The Destruction of Human Civilization by Israel and the USA Glen T. Martin 24 April 2024 The essence of human civilization points to the rule of democratically legislated laws designed to protect freedom, justice, and keep the peace. The very foundations of civilization include the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness, and dignity within a framework, in all complex societies, of enforceable laws protecting everyone equally. Due process of law arises from our common human dignity and constitutes a basic meaning of planetary civilization. The Renaissance gave human beings a new vision of humanity as expressing our unique freedom and creative self-determination. The Enlightenment gifted humanity with a sense of our universal human equality and the need for this to be founded upon enforceable laws. The Twentieth Century provided humanity with the realization of our common human dignity. Together these three developments betoken the foundations of civilization: creative self-determination, the rule of enforceable laws, and universal human dignity. Professor Errol E. Harris, in his book Twenty-first Century Democratic Renaissance describes civilized democratic laws as necessarily including the following: first, the equality of all persons before the law; second habeas Corpus, affirming that no person shall be imprisoned without charges, prosecution, and conviction for an offence; third, the assumption that accused persons are innocent until proven guilty through a due process of law; fourth, civil and human rights (such as life, liberty, and security of person) are indefeasible and must be respected. Civilized living requires respect for our common human dignity in these ways. So-called “international law,” on the other hand, protects, and tries to “humanize,” the barbaric war-system of the world. The Geneva Conventions form the core of the so-called “laws of war,” known as “international humanitarian law,” and signed by all 194 UN nation-states.  Under international “laws of war,” a war is understood as a conflict between two or more nation-states, often officially declared by the legal authorities within these nations. When this happens the laws of war become relevant to the conflict.  Under the rules of war, the targeting of civilians is a war-crime, however, civilian deaths as a result of an action premised on “military necessity” is categorized as “collateral damage” and is acceptable in war.  Second, prisoners of war must be treated with dignity. Third, medical workers must not be targeted and must be allowed to perform their functions.  Fourth, rape and sexual violence are forbidden. Fifth, chemical and biological weapons are forbidden. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), “aggression” is also illegal, and nations can only wage war in self-defense. However, in the case of an imminent threat, acting first, or “preemptive self-defense” is permitted. War crimes (violation of any of the above 5 rules) are prohibited as well as “crimes against humanity such as arbitrary killing, systematic humiliation, or torture. The “laws of war” apply to all armed conflicts, including wars of independence or rebellions against oppression, but the prohibition against aggression does not apply to liberation struggles because the rebellion of an oppressed people against foreign or domestic oppression is not considered aggression. Under these rules the attack by Hamas on October 7 was rebellion by an oppressed people, not an act of aggression. War crimes conventions prohibit widespread or systematic attack on any civilian population, including deportations, the use of siege tactics to force immigration or starvation, extermination, enslavement, torture, enforced disappearances, murder, rape, or systematic persecution of a group.  However, whether there are major conflicts going on around the world or not, the US, like Israel, has committed itself to an institutionalized policy of crimes against humanity, from WW II to the present, on a truly systematic and bone-chilling scale. The US was borne out of a war against the British and unified as a nation through genocidal extermination and «settler-colonial» displacement of the indigenous populations already living there. Israel was borne in 1948 in a mighty act of violence that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and the subsequent “settler colonial” displacement of Palestinians from their homes from then to the present. For both nations, violence is intrinsic to their very existence. Instead of the rule of law protecting persons, both nations target persons quite indiscriminately with violence and death. In terms of the goals of civilization, noted above, instead of truth, they cover their criminality with lies and propaganda, instead of beauty, they choose the ugliness of unredeemed violence. Instead of goodness, they choose naked evil. All this in direct contradiction to the opening statement of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that declares: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” To indiscriminately violate this, as done by Israel and the United States, is to affirm just the opposite of “peace, justice and freedom.” It is to predicate these nation-states on war, injustice, and oppression. The attack on the US on “9/11” resulted in the US formalizing its already on-going anti-civilizational policies through edicts and memos that claimed to exempt the US from some aspects of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). For example, the US made a distinction concerning treatment of “enemy soldiers” (who, when captured, must be treated with dignity) and “enemy combatants” who may be tortured (by “enhanced interrogation”), prosecuted for crimes, or held without charges for long periods. The US extended its war-powers everywhere on the planet, into any and all countries where it perceived its “enemies” to be. That is, it committed to a perpetual war without end whose scope was the entire planet. All war directly violates the essential features of human civilization as outlined above. The Israeli computerized kill system called “Lavender” generates the home addresses of suspected Hamas supporters using social media, phone records, etc. Then surveillance drones wait for these persons to come home, and their home is targeted.  