Southeast Asia has been poorly treated by the world's press. For over a decade, while the Vietnam war raged, the region provided by far the greatest amount of foreign news in the rich countries of North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Every news agency, TV station, and newspaper that could afford it maintained a bureau in Saigon and other regional centers. While most headlines were captured by the hostilities in Indochina, editors mindful of the “domino theory” paid great attention too to the situation in neighboring countries.

The result was that the region quickly acquired an “image” of violence, political instability, communal unrest, intraregional disputes, and a capacity for coups and countercoups rivaled only by Latin America. The “image” was implanted in the mind of the man in the street in New York, Washington, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, and Frankfort, but also found its way into the investment calculations of those cities’ bankers and industrialists—those whose decisions affected the levels of investment in and trade with Southeast Asia.

While all remained fairly quiet on the international front in Asia during 1976, it was a year of internal convulsions for many of the region's governments. Of the great powers, only the Soviet Union remained unshaken. The U.S. suffered one of its quadrennial "lame duck" run-ups to a Presidential election (with Henry Kissinger almost entirely preoccupied with diplomacy in the Middle East and Africa). China suffered the deaths of its two highest leaders, Premier Chou^En-lai on January 8, and Chairman Mao Tse-tung on September 9. Mao's demise was followed almost immediately by an amazing power struggle, which led to the swift downfall of his widow and three other members of the Politburo.

One way of looking at nations involved in the North-South confrontation is to group them as aid-givers (the industrialized rich nations) and aid-receivers (the poor Third World). Of course it is more complicated than this. Some countries of the Third World group, the Middle East oil states, are extremely rich. These played a special role in heating up the confrontation. Even among the others, not all are equally poor, but the distinction between aid-givers and aidreceivers is generally true. In fact, a great deal of the dialogue between the two groups is about how the North can more effectively assist the South in its desperate struggle to escape poverty.

In his inaugural address on December 1, 1976, to an alarmed and disquieted nation, fifty-six- year-old President José Lόpez Portillo y Pacheco made a dramatic plea for unity. “Let us never forget our parents lived here, we are here, and our children will live here…A few of the rich, who export capital, and a few of the poor, who export their labor, may leave, but the rest of us are staying and we can make our country a hell or a land where life is good. It is in our hands.“

Not since the fury and turmoil of the revolutionary years had the presidential succession been enveloped in such public loss of hope and surrender to despair. Three devaluations in as many months had distressed the entire nation; seemingly arbitrary government expropriations of vast areas of rich agricultural lands further embittered property owners; hundreds of Mexicans responded to the crisis by sending abroad millions of dollars frantically withdrawn from the banks.

This is a story about how nuclear war came to the Middle East. Events are fictitious. Description of nuclear capabilities and effects are actual. The sequence of events, however, is quite probable if peace negotiations should break down totally in the next few years. This story is told in an effort to gain some foresight into how a nuclear calamity might-be prevented in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Recently a flood of articles on Tibet has appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers throughout the world. Many of these articles contain patently false information about the situation in Tibet and the position of the Tibetans in exile. I feel, therefore, that it is time I contributed a brief article toward clearing up some of these misconceptions.

Tibet is geographically, racially, and culturally different from China. Historically, too, Tibet has always been an independent country and has never been “an integral part of China.” The very fact that it has to be referred to now as “part of China” is a clear indication of its separate independent status in the past. If it had always been a part of China, what was the need of changing the boundaries in the maps of Central Asia prepared after 1959? Another indication of Tibet's independent status is the great pains taken by the Chinese Communists in explaining to the Tibetans the status of Tibet. They make a distinction between China and “The Middle Kingdom”: Tibet is not a part of China, but it is under the Middle Kingdom, just as China is. Tibet and China, they explain, enjoy equal status, and both are parts of the Middle Kingdom.

I am essentially a village boy; I did not see the city until I was well over twenty. Now I am receiving my advanced education overseas. It is exciting, but it also involves tremendous emotional and cultural risks. How it all ends up is yet to be seen.

One thing has always been important since the day I began to dream of an intellectual, academic, and political experience beyond the borders of Zimbabwe: A man like me, whose parents never saw a school door, must ask himself if he can really justify such a risky and expensive investment in education. My parents and my brothers and sisters ask the same question, and they are right to ask it.

If there was a single development that stbod out among everything that transpired in Asia in 1975 it was the capitulation of South Vietnam to a pro-Communist regime. The "fall" of Vietnam holds implications that extend far beyond contemporary Southeast Asia;it was an event that perfectly symbolized the play-out in Asia of the entire history of postwar politics. Regardless of how one may judge the war in Vietnam itself, or the whole issue of Indochina, for that matter, to overlook the wider significance of what culminated in 1975 is to lose one's grip on any real understanding of what the Vietnam war meant.

Five years is a long time to be away.

Life in a small village on the southern coast of France gets to you after a while. It seeps into your system and becomes a very comfortable existence. Can you do this for me today? No. When? Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, or maybe not until next week.

In the spring semester of 19761 taught the first truly good course I can recall teaching in a number of years. I would feel much more hopeful about the future if I could take as much credit for the success of the course as I would like to. Twenty students and I sat about trying to decide which of the philosophers we read—Aristotle, Hegel, or Nietzsche—provided the best insights into4he literary tragedies we read. At semester's end a student wandered by the office. "It was really a good course... I mean, really worthwhile." "I'm glad." He hesitated: "It wasn't really an English course, you know. I mean...well...I think we learned a lot about life."

Robert Pranger's scenario demonstrates how ethical choices usually take place in the midst of concrete decisions to act. Most of us do not know our real ethical commitments until the heat is on and we make hard decisions. Within the scenaTio it is not enough to talk vaguely aboiM peace and security; we must ask how we and others might act under specified pressures and threats.

The American electorate has acquired an ingrained prejudice against foreign aid. The public suspects that foreign aid is something the government takes from the poor in a rich country and gives to the wealthy in a poor country. This suspicion— like many of America's populist wisdoms—is the tragic truth in one of the world's poorest nations, Bangladesh.

Only a pittance of international food aid to Bangladesh feeds the starving or destitute. Even in this bumper crop year an estimated 368,000 babies and young children will die due to malnutrition or related diseases. Food aid generally does not reach the poor; 90 per cent of the 1.6 million tons of foreign food aid shipped to Bangladesh this year was used to subsidize a ration system for the middle class.