Glen T. Martin

(This article was first published at Shout Out UK on July 8, 2013)

The recent revelations from Edward Snowden concerning massive NSA spying on the people of the US and the nations of Europe come as no surprise.  Any person who is even marginally politically aware knows that the US has been systematically implementing a project of total world domination for the past 15 years, if not for the past several decades. Fifteen or more years ago, a group of key neoconservative leaders wrote and signed the document “Project for a New American Century.”  This document (found on-line) has served as a blueprint for the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 and for the systematic militarization of the US in its project for world domination that has taken place since that time. As Paul Craig Roberts, former US Assistant Secretary for the Treasury, puts this in a recent article:

By now the entire world must know that Washington is not merely lawless, but also totally out of control, reveling in arrogance and hubris, driven by desires for hegemony over the entire world. Washington is so paranoid and distrustful that it doesn’t even trust its own citizens or the European puppet governments that it has bought and paid for.

           Washington is the only government that has ever used nuclear weapons, and Washington used them against a defeated government that was trying to surrender. Today the craziness in Washington is much worse. Decision-making councils are full of crazed neoconservative war-mongers, such as National Security Advisor Susan Rice, a threat to humanity. Washington think tanks and media are over-represented by neoconservatives such as William Kristol who wants to know “what good are nuclear weapons if you can’t use them?”  http://www.opednews.com/articles/Has-Washington-s-Arrogance-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-130702-784.html

For decades now, the US has had a policy of relating to other nations either as lackey nations (“allies”) or as enemy nations (destined for invasion or overthrow). The lackey nations, including Britain, France, and Germany, have compliantly followed US imperial policy by sending troops into Iraq and Afghanistan in order to justify and cover up the naked imperialism of the US through “a coalition of the willing.”  After the revelations of NSA spying on the American people and on ally countries in Europe, the leaders of these European nations today express concern and outrage.  But surely these leaders are not so naïve or stupid that they do not understand their immoral complicity with the destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries relatively independent of the system of domination. 

Surely, both the leaders and people of these countries know that the super-power is bent on world-empire and that their silence and complicity makes them modern-day heirs of their own past systems of slavery, colonialism, and devastation.  Do we want democracy, justice and freedom for the people of Earth or not?  If we see that every human being has the rights listed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including “the right to life, liberty, and security of person,” then we give up our ethnocentrism, egoism, and selfishness and work to transform this corrupt world order.

You cannot have democracy in Britain, France, Germany, or the US—or anywhere else—if your country is a militarized cog in the global domination machine. Militarism destroys democracy on every front—through secrecy, through surveillance, through violation of human rights, and through diverting massive resources from health care, education, social security, and environmental protection toward weapons, destruction, and naked power politics.

After 1945 there was great hope in the United Nations, a hope that has since been clearly betrayed. We should question why the UN system cannot give us peace or democracy in the world. Perhaps the most fundamental right in the UN Universal Declaration that has never even been partially actualized is found in Article 28: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”  Under the present world order “life, liberty, and security of person” are impossible for every person on Earth.  War, surveillance, violence, and poverty violate these daily for hundreds of millions of persons worldwide.  The only possible world order that can give human beings a decent existence is global democracy.

A decent world order cannot come through the system of some 192 militarized territorial entities competing militarily and economically from a multiplicity of national interests, ideologies, religions, and selfish perspectives.  The great French writer, Albert Camus, declared that we must free ourselves from this system that requires all of us to be “either victims or executioners.”  Today’s world system makes it inevitable that we be either one or the other. The leaders of Britain, France, and Germany express outrage that the US is spying on them, but how can they possibly justify such outrage when they have willingly been part of the system of executioners against the victim countries worldwide?

To free ourselves from this militarized nightmare of victimization and execution, we must rise to a higher level of existence. Albert Einstein declared that no fundamental problem can be solved on the level within which that problem arose.  We must move to a higher level of humanity, decency, and organization if we are to survive on this planet—if we are to respect human rights, establish justice, protect and restore the environment, and eliminate poverty and misery from the world.

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth (www.worldproblems.net), simply through the act of its ratification, raises humanity to this new level.  In its very first article, the Constitution identifies the functions of a planetary democracy all of which are beyond the system of nation-states to accomplish. From this level of global democracy alone can we prevent war, disarm the nations, protect human rights for all persons, conserve world resources, eliminate poverty, and protect our planetary environment.

The Constitution sets up a democratic world system—free of surveillance, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, power politics, and violence—in which the people of Earth join together to make our planet a happy and peaceful home for all its citizens.  It is not that people need to change their human nature.  Rather, it is the system itself—a democratic economic and political system for the entire Earth—that will lift us beyond the dilemma of being either victims or executioners.  In place of the chaos of some 192 competing, mostly militarized entities, we will have a democratic world parliament, a world judiciary, a civilian world police, and a world department of human rights called the “Ombudsmus.”

Let us place our outrage where it should be placed—not at the US in its project of global domination, not at Britain, France, or Germany for being lackeys in this imperial project, not at Arabs or Israelis or Iranians for struggling to survive within this brutal and unjust world system—but at the system itself which fosters these awful consequences and makes us all into either victims or executioners.  If we raise the democratic system to a world level where it properly belongs, we will be liberating humanity for the project of justice, peace, and decency.

Let us study the Earth Constitution, promote the Earth Constitution with its global democratic system, and let us pledge allegiance to the Earth Constitution.  We can have a truly new world, but it is each of us that must commit to building it. Our corrupt and complicit national leaders will not build it. They are too deeply embedded within the old system—too wealthy, too used to hypocrisy, too afraid, too compromised. We the people must take charge of our fate on this Earth—for our own sake, for the sake of our children, and for the stake of future generations.  Let us all be a living part of this world-historical transformation of our planet from chaos to order, from war and violence to peace, and from a system of power and domination to planetary democracy.  It is now or never.  We must make our choice before it is too late.

(Dr. Glen T. Martin is professor of philosophy and chair of the Peace Studies Program at Radford University in Virginia.  He is President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) and the Institute on World Problems (IOWP).  His personal website is www.radford.edu/gmartin.)