Take or leave a few lives, about 865 people have been killed by political violence in Northern Ireland since the troubles broke out afresh in 1969. It is not improbable that the toll will reach a thousand by March, 1974. The outsider is inclined to view March, 1974, as a kind of moment of truth for Northern Ireland, for that is the date by which, according to the British “White Paper“ of March, 1973, the people of Northern Ireland are to get themselves together around an elected Assembly. What happens if they don't get themselves together by then is unclear, but the alternatives now under discussion are not pleasant to contemplate. An outsider, such as I, might view March, 1974, as the fast approaching moment of truth, but as one Protestant leader there remarked: “Ireland has been undergoing ‘moments of truth,’ ‘definitive crises’ and 'once-and-for-all decisions’ for several hundred years now.

It's almost obligatory these days to interpret our national temper in 1973, particularly the alleged malaise of the young, as a resurrection of something called “the fifties.” Erstwhile radicals point to a new “silent generation” to justify a change of strategy and often a change of heart. Proponents of stability, eager to dismiss “the sixties” as one of those extremist binges which sometimes interrupt our cycles of “pragmatic” reform and retrenchment, cite the restoration of tranquility to affirm the genius of American politics. Nostalgia merchants and rock musicians find that the splendid sounds of yesteryear can be even more lucrative on eight-track stereo than they were at 45 rpm. Yet for all its commercial potential and ideological convenience, this currently fashionable historical parallel distorts both “the seventies” and “the fifties.”

It is not too soon for some firm judgments to be made regarding what has just transpired in Chile. We can consider not only some of the more important current causes for the bloody coup but some contributing events from the past. Some rough idea as to what we can expect from the present military regime—that is, the military dictatorship— will emerge from the examination.

How ironic that we use that ugly word “dictatorship“ to describe an institution that but a few weeks ago was winning praises as a model of an armed service that, recognized the doctrine of civilian supremacy, the chain of command, and was in itself— ostensibly to the end of the Allende Administration— the architrave of Chilean constitutionalism.

In the year 1948 Israel became a state and I became stateless. For the next twentyfive years Israelis were building a nation and I was inhabiting a world of nothingness in which I experienced no halcyon period, no moment when my very essence as a man was not negated and my very rights as a human being were not dismissed. In 1948 the world applauded the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. I was a Palestinian, and the Jewish homeland was being established in my country, at the cost of displacing me and creating in us all a nation in exile.

In 1947, as I wandered the streets of my village after a day of school, what excitement the next day promised. I wore a k'fiah and, on my head, in a very grown-up way, the traditional Arab agahl. I shouldered a rifle of wood and rubber and became one of the fighters for a free and independent Palestine, my birthplace and national home. From among the boys of the neighborhood I raised a regiment of brave fighting children, and we took upon ourselves the burden of protecting and defending our village against the Jews, our enemies.

In the end we fought neither with wood-and-rubber weapons nor with the weapons of our parents because our local council decided there was no sense in fighting. So the Jews, the Jewish army, took the village with peace talks, without firing a shot.

Liberal Christian activists have been accused of making politics Lord and the cure for the ills of the world. And by some of their near friends, too. In Up to Our Steeples in Politics (Paramus, New Jersey, 1970) Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway, publisher and editor of Katellagete and leaders of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, have questioned the gospel of relevance-and-realism. In approaching Evangelicals condescendingly, they argued, we have forgotten that the basic notion of these Christians is what we want persons to be—new men and women in Christ. To the question what should the people of today do, Campbell and Holloway answer, “Nothing.” And to the question what should people be, they respond in an evangelical way: “What you are—reconciled, to God and man.“

The momentum of East-West detente has grown with the summer visit of the agreeable and businesslike Leonid Brezhnev. A burst of treaties, agreements and deals has noisily signaled a singular achievement of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy. To most Americans the sole objections, raised by Senator Jackson and others in the name of Soviet Jews and liberal dissenters, must seem unwelcome throwbacks of the cold war or at least a parochial intrusion. With world peace and free trade seemingly at stake, even many intellectuals hesitate to belabor the narrowing liberties of those dissident groups.

Both Nixon and Brezhnev agree that trade and arms reductions are practical. While neither disavows ideological competition, both now say it should be channeled to peaceful outlets.

Africa's art tradition rests in a defined and ritualized relationship between man and the Supreme Creator, the primary essence that dwells at the center of all religious processes. Art then becomes the proper instrument of expressing man's world, a measuring rod of his conception of this same world beyond the grave. In the puristic sense, art in Africa becomes a means of expressing man's will and wishes to the Creator, an assertion of his own temporality as a living being (mortal), yet bearing the distinct virtue and energy of the determinable (real and unreal) world's animus. More important, art for the African is the articulation of his own spiritual awareness and sensibility within his cosmos. So it becomes an extension ab initio of the ritualism of all things, the unified expression and morphological statement of his communal and individual aspiration toward the divine.

Ernest Gellner's "Reflections on Philosophy, Especially in America" in the June Worldview contains so many perceptive and challenging statements that it merits a reply. It is also sufficiently confused and dubious in its conclusions as to require criticism. As a teacher of philosophy for over two decades, I am concerned about philosophy's role in contemporary and national life, and hence I am stimulated to make the following points.

What is the essence of Professor Gellner's assessment?