While Juan Felix. Bogado was attending patients in his shantytown medical office outside Asuncion, Paraguay, last July 19, police broke in and hustled away the thirty-two-year-old doctor, claiming he was a subversive. As most Paraguayan political prisoners, Bogado was subjected to “intensive therapy,” the local euphemism for torture.

“They tried to get him to confess he was a Communist and threatened to torture me before his eyes,” says his wife, who at the time was four months pregnant.

Serious disturbances have flared in the Netherlands, a country once known for its tranquility. It is the South Moluccans again. What has happened is not simply a replay of the scenario that hit the front pages all over the world last year. At that time a group of South Moluccan terrorists brought a train to a standstill in a somewhat desolate area and took nearly all of its passengers hostage. For a brief period a school in the vicinity served as a subsidiary scene of terror. The schoolchildren were released within a week, but the train siege set a hijacking record. Negotiations proved fruitless, and after some twenty days the Dutch Government, believing there was no alternative left, had the marines storm the train. The surprise action claimed the lives of six terrorists and two hostages. The surviving hijackers have now been brought to justice, and the trial predictably produced a great deal of commotion in Holland, particularly among the Moluccan communities.

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.

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.

The most serious analyst of the danger of technical determinism is still Jacques Ellul. As far back as 1965 this French philosopher, lawyer, and social prophet argued that “The technical phenomenon has assumed an independent character quite apart from economic considerations, and that it develops according to its own intrinsic laws…, following its own intrinsic causal processes, independent of external forces or human aims.“

Frequent accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, Ellul replied that he “never intended to describe any inexorable process of inevitable doom.” In fact he insists “that if we can be sufficiently awakened to the real gravity of the situation, man has within himself the necessary resources to discover, by some means unforeseeable at present, the path to a new freedom.“

I am going to touch on three topics that bear heavily on the fortunes of Pacific countries: the so-called energy crisis, the economic prospects of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and neighboring countries, and the implications of Chairman Hua's presumed pragmatism. I find myself holding unusual views on all of them.

Until 1973 I thought there might be a shortage of energy in the 1980's because energy was so obviously being temporarily underpriced. Since 1973 I have believed there is more likely to be a glut of energy in the 1980's because energy is being temporarily overpriced.

The possibility that OPEC might be able to maintain its cartel has, admittedly and unhappily, been increased by President Carter's and Congress's energy policies. These policies seem to me (although I know many who disagree) to be a glum example of the way in which politicians’ misunderstandings now override economic logic and history's lessons.

Because it is there!” the rabbi coins a phrase when asked by baffled congregants why, of all places, he chose to go to the Indian subcontinent for his summer vacation. The truth, nothing but the truth…but not the whole truth. He also went to sniff exotic art, architecture, landscape, music, and theologies. Shocking to admit, he decided on India because that's just about as far away as you can get from the normal daily realities of his life: Jews, that is. A guy needs a change.

Easier said than done. Remember Jonah and Nineveh and the big fish. Evasion of responsibilities does not seem to work. You buzz off to forget (temporarily, therapeutically only, you chirp) your fellow Jews. So they come traipsing after you (physically, figuratively; who's counting anyway?). I was positively haunted. A small mercy though: at least I did not bump into the standard, Hilton-circuit, American Jew in his flowered bermudas and her sequinned sunglasses. If they were around, they must have been safely tucked away in their airconditioned buses or in their gaggles of guided gawkers at mandatory sites. No, it was a very different presence of Jews that kept stepping on my heels.