In his Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly said of Proust: "His hatred and contempt for the life of action suited the war-weary and disillusioned generation he wrote for, his own snobbery offered him both a philosophy and a remunerative career, he believed also in art for art's sake." Had I Proust's genius, this judgment would fit what I have become in the past two or three years very well, and certainly, like Proust's, mine is a war-weary and disillusioned generation.

Until rather recently I was Major Josiah Bunting, United States Army. I ran very hard on the bureaucratic and careerist treadmill that the officer corps of the Army has very largely become. After five or six years I found that I had come to dešpise it and what it was doing to me and what it had helped to do to this country, and jumped off.

When it comes to discussing such a broad and highly speculative subject as the future of the international trade and payments system, I feel like the scholar who one day discovered that Christopher Columbus had set sail for America with four ships. Of course his astonished colleagues demanded an explanation for what had happened to the hitherto unknown fourth ship. The scholar replied that it had gone over the edge. In peering over the precipice at which the international economic system now lies, there is considerable danger of judging how the system is doing rather than what it is doing, or of projecting one's convictions about how it should operate in the future directly into a forecast. I shall try to avoid these traps.

When a Scotsman wears a kilt, or a Frenchman sings the Marseillaise, it seems reasonable to put it all down to strong nationalist feeling. Scotland and France are among the oldest nations in Europe, and most people can recognize instantly the symbols and characteristics that are associated with them because they are so often manifested.

But what does nationalist feeling amount to in Europe today, in political and social terms? Is Europe not at the end of the "era of nationalism" and at the start of an era of supranational unity? The European Economic Community has been enlarged this year with the addition of Britain, Ireland and Denmark, and it is possible to look forward to a sort of federal "United States of Europe" within the next couple of decades.

If the American public, after more than twenty years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, remains confused about the politics and objectives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, it is primarily because of a steady diet of misinformation conveyed by the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. The agents of this misinformation are primarily journalists and scholars who depend on the two governments for their facts.

During the long struggle in Vietnam it has been vitally important for successive U.S. administrations and their client regimes in Vietnam to persuade the American public of the justification for the intervention that is aimed at keeping local anti-Communists in power. Frequently, therefore, the same political warfare techniques used in Vietnam have been aimed also at the American public.

An idealistic reformer in western Sicily, Danilo Dold, has for two decades employed demonstrations, court cases, petitions, fasts and clandestine radio in an imaginative series of nonviolent tactics aimed at feeding and housing the poor. He has also been key to the building of a dam, the opening of a medical clinic and the creation of a new school for Sicilian youth. He has effectively challenged the violence, poverty and fatalism that have ruled western Sicily for three centuries, and has won the reputation of being "the Gandhi of Sicily." Dolci preaches and practices nonviolence in an area that, until most recently, has been the heartland of the Sicilian Mafia. It is a territory that typifies the brutal realities and awesome problems of the entire Italian South, the Mezzogiorno. Dolci dares to envision a new Sicily, a Sicily which by its democracy and economic development would be the envy not only of the underdeveloped world but of many in Western Europe and America.

Among Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially Presbyterians, there is a stronger tradition of individual clerics involved in politics than among Catholics. The tradition is traced over the last hundred years by Andrew Boyd in his Holy War in Belfast and is represented today by, for example, Ian Paisley and the Reverend Martin Smyth, head of the Orange Order, vice president of the Unionist Party and an important factor in the "loyalist" opposition to the White Paper. The three major Protestant groups are the Church of Ireland, which is in communion with the Church of England, the Presbyterians and the Methodists.

The use of fire in warfare is as old as history itself. It has been an offensive weapon, a defensive weapon and an instrument of psychological terror. To the ancient warrior fire was a way to destroy wooden ships and fortifications made of inflammable materials. Greek fire, the secret weapon of the Byzantines, repelled barbarian invasions in the seventh century. General Sherman tried to break the will of the South by burning a path to the sea. The Americans, with napalm and Zippo lighters, and the Viet Cong, with flamethrowers, continued the tradition by laying waste peasant villages in Vietnam.

Concrete bunkers and steel ships have not made fire obsolete from a military viewpoint, for the technology of setting fires has stayed a step ahead of the ability to put them out. The jet streaking in low with a canister of napalm has replaced the flaming brand tossed over a wall, and the flaming arrow has given way to a warhead of white-hot magnesium or thermite.