The building where they live or their house is bombed. This often kills at least ten additional people, usually mostly women and children, and sometimes hundreds of people. However, this fact means nothing to the Israeli kill machine, just as it means nothing to the killers at the Pentagon and the CIA. The compilation of such kill lists goes back to World War II when the Nazis tortured Soviet POWs for information about Jews and communists in places where they had been living.  Nazi death squads were sent out to eliminate the victims.  After that war, the US protected certain Nazi leaders who had conducted these massacres of suspected “enemies” or “sub-humans,” and it learned from them, adopting these vicious techniques as the heart of its (covert) foreign policy. After overthrowing the democratically elected president of Iran in 1953, the US trained the dreaded SAVAK secret police in how to generate kill lists through torturing prisoners to give names.  In Guatemala, after the US overthrew the democratically elected president there in 1954, it followed this up by establishing death and torture squads that ended up eliminating some 200,000 people over the next three decades. The US «School of the Americas» in Fort Benning, Georgia (today named the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”), was and is a top-secret training ground for death squads from all over Latin America. This technique has been repeated around the world wherever the US decided that it did not like governments in power or wanted to help repressive governments consolidate their power.  In Indonesia under Suharto, it supplied a list of 5000 names of suspected Communists to the government for elimination and supplied the weapons to help in the extermination process. It is often estimated that, with US backing at that time. Indonesia exterminated half a million suspected “communists.”  In Vietnam, the US conducted the Phoenix program that targeted for torture or death anyone suspected of being with the opposition, compiling kill lists based on the flimsiest of evidence. In “Operation Condor” that included all of Latin America, the US cooperated with repressive governments to compile kill lists of those struggling for democracy or liberation from repressive regimes (many of whom were priests or social workers), coordinating among several countries to track down and eliminate its perceived opponents. After 9/11, the US began compiling its kill lists on a worldwide basis, sending militarized drones over Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere to blow up its “enemies” from above, sometimes mistakenly blowing up wedding parties or funeral processions. In its occupation of Iraq, it systematically compiled lists of those suspected of resisting its occupation, targeting them for arrest, torture, or simply elimination. Israel, therefore, has had an astute teacher of how to destroy all civilized living and act with utter moral depravity.  No unalienable human rights, nor habeas corpus, no innocent until proven guilty.  Just murder anyone suspected of resisting you and indiscriminately kill everyone around them, including women and children.  It is this world of utter moral depravity that the Earth Constitution is designed to replace.  Under the Earth Constitution, the weapons-systems of these depraved moral monsters will be removed and dismantled, and the rule of democratic law will establish civilized living for the entire Earth. Everyone will be protected by habeas corpus, will be innocent until be proven guilty, and everyone will enjoy respect for their inalienable rights and their common human dignity. Today the global war-system on Earth blocks our ascent to planetary civilization, which necessarily means the rule of enforceable law for all persons. Compare this rule of enforceable democratically legislated law with unenforceable so-called “international humanitarian law” described above that now allows Israel and the US to get away with their depraved, lawless international systems of slaughter. Israel and the US argue that the genocide of the people of Gaza does not violate International Humanitarian Law, that the massacre of civilians, mostly women and children, is merely “collateral damage.” The unenforceable and ambiguous nature of these so-called “laws” is there for all to see. Civilized human beings are not fooled by these conventions that are supposed to regulate wars. You cannot «humanize» war. The point is that under the rule of law established for the Earth by the Earth Constitution there can and will be no wars, so this escape route into moral depravity will be closed. Real law applies to all individual persons and is enforceable by civilian police, with no military weapons for anyone, anywhere. No wonder the corporate media is silent about the Constitution for the Federation of Earth which is founded directly on human dignity. No wonder that the US government and Israel want to stop our movement from instituting the rule of democratic law for our planet.  Their corruption and depravity will have to end. Their deeply criminal world system must be replaced.  Their system destroys human civilization itself, which is based on the principles outlined above. This article is a call to decent people everywhere to ratify the Earth Constitution and thereby help establish a world that respects human dignity and integrity.  It is a call to join us at the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament that will take place with worldwide participation in the fall of 2025.  Here is truly our fundamental choice: continued absolute moral depravity or the democratic rule of law for all of humanity. How log must this barbarism continue? Please make your choice and act on it today, before it is too late.