The item says that "Biak residents held a festival commemorating the July 1, 1961, proclamation of West Papuan independence from New Guinea."
West Papua was still a Dutch colony at that time, with UN- sponsored "decolonization" in the process of handing the territory over to Indonesia against the wishes of the people. The Indonesian administration was established in 1963 and, in 1969, with a UN-endorsed "act of free choice," which West Papuans bitterly describe as the "act of no choice," was incorporated into Indonesia. The Free West Papua (OPM) movement declared independence from Indonesia in 1971.
In any case, "New Guinea" has never been a country to declare independence from!
Bob Aiken
Sydney, Australia
Reaction to Buchanan
Enclosed are two pieces taken from the Philadelphia
Inquirer. The first is a column by Patrick J. Buchanan, where
he demands that Harvard University accept white Christians to
its student body at a rate of 75 percent, and no less. The next
piece is a series of letters to the Inquirer which are for the
most part critical of Buchanan's column.
For anyone familiar with Buchanan's politics, this column should be no surprise. However, I found this piece a bit more reprehensible than most of his columns and so did many of the readers of the Inquirer.
In Daniel Guerin's book Fascism and Big Business, he pointed out how the Nazis wanted to push social relations back to a time before the revolutions against feudalism. This was their theoretical basis for a complete autocracy. Buchanan not only wants to push us back to before the Civil Rights movement, he wants to go back to before the American Revolution. After all, the First Amendment of the Constitution is freedom of religion.
Steve Halpern
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania