NEWS & VIEWS

NEWS&VIEWS Carter's Amnesty President-elect Carter's campaign promise to "pardon" some war resisters his "first week in the White House" upset patriotic groups mightily. Dissident organizations...

...Carter's 'pardon' is only for draft re-sisters, people still 'wanted' for refusing to be drafted...
...and his fact-finding trip to Argentina for Amnesty International [News & Views, 11/26/76]: The trip went according to schedule...
...Over 90 percent of these life-destroying discharges [were] given without trial, simply on the word of a commanding officer, for acts that would not be crimes in civilian life," said the journal...
...The emphases are those of Amex/Canada...
...John's College, close-by, now Fordham University: "They were highly-cultivated gentlemen and scholars, [who] smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion...
...Carter said he had one with His Son...
...its component parts will be more susceptible than ever both to Canada's internal east-west tensions and to the gravitational pull from the south...
...For Canada, The Economist sees the probability of dissolution: "If Quebec pulls out, it is unlikely that the rest of the Canadian confederation will hold together...
...Odd* and Ends -Niftiest Line of the Week, Mark Stevens's concluding comment in the Newsweek obituary on Alexander Calder, sculptor and artist: "If Calder had been Adam, there probably would never have been a Fall...
...Niftiest Line of the Nineteenth Century (come upon during a recent visit to the Bronx cottage, now a literary landmark, of Edgar Allan Poe...
...One of the basic problems with the rite, Rahner argues, is that it serves to increase anxiety among the ill and disturbed by feeding a primitive attitude towards the devil...
...Vatican Radio recently described Satan as "the new star of the cinema screen," and accused film companies of using the devil to make a devil of a lot of money...
...After a 10-day inquiry into allegations of human-rights violations, Drinan and others of the international team held a press conference in Buenos Aires...
...Meanwhile, on Nov...
...The Economist says, in effect: Everyone loses...
...The more we learn about that war, the more sure we are of that fact...
...The real criminals are the war makers, not the war resisters...
...20 sources reported 15 more deaths from political violence in Argentina, bringing the 1976 death toll to 1,296...
...The Devil You Say Add to the voices of alarm over increased preoccupation with exorcism that of German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner...
...By 1976, after 11,000 convictions and nearly 200,000 acquittals or dismissed cases, there are only 4,400 draft resisters still 'wanted.' This is only the smallest group needing amnesty, but the one group that is essentially white and middle class...
...A new era, with a changed horizon of understanding, brings with it also new questions," he adds...
...But there's no reason to deny or question the veracity of witnesses," Drinan added...
...Drinan said they had heard "incredible tales of torture being used...
...People should not simply act as if they can immediately, and without further reflection, reach into the drawer of tradition and fetch out a ready-made answer...
...Drinan in Argentina Updating on Congressman Robert F. Drinan (S.J...
...Amex/Canada solicits concern for the more than 93,-000 "deserters" still at-large or caught, punished, then double-punished with bad discharges-and for the war-era veterans who received less-than-honorable discharges, and whose number Amex/Canada places at 790,-000...
...Here's the catch," says Amex/Canada...
...The group will issue a detailed report in late December, with observations and comments on political violence, prison conditions, claims of mistreatment, problems of political refugees, and emergency legislation decreed by the regime...
...Traditions from the past can present ideas and theories which later will rightly be rejected...
...Quebec The Economist views negatively, for all concerned, the victory of Rene Levesque's Quebec separatist party...
...Jimmy Carter, who calls the Vietnam war a 'racist war,' is about to issue an amnesty that discriminates on the basis of class and race," Amex/Canada states bluntly...
...that relationship is so much harder to prove...
...Its conclusion: "All these people and all deserters need Honorable Discharges if they are to be freed from war-related permanent punishment...
...Runner-up was Eugene McCarthy's observation on the use of religion in the presidential campaign: "Ford said he had a special relationship with God...
...Writing in the magazine Stimmen der Zeit, Rahner asks church authorities to consider doing away with the rite of exorcism altogether...
...That left me with the Holy Ghost...
...It's just an unbelievable situation...
...And their raising of the race and class issues is no mere infelicity of language...
...The Vatican, holding the line as yet on the rite of exorcism, merely scores the proliferation of films about the devil...
...Poe on his Jesuit pals at St...
...We must point out that discrimination, and force him to include all the over one million Americans needing amnesty for correctly resisting an unjust war...
...He would have simply turned the serpent into a doodle in the air...
...The military government "of course denies" these reports...
...For Quebec itself, there's the probability of financial chaos: an independent Quebec would not attract much investment, "not even from France," and of course could not count on funds from Ottawa, now "worth well over $1 billion a year...
...Just as today we manage to survive as orthodox believers without a belief in witches, so in practice man could survive without possession," Rahner assures...
...For the United States, the probability is major political headache: "If Canada breaks up, the United States will have a sort of Caribbean to its north as well as the Caribbean it already has to the south...
...Dissident organizations remain unimpressed and unenthused...
...JOHN DEEDY...
...Amex/Canada, journal of Americans exiled in Canada, reviews the situation in its current issue...

Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 26


 
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