To effectively build a non-violent opposition to war, we must have at the forefront of our minds an obvious but suddenly forgotten distinction between the American people and the US state. Already there is a feeling that campaigners should hold back on criticisms of US government policy: OXFAM for instance has cancelled a petition challenging US policy on pharmaceutical corporations, on the grounds that ' that it is inappropriate to pursue criticisms of the US.’ But criticising the policy of the American government in no ways implies that we do not feel solidarity and shared grief with the American people. With this distinction in mind we express with all our hearts, sympathy and empathy for the friends and relatives of the dead, remembering too – but not counter-posing - the thousands killed by American bombers in Iraq, and dieing mundane deaths across the South as a result of US economic policies. This is not in conflict with unswerving opposition to, for example, US funding and arming of Sharon’s Israel as it terrorises the population of Palestine, the dangerous nuclear escalation threatened by the National Missile Defence programme and the impoverishment caused a deregulated global economic system of which the US is the lynchpin.

There are some signs that in the midst of their grief the American people are thinking and holding on to their autonomy from the state. On vigils in New York while some are calling for revenge others are singing 'give peace a chance.’ These protesters-in-mourning are questioning a rigid world-view that can only re-enact the past with ever more elaborate military technology. The US Administration’s response to an extreme injustice is a dogmatic self-righteousness and a resort to the scenarios of past victories – most notably the Gulf War. Its trauma is producing a reinforcement of the old reactions. By contrast, the Americans who beg for peace and justice are wanting the trauma to produce new directions, to end the US role of rogue superpower, to get their government to join with others for instance to build the United Nation and to sign up for the International Criminal Court.

The global superpower that sees itself above international law, is a threat to everyone one of us, whatever religion or none. People across the world are raising fundamental questions about the present world order, or disorder. At times the enormity, the very globality, of what has happened makes our own efforts seem puny. But every attempt to plant the seeds of a just and democratic society now has a new importance. Everyone consciously trying in their own circumstances to create such an alternative has a newly urgent duty to connect with colleagues internationally, especially in the US and the Middle East, health workers with health workers, environmentalists with environmentalists, community organisers with community organisers. In effect we need to create, where they don’t already exist, what the direct action movement calls 'affinity groups’ – that is friendly bases from which we can feel confident to open new means of people to people contact across national and ethnic borders to confront both imperialism and fundamentalism. The tools of information technology qualitatively extend the possibilities and they facilitate face-to-face contact. One modest example is Women in Black (WIB) that has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is an international network of women who, since the founding group in Israel in 1986, have been in the eye of every storm -from Bosnia to Palestine. There they have stood silently, or taken non-violent action, in protest as women from both sides of each ethnic divide, against war and militarism. They set us an example.