Come Home, America
twasinLondon , three years ago, that Senator George McGovern revealed some of his most aggressively left-wing opinions on world affairs. In 1968, he had been a Methodist delegate to the fourth assembly of the World Council of Churches in Sweden. At that assembly-as so often latelyit was the Americans who led the antiAmerican clamor over Vietnam, and who demanded more vigorous opposition to the regimes of which they disapproved in Southern Africa. As a result of his performance there, Senator McGovern was appointed Chairman of the Council’s “Consultation on Race,” which was held at Notting Hill, in London, in May 1969. Deliberately he allowed the Afro-Asian delegates to take the initiative, in a way that led to the setting up of a “Program To Combat Racism,” and, subsequently, to the financial grants made by the World Council of Churches to so-called African “freedom fighters.” On that occasion he said that if all other methods failed, the church must support resistance movements and revolutions to eliminate the “political or economic tyranny which makes racism possible.” The phraseology sounds like an echo of pure Marxist doctrine, although he may not have intended it in quite that sense. The possibility that a man holding such views might soon become President of the United States was gleefully celebrated in the London Times by the Reverend Paul Oestreicher, a clergyman who has long been prominent and vocal in his support of left-wing causes. “If McGovern beats the incumbent President,” he wrote, “those Christian leaders will have his ear who opposed the war with him, fought hunger (and the big corporations) and tried to get more effective Mr. Lejeune is a British columnist and




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