NIGHTMARE WITHOUT END

...If she survives, her mental and physical development will still be permanently impaired...

...The lessons are many, the conclusions inescapable...

...In India, scores of women monotonously pound coconuts with huge clubs so that the fibers can be salvaged to make various goods...

...But as always, there are those who have a vested interest in distracting attention from the real issues and finding scapegoats to which they can attach responsibility which rightfully belongs to themselves...

...This, obviously, is the role which the United States and other advanced nations are playing in international forums...

...Why our analysts disregard these lessons and, on the other hand, those of the Chinese experience, is perplexing and one can only speculate on their reasoning...

...She has leveled enormous class differences and, in recent years, placed much more stress on local initiative and self-reliance than on wishing away problems on to lethargic, centralized bureaucracy...

...One can hear grumbling throughout that the film is too long and, without question, it drags in spots...

...This is a fact of history...

...They did this by passing on OPEC's demands at the crude production stage and increasing their margins at other stages of the industry (and other fossil fuels such as coal)-still firmly controlled by the major companies...

...Dependent upon this realization, various theories of its dimensions and potential remedies stand and fall...

...Unfortunately, Five Minutes To Midnight will never earn the notoriety of Jaws or The Exorcist...

...For those familiar with living conditions in the underdeveloped countries, such scenes are commonplace...

...It is common knowledge that the price of crude oil was kept artificially low for a number of years by the multinational oil companies which bought it cheap and sold it dearly...

...And the film implies that the guardians of the old order are far more sensible to the latter...

...The session was convened to consider concrete proposals of the Group of 77 non-aligned nations (of which there are actually over 100) for the creation of what is referred to as a "new international economic order...

...The rain causes open ditches containing untreated sewage to overflow, thus carrying the sewage under the doors of nearby huts...

...It happened in China...

...On film, the global problems of humanity have never been presented more clearly...

...We seldom hear, for example, that the prices of wheat and rice tripled between 1972 and 1974...

...But far from attacking the roots of underdevelopment, these alleged remedies have, instead, only produced more underdevelopment...

...Anywhere from sixty to ninety percent of the births in poor countries, for example, occur out of the reach of government health programs...

...He notes, for example, that in 1971 the UN resolved that the developed industrial states should commit seven-tenths of one percent of their Gross National Products per year in development assistance...

...All of the nuclear bombs in the world," as Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara once put it, "are nothing compared to the misery in the womb of the Third World...

...This is a superb documentary...

...This is, in short, what Andre Gunder Frank has termed the "development of underdevelopment...

...But in poor countries characterized by labor intensive industries and high unemployment rates, children are and must be considered economic assets...

...This argument is erroneous on many grounds...

...Thirty of them died of malnutrition and routine diseases before the age of five...

...This being the case, as the needs of the underdeveloped countries multiply, so too will the demands they make on the advanced countries...

...If there is a moral to the story, it was probably best stated by a young black boy standing in a vacant, rubble-strewn lot in New York...

...What our filmmakers advocate, in other words, are all of the policies which historically have failed to produce economic "development" for the poor countries, only on a greater scale...

...Here the film is, to say the least, ambiguous...

...He discusses at length the promising rhetoric of the West concerning the fate of the poor countries...

...Finally there is the sight of a woman, whose growth has obviously been stunted by an inadequate diet, holding a very young child...

...The child's belly is bulging because it is full of parasites...

...Asked what he would like most for the world, he replied, "I think they should clean up New York...

...Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere agrees: "All of the rich, all of the reactionaries," he says approvingly, "will be swept away...

...What worries McNamara is that the world's privileged classes will try desperately to preserve the old order and the poor nations will respond with forceful action that could destroy the whole international system...

...Perhaps this was unavoidable...

...The nations of the Third World have arisen from their previous passivity...

...In any case, the public sector, is, in most instances, not too large but too small...

...At best then, it can be stated that OPEC and the companies are responsible for the increased energy import bills of the poorest countries...

...which, more often than not, is matched only by what he calls "inaction...

...Yet the sensitive viewer's attention does not waver...

...Oftentimes, there is no work and consequently, no food...

...But on the contrary, the film closes with a strong plea for more aid, trade and concern by the advanced countries for the condition of the poor...

...But perhaps some of the grumbling is due to the fact that excessive exposure to these aspects of reality is painful...

...Appropriately, the world premiere of this two-hour film took place at the opening of the United Nations' Seventh Special Session...

...Needless, to say, this crisis is not merely a short-term problem of energy supplies or upward bursts in the price of food...

...But at night, she and her husband share two beds in a tiny room with their five children...

...One is that rampant population growth lies at the root of poverty and underdevelopment...

...According to Five Minutes To Midnight, it lies with the economic system controlled and perpetuated by the West...

...Starting at the very lowest levels of society, China has constructed an autonomous, if still poor, economy...

...But if it did, as the importance of the subject compels, the historical problem of raising the consciousness of citizens of the West to recognize the utter misery and despair of their neighbors and what relevance this has for their own lives might be solved forever...

...Responsibility, then, for the condition of the poor lies elsewhere...

...And as Barry Commoner has persuasively argued, "in human societies, there is a built-in control on population size: If the standard of living, which initiates the rise in population, continues to increase, the population eventually begins to level off...

...It is no exaggeration to say that, for Americans at any rate, Five Minutes To Midnight is to the crisis of world poverty what Hearts and Minds was to the Vietnam war...

