Last Sunday (29 July 2007) it was reported that the US will sell $20 billion worth of arms to Saudi-Arabia. At the same time, an arms deal is in the making with Israel. How many billions worth, we don’t know. We don’t really want to know. This stone age thinking is psychopathic madness. To invite our leaders to start thinking more intelligently we, citizens of the world, should take action such as massively refusing to pay a portion of our taxes.
Last Sunday the BBC reported that the Cuban athletes attending the Pan American games have been ordered home immediately amid fears of more defections. Earlier 4 athletes defected. Cuba’s President, Fidel Castro, has made clear his irritation, accusing athletes of betraying their country for money. “Betrayal for money is one of the favorite weapons of the United States to destroy Cuba’s resistance”, he said. At the Pan American games in 1999, thirteen Cuban athletes defected.
There is something to resist
Reading the first paragraph, it must be admitted that there is reason to resist the US. Fidel Castro is spot on in that respect. On the other hand, the Cuban athletes are forcibly contained within the Cuban prison. This should also be resisted. Both countries suffer from stone age thinking, the only difference being that the US is smarter in making money than Cuba. But money-making for stone age reasons (such as money being considered more important than people) is plain wrong. This moral crime is rampant throughout the so-called ‘developed democratic world’.
This does not mean that Cuba should not move towards freedom and real democracy. It should, but not in the Russian way. The transition must, first of all, be peaceful. And, secondly, the Cuban transition must culminate in political and economic democracy, a new concept beyond stone age thinking. Cuba is poised to become a world leader in this, if the opposition and the Cuban leaders can be persuaded to make the right choices now. We referred to this in yesterday’s Daily Connect (look it up in our Archive).
So where do we go from here?
The short answer is: UN Reform. The first step should be to agree internationally that war and peace will be decided upon exclusively by the Security Council. To be a more credible representation of the ‘international community’, the Security Council must be expanded to include the following democratic countries as permanent members: Australia, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, India, Germany and the EU. Permanent membership is offered also to Egypt and Pakistan on the condition that credible democracy is restored.
Secondly, the UN must turn itself into a union of democratic nations. It is yet more madness to maintain a General Assembly, functioning along democratic principles, whereas a sizable number of voting members do not believe in human rights and democracy (such as Cuba, and Venezuela soon also, if Hugo Chavez has his way).
The third step is to agree on the gradual dismantlement of national armies and the simultaneous build-up of permanent UN armed forces, culminating in complete disarmament of all national armies. To those who say this is Utopian, we have no other answer than the following blunt question: How many more millions do you want to see slaughtered before you agree that there really is no other way?
Our daily video is two minutes of a speech delivered by the new UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As said before, we do not want to use the term ‘new world order’ any longer more since the hijacking of religion by George Bush to force a fascist new world order down everybody’s throat. We suggest the term ‘New Democratic Balance’ instead.