The Revenge of a Better World

October 6, 2001

The time is right for every person in the world to come forward and exert all their might to bring about, by world union, the best possible future.

On October 2, 2001 the U.S. government announced that it will speed up the recognition of Palestine as a fully independent state and will exert every means to achieve peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. If this proves to be true and is expedited –– without procrastinating or deception –– it marks the beginning of a new era in the Middle East, and quite possibly the world.

The attacks against America, no matter who the individuals involved, were connected to the festering situation in Israel and Palestine which, for over fifty years and three generations, has fueled hatred and discontent with America and the West in the Arab and Muslim world. And this fresh U.S. initiative is driven by the tragic loss of thousands of Americans and the potential loss of thousands of more lives elsewhere in America and around the world.

By dictating the scenario of Middle-East history in disregard both of the pacifist and progressive forces of the region, and of the extremist and fanatic movements manipulated by ideology and religious fundamentalism, which often asked for the same things by opposite means, successively U.S. Presidents, Congress, Israel and Jewish interest groups, the American media, and an apathetic American people contributed significantly to the climate of hatred and impotence which manifested itself most heinously in the World Trade Center and Pentagon massacres. And massacres is what they were.

The Muslim countries and peoples must believe finally that the USA is attentive to their feelings and problems, most urgently those centered around the holy land of three religions and many cults. If they do so believe, organized attacks will lessen or even halt.

But the United States government must act fast to be convincing. And its aid must be more than simply legal and symbolic. Palestine must be immediately recognized as a proper state. The Palestinian government and people need aid in many forms – psychological opening up, freedom to travel and communicate with the whole world including all of Jerusalem and Israel, schools, work projects and full, solemn assurances of security from terror and for the future, assurances of which Israel, too, must fully benefit. Jerusalem must become a world city, under administration of the UN.

Simultaneously the USA must move out into the world in a changed way. New aid must take the form of opening up the world, of enhancing the welfare of the peoples of the poor countries. Even to be considered is a broad treaty with Irak, with perhaps the UN signing on as a guarantor, that will provide for the reconstruction of that desolated country without relaxing vigilance with regard to chemical warfare preparations and rearmament.

More important than anything else in the long run would be for the USA to seize this moment to announce that America will reenter fully the United Nations agencies and help them to build a full range of global welfare programs, in the frame of free market economics, but going far beyond the haphazard effects of uncontrolled economic globalism.

Here is what the whole world hopes the United States will lead it to do:

Guarantee basic subsistence, education, and rights to all people.

Ban all nuclear weapons everywhere.

Halt the growth of world population.

While limiting UN Security Council power, abolish all vetoes in it.

Establish a single world currency.

Give religious freedom to all.

Give maximum autonomy to all ethnic groups.

Proportion UN Assembly voting to population and productivity.

Share in UN funding according to votes held in Assembly.

Can the USA do all of this? That is to say, can the American people do all of this? Certainly they can. They can if they will to do so. They will. The time for the old obscene world politics is over. A new era must begin. The ruin of the World Trade Center, atop history’s grim heap of sacrificial victims of terror, persecution, ethnic hatreds, greedy exploitation, and unjust war, already gives the World, with the United Nations nearby, a monument to commemorate the new era.

All of this, set forth above, is what may be meant by the words on the lips of so many people: "The world will never be the same again."

Alfred de Grazia    October 6, 2001