Euro Vista

...Asked how easy it is for his compatriots to obtain passports and foreign currency for travel abroad, a Yugoslav functionary told me: "Very easy, so long as they don't intend to visit Spain or Albania...

...Yugoslavia does have a better public health service and educational system than Spain...

...The lesson liberals would like Indochina to teach Washington is the simple one we all learned at our father's knee: Noble ends cannot be attained by ignoble means...

...He was never prevented from earning a living, however...

...The powerful anti-American currents that are now perceptible in Spain and Greece were stirred up by U.S...

...The Spanish press is able to report and comment with a moderate degree of freedom...

...The two regimes have much in common...

...One had hoped that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, himself a refugee from Fascism, might be endowed with sufficient compassion to feel sympathy for the victims of dictatorships of the Right as well as of the Left, and sufficient intelligence to reject the simple-minded precept that "the enemies of our enemies are our friends...

...Both suppress opposition parties and have puppet assemblies...

...Marshal Tito's foreign admirers adopt a parallel attitude...

...On the international scene, the two dictatorships fawn on the Arab oligarchies and are hostile to Israel...

...Oxford and Cambridge rowed their annual boat race on the Thames recently, but I don't know who won: I was almost traumatized halfway through by the information that a pair of oars of the kind used in the competition-you know, the long slender things, made of wood, used for moving a boat whose manufacturer has neglected to supply a motor-now costs $1,500...

...It was said that the visit might boost the Ford Administration's morale by demonstrating that America still has some friends...

...How can the world take America seriously as a champion of freedom when it hobnobs with characters like Thieu, Park, the Greek colonels, Franco, and those Latin-American thugs who periodically find favor in the White House...

...The foundations of the present anti-American regime in Portugal were laid out not by Leonid Brezhnev but by the U.S...

...Spaniards are now less scared of their government than Yugoslavs are, and more willing to talk politics openly and even engage in demonstrations and strikes...

...the Yugoslav press is totally servile...

...one we could have cause to regret by 1984...

...Both are headed by octogenarians who have given a far higher priority to maintaining order and discipline than to preparing their peoples for democratic citizenship...

...Much has been made of President Ford's "callousness" in playing golf during Indochina's agony and grinning broadly when newsmen asked him about Vietnam...

...The airlift of Vietnamese orphans to the United States has been variously described as a shameful "traffic" and a cynical exploitation of children for political purposes...

...than the Tories-were cross about Prime Minister Harold Wilson's trip to Washington last month...

...In the Spanish press, the grin became a "roar of laughter...

...The uninvolved observer can only express bewilderment that rational-seeming democrats should prefer Marshal Tito's dictatorship to General Franco's-or, indeed, that Spain should appear so horrifying in official Yugoslav eyes...

...and Europeans and Arabs, who have grown plump during the last quarter of a century beneath America's umbrella, are now saying: "Maybe this will teach the Yanks a lesson...

...Tito has tried to starve him into submission," says one of his friends...

...And when I asked a Yugoslav correspondent in Lisbon if he intended to have a look at Spain while he was in Iberia, he shuddered and said: "Certainly not...

...Over the last 10 years Mihajlov has made 20 applications for a passport and for permission to leave Yugoslavia...

...Many British Laborites-on the whole, even less sympathetic to the U.S...

...In the eyes of Yugoslav officialdom, General Franco's government is the lowest form of political life...

...Workers who try to organize free trade unions are still severely punished in the two countries...

...Maybe it will-the wrong kind of lesson, perhaps...

...A Croat opposition group was described recently in Belgrade as "vicious people with contacts in Madrid...

...In conversation, cartoon and commentary, America's former proteges in Saigon and Phnom Penh are derided as hirelings or dupes of American "imperialism...

...What was that about "the Yugoslav model," amigo...

...Europe's superannuated imperialists, who ought to be understanding, tend to be as exultant as the Communists and their friends...

...For several years Spain's standard of living has been rising faster than Yugoslavia's, and it is now considerably higher...

...Yet one would have to go back to the early 1960s to find a Spanish equivalent to the Tito dictatorship's persecution of Mihajlo Mihajlov...

...policymakers...

...Both make a show of being anticapitalist while competing for the capitalist tourist trade and packing off workers to earn money in satanic capitalist mills...

...Franco When the courageous Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment last February 28, the presiding judge said the tribunal took a particularly serious view of an article of his that "compared certain of our political structures with those of Franco's Spain...

...But diplomatic rumor has it that-remembering nothing and having learned nothing-he and the peripatetic President Ford have prepared a new agreement with the Franco regime that would extend the moral and political rot and provide additional ammunition for anti-U.S...

...all have been refused and he and his wife have been deprived of their modest apartment...

...The French, who started the Indochina shooting, console themselves with the thought that the Americans have made an even bigger mess of things than they did...

...American officials who behave as if the authoritarian Right were the only alternative to Communism are working for their own country's defeat...

...The Spaniards who still haven't forgiven los Yanquis for "taking over" Latin America, and the even greater number who hate the United States for "colonizing" Spain, are delighted...

...Similarly, talk to Spanish and Yugoslav workers about labor problems or the cost of living, and they will express contempt for their government-controlled trade unions in almost identical terms...

...But in most other respects, the average Yugoslav is worse off than his Spanish counterpart...

...Nothing shocks a gathering of British or Continental Leftwingers more than any kind of comparison between Tito and Franco...

...The Spanish democratic Left has an especially soft spot for Yugoslavia: An educated, traveled-and wealthy-Spanish Socialist informed me that "the Yugoslav model" was the sort of political objective he had in mind...

...propagandists everywhere...

...The overall political trend has been toward liberalization in Spain, and toward greater authoritarianism and regimentation in Yugoslavia...

...A British Labor personality, encountered on vacation in Yugoslavia, also replied "Certainly not" when I inquired if he ever went to Spain...

...America Reading and hearing European and Mideastern comment on the Indochina debacle, I have been reminded of the Arab adage: "When a camel stumbles, all knives are turned on it...

...The Spanish writer Dionisio Ridruejo has something in common with Mihajlov-he, too, revolted against the orthodoxy of the regime and refused to keep silent...

...British Tories, who always had doubts about the upstart Yankees' ability to sustain the White Man's Burden, are saying: "What did I tell you...

...Presidents who supported Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and Marcello Caetano...

...Tito vs...

...he was able to write for foreign papers, publish books in South America and travel abroad...

...Of course, Whitehall also hoped the visit would boost the Wilson government's credit rating as Britain's triple-decker economic crisis-slump, inflation, payments deficit-worsens...