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WORLD JOURNEYS

Buchman had spent much of the middle period of his life outside his own country. During his last twenty years, an era when America became progressively more dominant in world affairs, he spent more time based there, and was glad to do so, for he loved it deeply.

In the mid 1950s Buchman was critical of America's mentality vis à vis Russia and China. He did not believe that Communism was the right way for the world. But he feared the shallowness which was, he felt, making America redouble her military, political and material efforts without defining an alternative philosophy - and, above all, the complacency which made her unable to perceive the thoughts and feelings of other nations.

Dr Fadhil Jamali of Iraq at Bandung Conference

At a Moral Re-Armament assembly in Washington at the New Year, 1955, Buchman had listened to cabinet ministers, bankers, military and cultural leaders from Asia and Africa. What they told him convinced him the time was ripe for a new initiative on a world scale. The Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states in April that year confirmed this conviction. The Foreign Minister of Iraq, Dr Fadhil Jamali, had spoken to Buchman in San Francisco in 1945 of a world caught 'between materialist revolution and materialist reaction', and now at Bandung, in the presence of Chou En-lai and Nehru, he said, 'We must work on the basis of moral re-armament, whereby men of all races and nations with clean hearts and with no rancour or hatred approach each other with humility, admit our own mistakes and work for mutual harmony and peace. The world would then turn into one integral camp, with no Eastern or Western camps.'1

With Jamali in Bandung were men whom Buchman had known: Prince (later King) Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who had also met him in San Francisco in 1945; Dr Abdel Khalek Hassouna, Secretary-General of the Arab League; El Azhari, Prime Minister of the Sudan, who had visited him in London; Dr Luang Vichien, Director-General of the Ministry of Culture of Thailand; Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon; U Nu, Prime Minister of Burma; Mohammed Ali, Prime Minister of Pakistan, and General Romulo, who became the Philippines' Ambassador to the US in 1955. It was of these men that Buchman was thinking as he planned.

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Photo: Dr. Jamali, Foreign Minister of Iraq, at the 1955 Bandung Conference of non-aligned countries.
©David Channer/MRA Productions