erodes political stability and depletes what little hard currency the poor nations have amassed.

If it was nothing else the U.N. Special Session on Raw Materials and development, which stirred the East River enclave to an unwonted pitch of springtime activity last April, was a display of Third World solidarity. In spite of the massive balance-of-payments crisis threatening many of the less developed nations — a result of the sudden steep rise in the price of oil plus sharp increases in the prices of food and fertilizer — the atmosphere in the public forums reflected near euphoria because of the oil-producing (OPEC) nations' dramatic success in gaining control of their own natural resources.

Since we decided to retake our authentic names, everybody speaks of a conflict with the Church. This is not the case at all. There is no conflict between Church and State in Zaire.“ While President Mobutu Sese Seko denies the Church-State situation in Zaire is one of conflict, it is undoubtedly not one of great harmony. When a government expels the cardinal from his own country, silences the churches by prohibiting all religious broadcasts, publications and meetings, and refers to the political party as the proper way to fulfill the word of God, there are some very real problems.

Black Theology is a painful phenomenon in the history of the Church. Painful not because of what it says—although it certainly does not deal in soft phrases—but because it has emerged in an America that, since the arrival of the Pilgrims in the seventeenth century, has claimed to be a Christian country. Black Theology is a judgment on American Christianity in particular and Christianity in general. Ideally there would be no reason for Black Theology. It was forced into existence by the particularities of American history.

Black Theology as an academic concern can be dated from July 31, 1966, when the National Committee of Negro Churchmen issued a statement asking for power and freedom from the leaders of America, for power and love from white churchmen, for power and justice from Negro citizens, and for power and truth from the American mass media.

Recently I received in the mail an advertising brochure for the History of Childhood Quarterly, a publication committed to the assumptions and objectives of psychohistory. I read psychohistory before I knew there was such a thing, particularly in the fascinating studies of Luther and Gandhi by Erik Erickson, and certainly before I was aware that the subject was such a controversial one among historians, who are perhaps now wondering: Do the insights of depth psychology reveal hitherto hidden causes of historic events, or do they represent a dangerous intrusion of a discipline that is imprecise enough when working with living subjects, let alone long dead ones? Was the Jewish doctor who poisoned Hitler's mother while operating on her for breast cancer a causative factor in Hitler's later decision to remove the Jewish cancer from German culture? Was Nixon's vi gorous prosecution of the war in Vietnam connected with his childhood worries about being a sissy? Was President John F. Kennedy affected as Chief Executive by his unconscious belief that his parents didn't really love him?

Robert Heilbroner's Human Prospect would change everything. Suddenly and radically our future is transformed. Only yesterday morning science and technology—aided by expanding industrialism—painted for us a future resonant with promise. Now we knew how to know; and in knowing all, we could control all. Thus the future was to be a realm of unlimited freedom; freedom over the forces that formerly bound us in necessity, even, said some, freedom over evolution, freedom from the limits of space and time, from want, from labor, possibly from disease, from genetic faults and from social maladjustments. Only yesterday afternoon gospels of political, social and theological liberation painted a future of self-realization, a future where the chains of oppression and exploitation are broken. Here too the future is a realm of hope, the realm where, as futurist theologians have told us, God's rule will be fully manifest.