ABSTRACT
I was asked to address the subject of ethnicity, a large subject, and one that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls the most powerful force in the world. The year 1989 will go down as a vintage year, a year to rank with 1776, 1789, and 1848, one which schoolchildren will have to memorize and of which poets will sing. I shall never forget the picture of that young lad in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in front of the tank: every time it turned he moved in front of it, again and again. I shall never forget the pictures of the students marching in Beijing with the statue of the “Goddess of Liberty,” as they called her. The image was quite westernized, as they clearly intended. In Shanghai some miles away, another group of students had a statue modelled directly on die Statue of Liberty. They also knew exactly what they were doing. Nor will I forget a middle-aged man, by the name of Zdenek, in a brewery in Prague in November of 1989 standing on a box before his fellow workers and saying, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
