The Democratic Party in the United States pretends to be shocked by Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric that promises to “eliminate the vermin” who are polluting the purity of America should he be reelected in 2024. Simultaneously, the Democratic President of the United States wholeheartedly supports the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Many writers have pointed out that the bombing and murder of some 20,000 people in Gaza (most of whom are women and children) is not simply an “overreaction” to the humiliating attack of October 7th by Hamas. Rather, it arises from an ongoing attitude that Palestinians are subhuman and deserving of being humiliated, killed, and ultimately extinguished. The Hamas attack is simply an excuse, just as the 9/11 attack in the USA served as an excuse for invading Afghanistan and destroying many civil liberties within the US.

US-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud recounts Israeli treatment of Palestinians. He writes that “over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion which is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasize the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.” He chronicles the way prisoners have routinely been stripped naked, beaten, and abused, and have had their revered cultural values vilified and trashed: the Koran, their honour, their mothers, their women, etc. This treatment of some people as less than human is essential to the psychology of genocide.

The US genocide against the Native Americans involved a similar attitude that the “red man” was inferior, more primitive, less civilized and a lower form of human. Right through the 1970s the US was performing forced sterilizations on Native Americans and other “women of color.” This followed the military slaughter of Native-American tribes throughout the 19th century. “According to historical records and media reports, since its founding, the United States has systematically deprived Native-Americans of their rights to life and basic political, economic, and cultural rights through killings, displacements, and forced assimilation, in an attempt to physically and culturally eradicate this group.”

The Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 resulted in the death of 4,200 Americans and more than 20,000 Filipino combatants, but the real target was civilians. More than 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease. Scholar Commons writes: “In reality, the atrocities committed on the Philippine archipelago during the Philippine-American war suggest that the United States was interested in furthering American imperialism and attempting to “civilize” savages, ultimately necessitating the cleansing of a lesser race.” “Lesser races” include the indigenous peoples of Latin America, the black people of Africa, and the “yellow” people of Asia. The US empire has had few qualms about genocidal activities involving such peoples around the world, for example, in Guatemala, Rwanda, and Vietnam.

In 1954 the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, who proposed land reform to benefit starving peasants, was overthrown in a US-organized military coup that put the brutal Guatemalan military in charge. This genocidal group was supported “without qualification” (very much as today with the genocidal Israeli military) for many decades as they decimated their country, especially its indigenous population. During the 1980s, under the Reagan administration, the U.S.-backed military committed genocide against Mayan peoples in Guatemala. Between November 1981 and early 1983, the military swept through indigenous communities, committing over 600 massacres.

As the genocide unfolded, the Reagan administration continued to push for funding. U.S. officials assured Guatemalan military leaders that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done….The United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification reported that from 1960 to 1996 the civil war resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people, the vast majority of which were Mayans. State and paramilitary forces committed 93 per cent of human rights violations.

In Vietnam, beginning in 1965, the US military unleashed its “scorched earth” campaign against the people of South Vietnam. This included massive attacks on all areas deemed under Viet Cong control using “a genocide policy of kill all, burn all and destroy all” in these heavily populated areas. “They would round up all the people they could find and burn and destroy everything eatable and livable.”

This brutality was supplemented by a massive carpet-bombing campaign, for example in Quang Tri Provence where an area a little smaller than the state of Delaware was carpet-bombed to the point where literally nothing was left standing. Altogether some 4 million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, with an additional 2 million tons dropped on Laos and a half million tons on Cambodia. Overseeing this war, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara famously declared that “for Asian people human life is considered to be worth very little.”

In The Globalization of Poverty, Michel Chossudovsky writes that two years before the Rwanda genocide the World Bank (located in Washington, DC) had imposed severe austerity measures on the country causing hunger, unemployment, and despair (1999, 119). Helen C. Epstein writes: “Between April and July 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered in the most rapid genocide ever recorded…. The Rwanda genocide has been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in its surreal brutality. But there is a fundamental difference between these two atrocities. No Jewish army posed a threat to Germany. Hitler targeted the Jews and other weak groups solely because of his own demented beliefs and the prevailing prejudices of the time… Three and a half years before the genocide, a rebel army of mainly Rwandan Tutsi exiles known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, had invaded Rwanda and set up camps in the northern mountains.

They had been armed and trained by neighbouring Uganda, which continued to supply them throughout the ensuing civil war, in violation of the UN charter…. During this period, officials at the US embassy in Kampala knew that weapons were crossing the border, and the CIA knew that the rebels’ growing military strength was escalating ethnic tensions within Rwanda to such a degree that hundreds of thousands of Rwandans might die in widespread ethnic violence. However, Washington not only ignored Uganda’s assistance to the Rwandan rebels, it also ramped up military and development aid to Museveni (the then autocratic ruler of Uganda), and then hailed him as a peacemaker once the genocide was underway.”

