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The Humanism of
Democratic World Law
versus a
Totalitarian Pax Americana
Glen T. Martin
12 October 2011
The “Pax
Americana” currently being
imposed
upon the
world by the massive military might of the
United States signals the peace of death. It
portends death raining down upon anonymous
victims from countless drones soaring, like
satanic hawks, through the skies of hapless
foreign peoples in complex cultures. The
blindness of its spy-lenses recognizes no living
humanity below, no patterns of cooperation,
love, or trust, no rituals of solidarity or
companionship, no cultural traditions inherited
from ancient bonds, no simple struggles for the
satisfaction of human needs. A technology
espying no living, breathing humanity but only
potential enemies of the Pax Americana
determines who are subversives, suspected rebels
against the procrustean unity forced upon the
peoples of Earth by the great “superior
sovereignty.” The mighty signatory of the “end
of history” deploys its cultureless, bloodless,
technological all-seeing eyes upon the living,
breathing peoples of our planet.
The Pax
Americana portends the death of countless
millions in the vast concentration camps called
“third world nations” condemned to perdition in
the arbitrary order of globalized greed. Most
nations serve today as malleable resource
peripheries for cheap materials and labor in the
service of a planetary economy catering to the
needs of the top 10% at the expense of the
bottom 90%. The Pax Americana signals the
triumph of capitalism, the so-called “triumph of
the West,” resisted with naïve futility by its
countless victims for several centuries until
its culmination in the Pax Americana of the
surveillance planet. Our precious blue-green
Earth soon to be encircled by numberless
pilotless drones and satellite based
weapons-systems, policed from the imposed unity
of its sky-mounted guard-towers, lies prostrate
below the implacable eyes of the death machine.
The camps at Auschwitz shocked the world as
those who thought themselves superior
exterminated those, assumed different from
themselves, who were thought to be inferior.
Today the eyes
of Predator drones watch their victims below for
signs of rebellion among the inferior by those
who know themselves to be superior, who sit in
air conditioned facilities deep within the
center of civilization watching, and waiting,
for the chance to rain death upon suspected acts
of rebellion by the inferior who populate the
far flung corners of the Earth.
Military recruits, in the armies of the
center, stripped of their human dignity and
individuality, jog in formation through
simulated battlefields commanded to chant, in
satanic-like rituals, “kill, kill, kill, kill,
kill, kill.” The artificial unity of the
recruits, stripped of their human diversity and
stamped with a “brotherhood” willing to
obliterate all who are different, mirrors the
newly emerging unity of the Earth under the
murderous eye of planetary surveillance.
For those who
would cling to our common humanity and resist
this regime of death, there are certain
questions that must come first. How does one win
the hearts of ordinary people across the globe
to unite in a unity producing peace and
prosperity throughout our common planetary home?
How does one reduce and mitigate
violence, hatred, and distrust within the minds
of people everywhere?
How do we minimize or control the
treacherous eruptions of our unrestrained lust
and violence, and our collective nationalist
psychoses? How do we discover our common
humanity beneath the endless diversity of the
limitless “worlds within worlds” of human
aspiration and endeavor? How can the deeply
diverse peoples of Earth work together for the
future of all her nations and citizens?
These are the
central questions that we must ask, first and
foremost, not how to stop the emerging
construction of our global death camp by the Pax
Americana.
If we merely oppose something, that
opposition will define us. If we struggle
against what is ignorant and evil without
finding what is wise, deeply human, and good for
all, then the ignorant and evil will tend to
drag us down to its own level.
We will torture our prisoners, like they
torture their prisoners.
We will kill their women and children,
like they kill ours. We will spy on them in
reaction to the horrific reality that they spy
upon us with an inhuman surveillance lacking
both comprehension and compassion.
All this has
been said before by the great humanists of the
world, from Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma
Gandhi in India, to Leo Tolstoy in Russia, to
Albert Schweitzer in Germany, to Michel de
Montaigne in France, to Martin Luther King, Jr.
in the United States. We must discover in
ourselves, and hence in all others, our common
humanity, which is the source of our common
human dignity and our universal ethical
relationship with all others on the planet. We
must not only live our personal lives from this
common humanity but find ways to make it the
genuine unity within which the vast diversity of
our human project flourishes with protection,
compassion, and security.
Among the above
named thinkers only Gandhi realized that the
project of authentic human unity requires the
unity in diversity afforded by democratic world
law. The spiritual and moral unity of the human
race can only be effectively promoted and
universalized through the promulgation of
democratic world laws protecting the rights,
dignity, and freedom of all persons equally.
Because the “rule of law” has been so abused in
the dark history of imperialism and colonialism,
we do not always realize this central function
of law: law is an essential factor in creating a
fully functioning and operative equality,
freedom, and dignity among human beings. In the
theory of natural rights expressed, for example,
in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the freedom, equality, and dignity of all
persons is said to inhere in our personhood
prior to the state and its laws. The state and
its laws are supposed to protect these natural
rights that define our common humanity.
