In 1878 the young Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was on his first trip as a student from India to England. Though only seventeen, he was fascinated by the combination of charm and productivity he saw in the European countryside. And he feasted on it as he traveled by railroad from Brindisi to Calais. It was, in his words, a case of “perfect union of man and.nature, not only through love but also through active communication.” He was filled with wonder and admiration at the sight of a continent “flowing with richness under the age-long attention of her chivalrous lover, western humanity.” The shaping of the continent by human labor was a “heroic love-adventure of the West, the active wooing of the earth.”

As events continue to unfold in Poland, Western experts still fail to realize that what they are witnessing is not simply a “revolt of the workers” joined later by intellectuals, farmers, and students. Rather, it is a fullscale social and spiritual revolution, what the Poles prefer to call odnowa, renewal. It had been fomenting for four extraordinary years before it burst through the crust at Gdansk, and it has roots deep in Polish history. What the general public—and possibly some Kremlin leaders—still fail to grasp is that Solidarity is not just a labor union but a mass movement involving the overwhelming majority of the Polish people, including 39 per cent of the Communist party.

The Syria of Hafez alAssad comes steadily closer to the society of contradictions portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. The official slogan of the ruling Ba'ath party is “unity, freedom, and socialism.” Yet as one Western diplomat stationed in Damascus recently pointed out, the salient characteristics of Syrian life are the antithesis of these high ideals.

Power is concentrated in the hands of a clan of Alawites, a Shi'ite offshoot considered heretical by the Suu ni Muslim majority. The most overt opposition is that of the fanatical, fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which has attempted to assassinate Assad and has succeeded in killing hundreds of officials and supporters of the regime. The government has unleashed the special Defense Brigades, under the command of Assad's brother Rifaat, and allowed the Mukhabarat, the secret police, to conduct a reign of terror and intimidation, including searches without warrant, detention without trial, torture, and summary execution. The result has been increased resentment against the regime among the majority of the population.

“Could you tell us why you, a self-professed Democrat, a liberal, happened to be selected by the Reagan administration to represent the United States at the United Nations? It is, after all, a conservative administration.” The question came from Charles H. Percy (R., 111.), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The response followed sharp and confident.

“I suppose,” said Georgetown political scientist Jeane I. Kirkpatrick, “President Reagan asked me to take this very difficult job because he believes that we share a particular sense of the problems that confront the United States, the democracies, and Western civilization.” That “particular sense,” as she explained it, seems to relate back to the comparatively straightforward, bipolar world of the early 1950s, when Ambassador Kirkpatrick was studying political science in Paris and Stalin's soldiers still surrounded Vienna.

The scarcity of hard currency and deep cuts in foreign assistance have brought Haiti to a point of complete economic stagnation. Hurricane David and poor crops have curtailed exports drastically. What mother nature has left undone the president has completed, diverting internal revenues from the treasury, which are converted into available dollars and transferred to private bank accounts abroad. At a popular estimate the Duvalier family is worth more than $500 million, cash.

Firm evidence of treasury looting was first provided by World Bank Report No. 1243HA of September 25, 1976, revealing that $45.5 million in government revenues for fiscal 1975 were unbudgeted and could not be accounted for. In 1977, according to a report prepared by the U.S. embassy staff in PortauPririce and published by the U.S. Department of Commerce in Foreign Economic Trends (No. 77-148), the “unbudgeted receipts amounted to 60 million in FY/77 and [were] projected at 69 million in FY/78.” Now Jack Anderson provides an update. “Baby Doc,” he says in his column of March 29, “has been stealing millions of dollars in loans provided by the International Monetary Fund.” And what is more, Michele, the president's bride of a year, has been drawing a monthly allowance of $100,000 from the treasury under her husband's authorization.