All Our Yesterdays

This classic Private Eye cover requires some explanation for younger readers :- In 1988, it was discovered that the then President of Austria (and former Secretary-General of the United Nations),Kurt Waldheim, had not only been a high ranking officer in the German army during the war, but that he had been an enthusiastic Nazi supporter and had almost certainly participated in atrocities amounting to war crimes. Waldheim's reaction was to aver that he had done his patriotic duty but to deny that he had any knowledge of what the Nazis were up to behind the scenes. No-one believed a word of it, and during his term as President of Austria he was virtually persona non grata throughout the world. Against that background, it is disappointing to record that Waldheim was one of those who compiled a recorded message to other worlds which was placed aboard one of the early Voyager spacecraft in 1977. That craft is now in deep space - it is a terrible thought that creatures from another galaxy may one day hear us represented by an appalling old Nazi.