But we do not
fully appreciate the way in which properly
framed laws
create a
framework for our equality, freedom, and
dignity that remains fluid, amorphous, and
tenuous in the absence of that law. The equality
of men and women in modern western societies has
been progressively realized not primarily
because of some amazing enlightenment on the
part of men, but because it has been
progressively enshrined in enforceable law.
Freedom of speech and religion in modern
democratic societies has been gradually taken
for granted not because we now lack bigots and
haters of free speech and thought but because
these freedoms have been enshrined in
enforceable laws for the past two centuries.
A common,
democratically legislated regime of law produces
in people a sense of unity. When citizens
realize that we are all precisely that:
citizens
with common rights and a common stake in the law
that protects those rights, then a tremendous
sense of unity can arise in the most diverse
populations.
Good law emphasizes equal due process for
all citizens.
Due process governs administrators. It
governs the police, the courts, the prisons, the
legislators, even the executives. The inherent
equality and freedom of persons becomes
institutionalized and protected in procedures
that resist arbitrary discrimination and abuse.
If these procedures are securely embedded
under the rule of law, trust is enhanced, a
sense of common citizenship is enshrined,
respect for the proper rule of law is increased,
and people become free, for perhaps the first
time, to recognize, rely-on, and live from their
common humanity.
This is the
function of world law as this is envisioned and
articulated within the
Constitution for the Federation of Earth.
The present anarchic structures of our world
disorder militate against recognition of our
common humanity. A perceptive recognition of our
common humanity does not obliterate diversity.
Just the opposite. The real love of
humanity in others means a love of this unique
expression of humanity in this particular
person, culture, gender, or ethnicity. In the
West, St. Francis of Assisi was a living
embodiment of this truth.
He loved
people and nature in terms of their unique
particularities. In the East, the writings of
Rabindranath Tagore manifest much the same
authentic spirituality. Recognition of beauty in
our Earth, its cultures, and peoples involves
the perception of the synchronous harmony of
unique particulars embedded within multiple
universalities. Indeed, all reality (as the
history of philosophy has revealed over and over
for every generation) involves the synthetic
integration of universals
and
particulars, the one
and
the many, unities
and
diversities in endless variety.
Authentic humanism simultaneously
recognizes both the sameness of other persons
and the marvelous multiplicity of their
differences.
The
Earth
Constitution, binding all nations together
under the common rule of law while protecting
their uniqueness and diversity, will help to
overcome the vitriolic nationalism and
dehumanization of others that now leads peoples
and nations into the abyss of endless war. As
journalist Chris Hedges writes in his book
War Is a
Force That Gives Us Meaning, chronicling his
experience as a war correspondent in conflicts
all over the world: “Many of those who defy the
collective psychosis of the nation are solitary
figures once the wars end. Yet these acts of
compassion were usually the best antidotes to
the myths predicated by nationalists. Those who
reached across lines to assist the “enemy” freed
themselves from nationalist abstractions that
dehumanized others…. They reduced their moral
universe to caring for another human being. And
in this they were able to reject the messianic
pretentions that come with the nationalist
agenda.”
Today, the
virulent “nationalist agenda” festers
unrestrained by any due process rule of law, for
between nations there is no law, no enforceable
unity to embrace their incommensurable and
fragmented diversity. “War,” as the infamous
Santa Fe document formulated in the US during
the 1980s states, “is the norm in international
affairs.” The humanist vision of universal
respect and compassion cannot get a foothold
because
the structural fragmentation of our planet
fosters “nationalist abstractions that
dehumanize others.”
The
American empire is premised on the assumption of
endless war against pervasive enemies crushed
under the all-seeing eyes of its merciless
killer drones.
The unity
fostered by democratic world law is not the
alien, totalitarian unity imposed by the Pax
Americana. Indeed, it may well be the only
viable alternative to the rapidly closing doors
to freedom and dignity for all humanity. The
unity fostered by democratic world law is
inseparable from the unity of humanism
recognized by Tagore, Gandhi, Tolstoy,
Schweitzer, Montaigne, and King. Non-military
democratic world law under the
Earth
Constitution provides the effective,
due-process legal unity necessary to put human
beings everywhere in touch with our common
humanity, with our deep spiritual unity arising
simply from a common understanding and
compassion. Whether we recognize our common
humanity within a religiously motivated idiom is
irrelevant here. We may express this common
humanity as do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
through the metaphor of being made in the “image
of God” or we may express this, as in the East,
as the recognition of the “divine infinity”
within every human self. But neither image is
necessary.
What is
absolutely necessary is that we discover this
common humanity within ourselves and begin
relating to all other persons with sensitivity,
compassion, and respect. This cannot happen
unless we overcome our lethal nationalisms and
dehumanizations of others who happen to be
different from ourselves. It cannot happen until
we allow ourselves to be embraced by a common
legal framework for all persons that
institutionalizes freedom, equality, and dignity
within coherent due process procedures of world
law.
The humanism of the great thinkers of the world
is also the deep humanism of the Earth
Federation Movement. The effort to recognize our
common humanity and the project to establish
democratic world law are and the same.
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