...This film depicts in striking and often horrifying detail the realities of human existence for the vast majority of people in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America-where over two-thirds of humanity lives...

...And unless immediate and concrete steps are taken either to expand the economic pie or divide it up more equitably, McNamara predicts that "ten, twenty, or thirty years down the road," Third World discontent will work "to the distinct disadvantage of the West...

...They are becoming aware," a pensive World Bank President Robert Mc-Namara tells his interviewer, "that they need not suffer...

...The film is, above all, remarkably successful in sweeping away many of the myths and distortions which pollute official and academic discussions of the horrendous crisis which plagues the countries of the underdeveloped world...

...Another misconception, which assumes that capitalist development is the most optimum way to achieve rapid economic growth, is that poor countries have for too long experimented with various forms of state "socialism" at the expense of encouraging development of the private sector...

...Fat and smiling people work at meaningful jobs rather than become beggars sleeping in the streets...

...And it points to a single political message: the undeveloped countries of the world want a larger share of the world economic pie and they are doing something about it...

...A case in point is blaming the present condition of the underdeveloped countries on the price of OPEC oil...

...OPEC's outrageous price increases, the argument goes, provided the bulk of inflationary stimulus which priced poor countries out of the market for basic necessities such as energy, fertilizer and basic foodstuffs...

...An African man tells the story of how rapidly disease can spread in his village if there is too much rain...

...For it is clear that, in the short-run, the multinational oil companies have profited enormously from the actions of OPEC...

...In this sense, for the developed as well as for the underdeveloped, it is Five Minutes To Midnight...

...This crisis is, at its essence, a crisis of poverty...

...This confuses (perhaps deliberately) genuine socialism-the development of society's productive forces for the advance of the many than for the aggrandizement of the few-with the growth of a large public sector, the purpose of which is to supply goods and services which the private sector cannot or will not provide at a cost acceptable to society...

...it will happen elsewhere...

...All of these things China has accomplished by rejecting the economics of dependency and choosing a path of development where stress is placed on collective betterment as opposed to private accumulation...

...The posted price of Persian Gulf crude (upon which benefits to producing countries were calculated), the film indicates in a brief interview with the Shah of Iran, declined from $2.17 per barrel in 1947 to $1.79 in 1959 and remained stable for a decade thereafter...

...For these people as for most of the rest of their counterparts throughout the underdeveloped world, time is indeed of the essence...

...Centuries of colonial exploitation and years of neo-colonial dependence have made the poor countries what they are today...

...The second great myth, enormously popular these days in Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, is that the impoverished masses in the underdeveloped world are somehow responsible for their condition...

...Doing this for five hours earns these women the right to one day's food for their families...

...This is based on several misconceptions...

...And though the OPEC nations have dramatically altered their situation, most other poor countries continue to experience similarly deteriorating terms of trade...

...Obviously, this increase has not occurred...

...On the one hand, a short but powerful segment of the film contrasts the condition of China since 1949 with that of the rest of the Third World...

...Thus far, less than forty percent of the goal has been achieved...

...Secondly, the media and politicians in the West generally ignore or play down the importance of similar price rises in other commodities...

...Elsewhere in Latin America, the journalist talks with seven mothers who have given birth to a total of sixty-five children...

...Capitalism (and its mirror image, Sovietism) encourages the accumulation of military hardware, worthless glitter and frills which add nothing to the quality of life and privatized social attitudes where increasing one's own consumption becomes life's chief aim...

...All the while, however, the prices of finished goods which the underdeveloped countries have historically imported from the West continued to rise...

...But this logical inconsistency and lack of political clarity should not detract from the importance and timeliness of Five Minutes To Midnight...

...This is not surprising, since the prices of these commodities are controlled, not by associations of underdeveloped countries, but by giant corporations operating with full support of their home governments...

...It is somewhat like a nightmare to which there is no end...

...Michael moffitt is a research associate of the Institute for Policy Studies/Transnational in Washington...

...This situation, the film drives home in a powerful way, is not only objectionable in a moral sense, but in the era of rising Third World expectations, politically unfeasible...

...Despite all of the scientific and technological advances of the past generation, the masses of people in the underdeveloped world have not benefited from them because, quite simply, they are too poor.' This is as true today as it was at the beginning of the first UN "Development Decade" in 1960...

...She is beholden to no rich country for aid, trade, or credit...

...This is a situation which stalks a clear majority of the world's population day-after-day, month-after-month, year-after-year...

...In a world where thirty percent of the population receives seventy percent of its income, the system promotes all of the wrong tendencies in production and consumption...

...Five Minutes To Midnight, a production of World Focus Limited of London and directed by Alan Hart, presents a view of reality that is hardly new...

...See the film and the connection should be obvious...

...Conversations with numerous Third World figures, a radical Latin priest, the president of Tanzania, and, in a different sense, national bourgeois figures such as the Shah, conducted by these British journalists show us that things are going to be very different from now on...

...This, coupled with enormously high infant mortality rates, means that people will have more children in hopes that a few may live long enough to provide income for the rest of the family...

...In addition, the fact that OPEC-in-duced price rises have heaped additional hardship on the poorest countries is no exoneration of the West...

...The ultimate purpose of this obfuscation is to obstruct proposals for meaningful social change which strike at the heart of the problem and hence at the self-interest of those who benefit from the existing order...

...What, then, is to be done...

...That the latter are now suffering severe dislocations and bottlenecks as a result of the price of OPEC oil is but a result of the essential underdevelopment of their economies, hardly the cause of it...