This history lends insight into the practices of what is surely the most genocidal nation in the history of the past 1000 years, with the possible exception of the Nazi State. In fact, many of the Nazi sympathizers or elite officers, such as Stepan Bandera in Ukraine, were recruited by the US government after the Second World War for their murderous skills that could now be used in places where the US was working clandestinely to weaken and destroy the Soviet Union. Today, the US support for Israel and its spy network function in basically the same way. Human rights and dignity mean nothing within the struggle of lawless sovereign nations for power and hegemony. Israel is the US military and strategic outpost in the Middle East, and a key ally in case they want to find an excuse for obliterating Iran with nuclear weapons and conventional weapons as planned in “Operation Support Sentry.”

We can add to this history of genocidal actions the long list of US interventions, overthrows, and brutal sanctions of governments, many democratic, going back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, including recently, Cuba 1962 to today, Chile 1973, Nicaragua 1983-90, Sudan 1998, Yugoslavia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 1991 and 2003, Venezuela 2005 to today, Libya 2011, Yemen 2017 to today, Syria 2018 to today, and support for Ukraine’s war-making 2008 to today. US foreign policy appears as a demonic regime designed to prevent independent initiatives worldwide and to bring the planet’s wealth from the poor periphery of the world into the coffers of its banking and multinational corporate enterprises. US Christian theologian David Ray Griffin summarizes the US empire as it has developed since the Second World War:

We are right to be horrified by the Nazi regime’s murder of some 12 million people. But we should be even more horrified by the fact that the global economy, over which America now presides, is responsible for 13 to 18 million deaths per year, most of which are due simply to a lack of adequate food, clean drinking water, and elementary healthcare. This means the American empire is responsible through a combination of indifference and deliberate policy, for at least 130 million easily preventable deaths every decade.

(Reinhold Nieber and the Question of Global Democracy, 2021, 126)

From this sordid history, we can deduce that the US government has zero concern for the people of Gaza, except for propaganda purposes designed to cover up its utter moral depravity. However, the world system of militarized sovereign nation-states does not allow there to be states without moral depravity. Some states may be morally worse than others, but they all embrace militarism and the inevitable struggle against other sovereign states viewed as rivals for power, resources, and markets. This means they all embrace power and murderous violence rather than peace and human dignity. The World System requires this; the system is based upon a struggle for power and ascendency among militarized rivals. The system itself requires moral depravity.

That is why the only solution to a genocidal and murderous world system is not a “multi-polar” system of equally powerful nation-states, for example, Russia, China, and the US. Such a system will inevitably collapse in the same nihilism exhibited by the US in the above-sketched history. Griffin continues by declaring that “a vision of a world ordered in terms of moral principles….could be realized through the creation of global democracy” (ibid., 133). In my terms, there can be no effective moral action at the national level unless the nations are joined in an Earth Federation based on the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

The Earth Constitution (written by hundreds of world citizens through a process of 4 constituent assemblies over 23 years from 1968 to 1991) represents all the people of Earth and not some fragment thereof. It places sovereignty in the people of Earth (Article 2) and not in any limited nation-state or other entity. It gives the united people of Earth the authority to end war, demilitarize the nations, protect universal human rights, create global economic justice, and protect the planetary environment. None of these things can happen at the level of sovereign militarized nation-states. True holism cannot be founded upon an unenforceable treaty arrangement of gigantic fragments. The Constitution requires authentic holism: uniting the nations within a global democracy that embraces all of human life under the heading of “unity in diversity.”

Moral principles are universal. Human dignity is universal. They can only be respected and effectively acted upon if we have a corresponding world system based on moral principles and human dignity. Neither capitalist greed nor nation-state power politics can give us a morally based world. Like its main hegemon, the USA, our world system is itself genocidal. Mahatma Gandhi declared that “the world has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.” He also declared that the world absolutely requires “a federated union of free nations.”

The Earth Constitution is not just another well-meaning draft. It is final and ready for democratic ratification, providing specific steps by which this can be accomplished. It embraces the “unity in diversity” of human existence and “assures to each child the right to the full realization of his or her potential.”

It is up to us, the people of Earth, if we want to create a decent future for our children. The choice is simple and clear: it is not difficult. Either we embrace global democracy under the Earth Constitution or we continue with a genocidal world system in which the horrors of Gaza appear as merely a blip on the screen of chaos and carnage. Let us choose the morally superior option. Read the Constitution. Then allow it to show you what it could mean for a world without war, genocide, or imperialism—how it could mean a world based on true human dignity and freedom. Let us act together to make this happen.