In light of the recent war between Israel and Egypt and Syria and the uneasy cease-fire which now prevails, it is entirely natural to inquire whether Resolution 242 of the United Nations Security Council, adopted on November 22, 1967, following the Six-Day War, remains operative.

In a lecture delivered at Chatham House on April 6, 1971, and in an article published in a recent issue of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, I stated my conviction that Resolution 242 may ultimately prove to be the basis for a peace settlement in the Middle East. I adhere to this view, despite the recent hostilities still smoldering.

There is an important new development which reaffirms my conviction that the guidelines set forth in Resolution 242 are still relevant. That development is the resolution of the Security Council sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union–Resolution 338, adopted on October 22, 1973–calling for a cease-fire in the early hours of the morning of the following day.

The best way to begin Noam Chomsky's For Reasons of State is to read the epigraph, a lengthy quotation from the nineteenth-century anarchist saint, Mikhail Bakunin, from which the title is taken. Central to it is an impassioned assertion that “the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes” and that kings, ministers, statesmen, bureaucrats and warriors, past and present, “if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows.” It is a fiery and, in more ways than Chomsky may have intended, an entirely appropriate invocation. This is the Bakunin who appears later in the book, in “Notes on Anarchism,” as the eloquent sniffer-out of the coming “red bureaucracy,” the confessed “fanatic lover of liberty,” the prophet of thai “intelligent and truly noble part of youth” that will ultimately adopt the cause of the people.

The multinational corporation is an obviously important enterprise in the world today. But how important, and in what ways? The gross world product is estimated to be about $3 trillion, the United States accounting for one-third of it. Europe, Japan and Australia produce another third, and the remaining third is produced in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and developing countries elsewhere in the world. About 15 per cent, or $450 billion, is accounted for by the multinational corporation (MNC), whose output has been increasing at 10 per cent per annum.

The multinational corporation, which has been active, powerful and highly evident for some time, is coming under ever more careful scrutiny. The multinational corporation (MNC) and transnational investment are very big business. The size creates problems of its own. But when business gets as big as the MNCs, it is not only business; it extends its influence into other realms of our social life. It is not surprising, then, that there has been increasing pressure for some kind of international rules or regulations.

In January of last year, for example, the Institute for International and Foreign Trade Law of Georgetown University, in collaboration witli its sister institute of Germany, organized a very well-attended conference in Diisseldorf on International Organization for Investment. Before and after that conference there was active debate on the subject, but for some time the papers discussed there will probably be the most quoted reference material on the matter. (The papers and conclusions are to lie published by Praeger.)

Mao Tse-tung composed the verse in 1925 before organizing the farmers of his native village into an “association to clean up the shame” of Japanese “invasion” of parts of northern China—the precursor to the spreading occupation of the Chinese mainland in the 1930's. A negotiator for China's Five-Metal Company presented a scroll, with the characters for the verse gracefully brushed in black ink, to Hosai Hyuga, president of Sumitomo Metal Industries, Ltd., in December, 1972, three months after Japan and the People's Republic opened diplomatic relations.

There was a time when the Caribbean area loomed large on the American foreign policy scene. The Monroe Doctrine, the Cuban war, canal concerns, dollar-diplomacy—these issues occupied not only the time of diplomats but the attention of press and public as well. Yet now, ten years after the Cuban missile confrontation, seven after the Dominican Republic fiasco, Americans treat the Caribbean with monumental indifference. Rather than an area of great political concern, it has become merely a resort for winter holidays.

But profound changes are under way in the Caribbean precisely in those islands known only for their tourist appeal. New forces in the British West Indies, traditionally the safe and stable members of the regional community, are transforming once sleepy tropical isles into fully conscious members of the Third World. One such force is the movement toward West Indian integration.

In 1965, shortly after the United States Government had ordered regular bombing raids over Vietnam, Bertrand Russell and his Peace Foundation organized a nongovernmental “International War Crimes Tribunal.” Its aim was to determine whether the U.S. Government was committing crimes in violation of international law in its conduct of the Indochina war. Hearings began in November, 1966, in Sweden. A year later, Secretary McNamara was ordering preparation of what is now known as the Pentagon Papers, and four months after that was the massacre at Mylai. The final question put before the Tribunal was: “Do the combination of crimes imputed to the Government of the United States in its war in Vietnam constitute the crime of genocide?” The Tribunal voted unanimously that “the United States Government [is] guilty of genocide against the people in Vietnam.”

Waste, as is now well known, has become a cosmic threat. Scientists have warned us that the accumulated product of overpopulation is strangling the environment. Smoky filth darkens the sky, turning the air into lethal gas. The junk of existence piles up, transforming park greens into tin mines. The oil of industry spills death where once there was life.

That this must? be stopped is indisputable. But, until now, no suitable plan has been offered. My modest proposal will cure two of man's greatest ills by ending overpopulation and providing a new source of income for the poor. And, since experts link overcrowding with aggressive behavior, war may even be eliminated.

It is not too early to try and anticipate some of the possible defense strategies that might be used in trials emerging from “Watergate.” Some months ago, in one of those TV appearances, Richard Nixon suggested an excuse by way of comparison with the illegal antiwar demonstrations of the 1960's. Then there was Jeb Stuart Magruder before the Senate Watergate Committee arguing that his former ethics teacher, William Sloane Coffin, had inspired him with the idea that for certain higher reasons a breaking of the law was justified.

Other Watergate defendants have pleaded loyalty to Nixon and the Nixon cause as sufficient justification for their otherwise illegal actions. Notable were John Mitchell's insistence that (almost) anything was justified to prevent “the alternative” candidate from being elected; Patrick Gray asserting that loyalty to Nixon should override his own doubts about what he was asked to do; and Bernard Barker's commitment to the defeat of communism in general and Castroism in particular.

During those ominous early hours and indecisive days of the war of Yom Kippur, many American Jews were surprised by the depth of their fears concerning the fate of Israel. Such Jews had thought of themselves as powerful, detached, integrated into the larger American society. Suddenly they could not be certain that their colleagues and friends shared the secret dread they began to feel: the nightmare of another possible holocaust.

Christian leaders have sometimes seemed to treat Israel as though it presented an anguishing moral problem: “The question has two sides. There are complexities. Jewish military spirit seems a trifle pushy. Think of the poor, Third-World Arab refugees.” One anguishes about sorting out the truly moral thing to do.

Laurence Birns's fine article, “Chile: A Bloody Fall” (Worldview, November, 1973), came to my attention after I returned from a few weeks' visit to Cuba, a visit that coincided with the fall of Allende. The overthrow of Allende drew enormous response.

“Fidel, Allende, el pueblo les defiende”— Fidel, Allende, the people will defend you—shouted some 500,000 Cubans who jammed the Plaza of the Revolution on the afternoon of September 28 in Havana. A bold-colored outdoor mosaic locates Chile's martyr catty-corner to the Che Guevara monument and just in front of that of Cuba's liberator, José Marti. Allende's finger is pointing skyward in one of his favorite gestures. The inscription below reads: “The forces of fascism will not crush the Chilean people.”