It is not historical fact, claims, and interpretations vying for credence against counterfact, claims, and interpretations that have determined the course of events in Palestine. Rather it is how Israelis and Palestinians over the years have come to perceive their reality and how each has built a whole body of active mythology to give outer shape to its maturing energies. Each of the two peoples is molded by its historical experiences it has first internalized and then projected in varieties of expression. The substance of what is right, who is right, becomes subordinated to, or is preceded by, the texture and contours of a person's sense of otherness, the force and quality of his sense of oppression.

The subject carries all the taboos of incest. Easier, by far, to get someone to suggest that Henry Kissinger smokes pot with President Nixon than that Rene Levesque might be received for coffee by the Canadian desk officer. That was how Washington journalist Milton Viorst described his experience when he tried to discuss French-Canadian problems with American State Department officials three years ago.

As Viorst predicted, not much has changed: “Washington is likely to keep tiptoeing around, feigning delicately that the separatist movement in Quebec doesn't really exist.”

I hate all violence, but most intensely I hate the violence inflicted by an all-powerful establishment on a helpless individual. The thought of a man or woman alone in a secret cell facing the fiendish horrors of ingenious and remorseless torture is utterly revolting. I can think of no evil to equal it. It should by now be a crime completely outlawed, but instead it spreads like an epidemic disease.

Reading Scientific American is a different experience from reading other American magazines. The reader feels he is up against something formidably, though quite genially, solid. It is not only that science itself is factual, its effects enormous, and its establishment (comparatively) united. The impression the magazine gives of its subject field derives in part from its own structure, its mode of being, its style. It patrols such a large beat, the expanding sphere of human awareness, and it seems to be actually expanding that sphere itself. And yet one couldn't call it pompous. It is just consciously, but not self-consciously, big.

In recent years a new economic nationalism has been bom in the developing countries of the “Third World.” The embargo imposed on consuming countries by the Arab producers, followed by the manipulation of prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), sparked the beginning of a significant redistribution of world wealth.

The demand of the Third World for a changed world economic order was highlighted at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly on raw materials and development in April, 1974. The industrialized countries evidenced their concern about their “right of access” to other scarce raw materials besides petroleum. But the larger issue dealt with reducing the vast inequities in the international economic order.