Waking people up is more important than giving them recipes. We must have men who can stand up, not automatons cut down, in Padraig Pearse's words, to Procrustean measure, passive consumers subdued by The System, reduced to football and the media, and cars for toys. These are the lambs that will be led to the slaughter. So be provocative. A measure of creative chaos will be useful. Confuse the issues by scattering them through the text, forcing the reader to knit the strands together, digest the material and form his own synthesis: Use your French irony and satire. Develop the Chestertonian art of paradox, which obliges the recipient to make an about-turn, retrace his steps and try to find his way again. The West will either be animated by such persistent knocking as would waken Duncan, like the Yeatsian ghost of Roger Casement that is still banging on the door, and be turned back from the path of self-destruction which Soren Kirkegaard saw it embarked upon, or else it will be aroused, too late, by the muffled thunder of approaching hoofbeats.

There are now signs that the staggering overt and covert power of the United States may be on the wane. Since, however, you are studying in the United States and will be drawing heavily on that country in your work and since the European Community seems to be going down the same road on which the US gave the leadership that set the example to the world, our correspondence will perhaps concern that country more than others. But let me say once and for all:

	-	that the United States has not been the sole source of badness in the world;
	-	that it was Europe (including Czarist Russia) that blazed the trail in imperialism and exploitation and continues it today with renewed vigour;
	-	that a clear distinction must be made between the US (and

Western) Establishment of high financiers, big business and arms merchants, with their spokesmen in politics and the media, and the great American people who are among the sufferers of The System (a matter we shall come back to under a later chapter).

I should also add at this point that names from our particular time such as Reagan, Carter, Thatcher, Mitterand, Kohl, Gonzalez, Bush, Kinnock and so on are merely symbolic. Change the names, the times and the countries and the same criticisms of The System will remain applicable and this criticism must not exclude ourselves. In these times hypocrisy is one of our predominant characteristics. We grumble and groan about the faults and failings of others when we could do infinitely more for the reformation of society by examining our own consciences and acting accordingly. We talk about the evils of unemployment at a time when sloppiness, sloth and dissipation in futilities is writ large in our attitude to getting the most out of life instead of putting the most into life. We take secret pleasure spreading the consoling idea that the socio-economic structures of the world are too big to understand and too hot to handle. This salves our consciences, enables us to indulge the ancient anthropological pleasure of blaming our woes on scapegoats without lifting a finger to tackle them, and go on our hedonistic consumption spree with a light heart.

According to an old, self-evident axiom, everything of importance must start in one individual's mind. And thus one man can change the world because where there is one there can be two, where there are two, four, and so on in an accelerating geometrical progression until the movement becomes a tide. If the 'butterfly effect' as defined in the science of chaos can be so significant, how many thousand times more can be the outcome of concerted action by a snowballing