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Perspectives and Proposals Leadership Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make clear that there are particular reasons why I have asked you to come to this particular meeting. First, you must be clear about one thing: I don't propose to ask you to join anything. I have nothing which you can join. Secondly, I not only do not propose to ask you to join anything with which I am associated, I am not proposing to you to join something else. That is entirely away from what I have in mind. I will tell you precisely what is the origin of my inviting some of you here. I have been, for over 20 years, in touch with an organization in the United States. We have done a certain amount of work, very good work, and I have accumulated in the course of those years, and by taking part in politics in England, a certain amount of information which I want to exchange and which I have to a large degree kept to myself. Now I have found it necessary, I think it urgent, to make it knownto myfriends in the United States and elsewhere , those who are interested. After 20 odd years it is the first time I am going to speak about these matters. I believe, however, that today a circle of people such as you would be interested in them. First of all you may have some political perspective ofyour own. And if even you haven't, what I have to say will be of importance to you in judging what is a great preoccupation of any civilized and active person today, the politics, if not of his own political organization, then of other people and the world in general. You may know some of the people of whom I will speak and may have been very much concerned with the events. But I have thought that it would be interesting to me, and it would be helpful to us that it wasn't concentrated so narrowly but should be broader. And I can't imagine myself in your situation where it wouldn't be interesting and valuable to me to listen to something of this kind. There will be two more meetings. This one deals with Leadership. The second one deals with Membership. And the third deals with what I call "McNamara,"1 that is to say, the political and economic movement of the world as it exists today. There are many things I am going to leave out, but the things that I say will form a whole. And they are particularly directed at those people who have had the experience that we have had over the past years. Now the fundamental question today in all politics in the West Indies, in Ghana, in Britain, in Russia, and everywhere else, is what is taking place in the world today, and what position have countries, political parties, and individuals taken towards the general activities of the political organizations and countries. The people of underdeveloped countries, their political leaders, have taken fairly clear positions. (About this I have spoken before and will speak again.) They are non-aligned. They are neither with the West nor with the East. Unfortunately, although they say that and politically try to carry it out, some of them lean to the West and some of them lean to the East, because they have not got clearly in their mind any different road that they can follow. But that problem is a problem that now occupies everybody in the world. Everybody. The world is now more than ever one. And I think the first thing I would like to do in talking about leadership is to get clear what is the basic position today of any political leader. Wherever he is, if he is ruling a country, if he is leading a private political group, or if he is leading a political party which is the government of a country, the problems that I will deal with are the essential problems. The world in which we live began in 1917. It began with the Russian Revolution . You all are young people, you don't know the world before that. I knew it, I actually lived through it, a good bit of it, and I know the history of it. I have had to study it, and I have known people who lived then and have read their writings a great deal. This world in...

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