Basic HTML Version
-8-
•
the people of Europe care so deeply, and worr: so much about how it
affects their lives.
It is clea� from the tone of voice that the real
question is:
'Have you!!£ pride?'"
Tragically no.
Much of the pride of the U.S. was once concentrated
in its powerful currency, the "Almighty Dollar."
The pride in that
power is fading as fast as its value.
Also while we were at the Feast, China's most influential policymaker,
its Deputy Prime Minister Teng Hsiao-peng, made a history-making eight
day trip to Japan.
It was the first ever to Tokyo by a top Chinese
Communist official.
He journeyed across the Japan Sea specifically to
formalize the August 12 China-Japan friendship treaty.
Teng, however, went a lot further than mere formalities.
He praised
the Japanese over and over, emphasizing that his visit marked the
official end to recriminations and ill feelings brought on by war
between the two powers over 40 years ago.
The Japanese realize they are being brought, almost against their will,
into much closer relationship with China, and against China's number one
rival, the Soviet Union.
As the big Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun editora
lized, "Regardless of what Japan may think of this treaty, it has pulled
us more deeply into the power politics of the Sino-Sovii�t confrontation."
Japan's industralists, however, are not that much concerned. Worried
over loss of sales in the West, they are counting on the new Peking
connection to lift Japan's depressed industries out of the doldrums.
As the memories of bitter fighting between the two Asian giants fades,
there is another more ominous development.
The Chinese have abandoned
their traditional opposition to Japanese rearmament and have recently
been encouraging Tokyo to build up its fledgling defense forces.
Even
the shrewd prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, stated before
the Feast that his government and the others in the ASEAN grouping
(Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand) would not be
opposed to a moderate buildup of Japanese military strength.
Two other events of major importance occured during the Feast -- the
election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and
the overwhelming victory of Franz Josef Strauss irr Bavaria's provincial
elections.
The analysis of these two events will appear in the next
issue of the Good News.
----
Also during the Feast, the United States reluctantly permitted
Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, along with one of the black co
leaders of Rhodesia's transitional multiracial government to visit
the U.S.
Smith was invited by a group of U.S. Senators and Congressmen
who have been irked by the State Department's obvious favoritism shown
toward the guerrilla leaders of the so-called Patriotic Front and
its unwillingness to lift the trade embargo against Rhodesia -- even
though it said it would do so if the embattled country moved toward
majority rule, which it is doing.
One of these senators is California's
s.
I. Hayakawa, who fulminates
against the insipidness of U.S. foreign policy, specifically the fear
fulness of "offending" America's new "friends" in Africa, especially
the so-called "front-line" states of Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, Botswana,
and Mozambique.