For two and a half years I have been haunted by a story that I pieced together from scattered reports. The story was disputed and denied when I first published it in 1975. But I now have overwhelming evidence from the secret files of the State Department, Justice Department, and Central Intelligence Agency. This is the most important human rights story of the decade. It is a stark, cruel story of mass slaughter in Cambodia under the Communist dictator Pol Pot.

I want you to remember that name, Pol Pot. It belongs in the hall of infamy alongside the names of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The Communists took over Cambodia in April of 1975. Pol Pot wanted to build a new Communist society.

Christianity is a sleeper in China. It has not expired since the massive antireligious campaign of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, any more than has the traditional body of Chinese beliefs, ranging from philosophical Buddhism to primitive superstition. The Chinese landscape still abounds with gods, ghosts, and heavenly omens. And the church lives cautiously, but intensely, underground. The evidence suggests that wherever Protestant or Catholic belief once took hold, the faith is practiced to some degree; secret prayer meetings take place and young people are converted. The fact that the Peking Kuang Ming Daily of September, 27, 1977, published an article proposing new "research" efforts directed toward the criticism and the eradication of all religions, including Christianity, is sign enough that the central propagandists still see themselves as battling a live adversary.

My home town, called Sakya, is located in Western Tibet. The news about the Chinese invasion of 1950 reached us sometime in 1952. A soldier whose family lived in a house next to ours brought the astounding news. He announced that the “enemies of our faith” were advancing rapidly from the east and that there would be no peace and happiness in the land of snow.

Despite the alarming news, no one in Sakya sharpened his sword or dusted his bow and arrows. Our government neither declared a state of emergency nor conscripted the young into the army. Instead, we witnessed quite a few unusual religious rites of the sort called mangdog, meaning prevent or negate war. After the revolt against the Chinese in 1959, a number of leading monks were imprisoned, charged with mangdog, which was interpreted as treason against China.

Political theory is by all accounts a discipline peculiar to Western civilization. It has its origin in the Greek city-state, particularly in Plato's account of the death of Socrates. In The Republic Plato went on to ask whether the just man could live in even the best state. Socrates, we know, fought in the Peloponnesian Wars and died by virtue of a public trial in 399 B.C. By his own testimony he died obedient to the laws of the civil community in which he chose to live his life, thereby condemning the unjust use of Athenian law and stigmatizing forever those 281 hapless jurists who voted for his guilt. Moreover, Socrates died calmly because he believed in the immortality of his own soul and because he was by no means sure that an already aging man would not be much better off in the Isles of the Blessed.

If we now choose the right road, the poorest countries could become the world's breadbasket

‘he acute food crisis that gripped the world in 1972-74 has visibly subsided. Harvests have been bountiful for two successive years; this year's production, too, definitely looks good, even though it will not match last year's record crop. World output of wheat, coarse grain, and milled rice for 1977-78 is currently estimated at 1,322.5 million metric tons (mmt). This is only 11 mmt short of the total of 1,333.1 mmt harvested in 1976-77. Fate has been kind at our time of direst need.

Food stocks, badly depleted in the crisis years, have been substantially replenished. In the USA storage bins are overflowing with grain—this has depressed farm prices, triggering agitation among farmers, who are faced with plunging profits. Even in India the problem, for a change, is not how to cope with chronic shortages but how to deal with a large surplus and to store the bulging stocks the Government has acquired from the producers.

President Carter has packed away his human rights crusade, as the State Department implicitly confirmed in this year's survey of countryby- country violations and what the United States can do about them. Reduced to absurdity, the crusade now amounts to looking at 105 nations receiving American aid or buying American weapons and finally deciding it is safe to penalize Nicaragua. And who will deny that Nicaragua deserves a penalty?

No doubt we will continue to hear of human rights and occasionally see a bit of action, as we did of course before Carter appeared, but human rights as a crusade has been canceled. Carter in office quickly learned that his approach endangered too many American interests without visibly weakening tyrannies abroad.

One November afternoo|i in the heart of a Third World city a (farmer began the difficult exercise of leading his horse through a halfcircle. It was difficult because the cart drawn by the horse required a sizable turning radius, because the farmer made the turn while responding to a traffic policeman's choleric gestures, and because no man or horse can be complacent when conducting such a maneuver on the pavement of Sharia Tahrir against Onrushing waves of automobiles. Like many other Egyptian place names this one has political significance. Sharia Tahrir means Liberation Street—which would be an equally ironic designation for another street on another continent in another part of the Third World.

