For a full generation the world, like Gaul, has been divided into three parts, the rich, the poor, and the Communists. Scholars and bureaucrats have devised these economic categories, calling them the developed world, the Communist countries, and the less developed countries (LDCs). In the last few years, however, these classifications have been bursting at the seams of their logic. Even the man in the street is beginning to wonder why such nations as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil are still "poor" LDCs and thus eligible for various aid programs. Visual evidence of their burgeoning wealth is available on TV and in the popular press. Yet the list of developed countries remains the same. It seems no one ever gets promoted.

When the Sandinista Liberation Front triumphantly marched into Managua, Nicaragua, on July 19, 1979, the air was filled with joy, youthful enthusiasm, and vigor. Accompanying the Sandinistas in the victory march were conservative businessmen, Catholic priests, peasants, urban workers, and leftist intellectuals. All were part of the pluralistic alliance that defeated Anastasio Somoza and his hated National Guard, the country's only security force under the forty-five-year dictatorship of the Somoza family.

Employees at a Coca-Cola subsidiary in Guatemala are the victims of a terrorist campaign specifically designed to prevent them from organizing a recognized trade union, raising grave questions about the extent to which U.S. companies should be held accountable for their actions and policies abroad.

It has been twenty years since the Tibetan uprising. Last March, Tibetans and their American supporters rallied outside the United Nations building to commemorate that uprising against Chinese troops occupying the Tibetan homeland.

Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and honorary president of the International League for Human Rights, was there calling for support of resolutions passed three times by the U.S. General Assembly, in 1959, 1961, and 1965. The U.S. called “for respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their right to self-determination.” The rally, Baldwin said, was to protest the “subjection of six million people to foreign rule” and to uphold “the right to live in your own house.” The nonagenarian champion of civil liberties expressed some hope: “It may be that autonomy, semi-independence in Tibet, may be granted when China settles down into the modernization it seeks.”

On the heels of Andrew Young's departure from the United Nations amid much publicity concerning U»S. failure to involve the Palestinians in Middle East negotiations, heads of state and representatives from ninety-two countries and three independence movements convened at the Sixth Summit Conference of Non-Aligned Nations hosted by Dr. Fidel Castro at Havana, Cuba.

The Havana Declaration of September, 1979, adopted by the Non-Aligned Conference—perhaps the most powerful of Third World forums—censured the Camp David accords as a U.S. attempt to “obtain partial solutions that are favorable to Zionist aims and underwrite the gains of Israeli aggression at the expense of the Palestinian people.” In an international environment in which the United States increasingly finds itself in the minority on the majority of world issues, Third World attitudes toward the Camp David accords—of which the Havana Declaration is but the latest evidence—merit serious consideration.