Of all evils in American society, racial oppression is the most intolerable. Of all priorities for American society, the attainment of racial justice is the most urgent. This is so because the issue of race touches on the very heart of the moral values by which the society lives. Martin Luther King understood this, and the same understanding illuminates his idea of an integrated American society.

The ideal is not only the integration of black Americans in terms of all the rights and privileges promised by the society's political creed; and it is not at all integration that deprives blacks of their cultural identity, as King's detractors (including the posthumous ones) have falsely claimed.

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.

It is widely believed that in the recent India-Pakistan conflict the United States backed the wrong, that is, the losing, side. Not enough attention has been paid the possibility that the United States backed the wrong, that is, the immoral, side. This is an effort to look at that possibility within the framework of the traditional “just war theory,” a theory that may turn out to be a great deal more serviceable than its contemporary critics suggest.

The principles governing a just war were first spelled out by Saint Augustine and are an integral part of scholastic moral theology even today when the whole theory has been subjected to a new and rigorous scrutiny.

Mr. Peter G. Peterson, Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs and frequently called the President's “economic Kissinger,” must be credited at least with candor when he recently stated: “I believe we must dispel any ‘Marshall Plan psychology’ or relatively unconstrained generosity that may remain. This is not just a matter of choice but of necessity.” In a hungry world, unfortunately, an American imperial policy of unmitigated self-interest is not made more morally palatable by the candor with which it is proclaimed. Mr. Peterson's recommendations would remove the ethical linchpin of the Jewish-Christian tradition (and of the American experience at its best), namely, the belief that the rich are accountable to the poor and the strong to the weak. As “idealistic” as they may seem, it is the better part of realism to recognize that such ideals are an essential ingredient in holding together the experiment that is American society.

When we arrive in a wealthy nation and denounce oppressive structures which exist in poor nations; when we say that some of the rich in poor countries live at the expense of the misery of thousands and even millions of their fellow citizens; when we describe the subhuman situation in which millions of God's children in the underdeveloped world continue to vegetate, it is easy to obtain understanding, svmpathy, and generosity on the part of wealthy nations.

But we dare not go further. For if we wish to say that together with wrong structures which should be changed in poor countries there are also wrong structures to be changed in rich nations as well, the first impression is that we are joking: Why change, if everything is going well, the country is rich and grows more prosperous each day?

The ideal preparation for Theodore Roszak's new book is to read again Wordsworth's sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us.” After lamenting the “getting and spending” that lays waste our spiritual powers, the poet declares he prefers to be a pagan “suckled in a creed outworn,” sustained in a universe still mythic and sacral. Wordsworth, like Roszak in Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Doubleday; 492 pp.; $10.00), complains about the spiritual depletion resulting from the scientization of culture and the disenchantment of the world. Since Wordsworth, says Roszak, the situation has simply gotten worse, so that Blake's “May God us keep/ From Single vision and Newton's sleep” sounds more than ever like a desperate prayer.

Somewhere in the National Archives of the United States lies one of the very first, if not the first, diplomatic correspondence between this country and Vietnam. On August 16, 1849, President Zachary Taylor wrote to “His Majesty the Magnificent King of Anam.” The letter reads in part:

Great and Good Friend!

To you, my Brother, the Great and Mighty King of Anam, I send love and goodwill, in this letter, by the hands of Mr. Joseph Balestier, my faithful and trusty Envoy and Minister to South Eastern Asia, to whom I give express orders to deliver it into your own Royal hands in order that you may understand how greatly I have been grieved to hear it said, that the Captain of one of my warships had misbehaved himself, four years ago, (which I have only heard of lately, for the first time, because your country is so far from mine) by landing men from his ship in Toorong Bay and firing on your people, and killing and Wounding some of them….

One of the strangest paradoxes of modem man, often reflected upon by various social commentators, is the fact that he seems to be infinitely malleable under the pressures of his institutional environment while at the same time he is constantly rebelling against it. The easiest solution of the paradox is to divide modern men into two categories, those who rebel and those who conform. Usually this split is additionally dramatized by identifying the rebels with the younger generation, while people roughly above thirty years of age are considered members of the “establishment.” Since the latter is morally compromising nowadays, not a few members of the “older” generation try to pass as youngsters or adolescents, adjusting to the clothes, manners, musical tastes, linguistic jargon and political argot typical of various youth groups and their sub- or countercultures.

Throughout the final week of April, a group of over 400 Christians, mostly Catholic priests, met in Santiago, Chile, for the First Latin American Meeting of Christians for Socialism. Convened by the Chilean Secretariat of this movement, which has grown rapidly in the last year, the meeting drew participants from every Left Christian group and from virtually every country in Latin America. Observer-participants from North America and Europe were also welcomed.

In a seemingly paradoxical development, the major effect of the signing of the strategic arms limitation agreements in Moscow last May has been a resurgence of interest in the Administration's program to modernize the nation's strategic weaponry on an accelerated schedule. Almost before the ink was dry on the agreements, the Secretary of Defense appeared on Capitol Hill forcefully advocating a vigorous modernization program for U.S. strategic forces and stating that he could not support the arms control agreements without such compensating measures. Mr. Laird's position has been seconded by the President, although in a reserved fashion, and has been supported in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

The recent invasion of South Vietnam and the intense fighting of the past five months draw attention once again to the human cost to the Vietnamese people of the continuing war. I am not here referring to battle casualties which, although terrible, can at least be regarded as “legitimate” in war. Nor am I including those refugees who, although their plight may be tragic, are at least still alive. South Vietnam has had, in fact, a remarkable record in coping with refugees and has maintained it yet again in respect of the 750,000 who fled before the invader from the fighting zones.

It is generally recognized that Pope Paul VI has played a significant role in the development of initiatives for peace in Vietnam, and his efforts and attitudes have frequently been contrasted with those of the Catholic bishops of the United States. Since the publication of John XXIII's Pacem in Terris in 1963, and especially since Paul VI's visit to the United Nations in October, 1965, the papacy has attempted to create and fill a new role for itself as an agency of peace and reconciliation in the modern world. A close examination of the role of the Pope in initiatives for peace in Vietnam, however, reveals both the difficulties of the role and the extent to which the scarcely acknowledged political commitments of the Vatican profoundly affect the efficacy of these initiatives.

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.