Chief Gatsha Buthelezi is the controversial Zulu chief and leader of the still legal Inkatha opposition movement to South Africa's apartheid policies. In conflict with both the current Pretoria authorities and black African supporters of violent revolutionary action, Buthelezi is said by his supporters to represent a nonviolent, multiracial and liberal- democratic opposition leadership. His is a middle ground that Buthelezi's critics say is fast eroding under the increasing polarization generated by the policies of the Pretoria regime. Buthelezi's supporters counter that the chief is the most popular black African leader in the country. They cite among other evidence a recently completed four-year study by West Germany's Arnold Bergstrasser Institute, which polled urban blacks in different parts of the country and concluded that Buthelezi is supported by almost half of the urban blacks.

A new international economic order, strategic arms limitations, the interminable problems of the Middle East—these and many other foreign problems swirl around the average American citizen in a dazzle of complexity. The language of concern in which these and other issues are debated falls on ears that heard the equally serious and sincere language leading to the massive and mistaken involvement in Vietnam. And serious academics publish revisionist histories that contend that the cold war that mobilized the nation's energies for two decades came more from American aggressiveness than from foreign threat. A new generation of Americans turns its main attention away from such faraway, difficult, and ambiguous problems to ones closer to home, such as energy, the environment, and the economy.

Since time immemorial men have believed in an inner spiritual core of the human personality. All primitive religions hold that man is inhabited by a spirit, however defined. The higher religions claim that man has a soul, that the spiritual nature is the true self, of which the body is a vessel. Since the seventeenth century these notions have been subjected to ever-increasing attacks. The critics of conventional morality include materialists of many different persuasions. However much they differ among themselves, they hold certain principles in common.

Australia is being forced to hard decisions about its future. More than 3,500 war refugees from Southeast Asia have sailed to northern Australia in the past two years. About 2,500 fled to Darwin harbor from East Timor after the invasion by Indonesia in 1976, and more than 1,000 Indochina refugees have trickled down to Australia's north coast in twenty-nine small boats.

The arrival of these people poses far more important questions than their relatively small numbers would suggest. Perhaps for the first time Australia is asking how it could become a multiracial society that includes significant numbers of Asian settlers. The “boat people,” as these refugees are called, have hammered home the fact that the Australian mainland is geographically closer to Indonesia than to the southern island state of Tasmania, though many Australians continue to think of their country as being in “Euro-merica.“

The world economy and international economic institutions are in trouble. That, at least, is the opinion in informed circles following the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) held in Paris last spring. There is a growing realization that CIEC failed to grapple with the systemic problems the world economy faces, a failure that threatens developing and developed countries alike.

Despite Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's dramatic call for a “new international economic system,” the Paris conference failed to address systemic issues. Instead, the developed nations of the North angled for a separation of the issues of energy from those of development; and the developing countries of the South closed ranks by linking the two. Consequently neither side truly debated the crushing problems of the world economy.

Is there something about modern society itself that makes governments inadequate to the tasks they face in the contemporary industrial world? In recent years critics such as Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith have analyzed postindustrial society in an attempt to illuminate its basic character. Other prominent analysts have spoken about the ungovernability of modern societies and the dilemmas encountered by governments as the demands they face outstrip resources. The daily press obligingly confirms the existence of almost chronic crisis and of persistent political failure in the various capitals of the developed world.

What emerges from all this is the vision of a society that we recognize but do not really comprehend: a busy, complex society that projects new conquests for itself as it discovers ever new latent capabilities; at the same time, a society out of control and deeply dangerous to the individuals who are both its beneficiaries and its victims.

Enhancing respect for human rights and human dignity is a fundamental objective of U.S. foreign policy. It is an objective based on our laws, our international obligations, and on the strong personal commitment of President Carter. The human rights policy, after a year, already has changed the way this country is seen by others, placing us more and more frequently, as President Carter has said, “with the tortured and the unjustifiably imprisoned, and with those that have been silenced.”

We have done that, and more. No government today doubts that this nation stands for the same ideals and values abroad that we assert at home. We freely acknowledge our own internal flaws and readily admit that there is much to do to assure full equality with economic opportunity for all our citizens.