Civilized societies do not accept that the powerful should be able to attack the weak
So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in
Iran, according
to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls
aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their
school.
Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to
protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war
is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon
has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the
intelligence community.
As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized
society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker.
Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the
fittest and most powerful could survive.
This moral aspiration lies at the center of America’s founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — although this nation has not always honored the aspiration.
It’s also the core of the postwar international order
championed by the United States, including the UN charter — emphasizing
multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
But it’s a fragile aspiration, easily violated by those who
would exploit their power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have
enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins — and that the rest of
us hold them accountable if they don’t.
Every time rich and powerful countries or corporations or
people attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays.
If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the
entire world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.
We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more
unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before.
This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker, because the powerful feel
omnipotent.
The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry
Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension.
The influence of big tech, big oil, and the largest aerospace and defense
corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth
and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and
Russia is unmatched in human history.
Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a
pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the
most powerful and least accountable agent of American government in this
nation’s history.
A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 to his
baseless assertion that the election was “stolen” from him, to his bombing of
fishing boats in the Caribbean on his unproven allegation that they are
smuggling drugs, his arrests and detention of people in the United States on
unproven assumptions they are here illegally, the lawless cruelty and mayhem of
his ICE and Border Patrol agents, his illegal abduction of Venezuelan president
Nicolás Maduro, and now his “death and destruction all day long” in Iran.
All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of
omnipotence. All are morally wrong.
You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s
threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by big tech
and big oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public
power with their personal wealth. In the swagger and entitlement of the late
Jeffrey Epstein and his disgraced friends and accomplices.
But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for
instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.
History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the
powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands
for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their
corporations, nations, and empires. And they threaten world war.
Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world
— and civilization — for years to come. It is our sacred duty, to ourselves and
future generations, to peacefully and legally put an end to it.
