Passivity spells complicity!

written with collaboration from Helio, my OpenAI ChatGPT amanuensis

We Are All Guilty Unless We Take Action to Dissociate Ourselves from the Gaza Genocide

As matters now stand, we are all complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza—unless and until we publicly repudiate it.

The United States government may treat international law as optional—selectively citing it when convenient and scoffing at it when it condemns allies—but this does not erase the law itself. The legal frameworks governing armed conflict and civilian protection—from the Geneva Conventions to the Genocide Convention¹²—are not mere diplomatic niceties. They are binding treaties drafted in the shadow of Auschwitz and ratified by the United States, making them the supreme law of the land under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution³.

And yet, as Gaza burns, the U.S. bankrolls the incineration, vetoes ceasefires, ships bombs and sends its officials to publicly bless the war effort. It is not just Israel that is on trial in the eyes of the world—it is America

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A World Watching—and Not Forgetting

While Washington may still dominate Western media narratives, the rest of the world sees clearly. In the most recent war with Israel, Iran was meticulous in its adherence to international law—targeting only military facilities, issuing warnings and avoiding civilian casualties. By contrast, Israel has violated those same laws at every turn, bombing residential towers, refugee camps, hospitals and aid convoys with total impunity.

The result is that in the court of global opinion—particularly in the Global South and across the Islamic world—the sympathies now lie with Iran, not Israel. The so-called "rules-based international order," once invoked by the U.S. as the gold standard of justice, is now widely regarded as a self-serving fiction—a cover for power not a constraint on it.

Criminal Accountability—And Ours

Let us be clear: U.S. politicians who continue to fund and enable the destruction of Gaza are criminally liable under international law¹⁴⁵⁶.

And we as citizens of a self-governing republic are not innocent bystanders.

In a democracy, failure to oppose a crime being committed in our name is a form of complicity—if not in the legal sense then most certainly in the moral one.

We pay the taxes. We cast the votes. We choose whether to stay silent or speak. And if we do nothing, then we become what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called “metaphysical participants” in crime⁷—those who may not pull the trigger but who tolerate its use and share in its shame

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The Remedy: Moral Severance

What then are we to do?

We cannot bomb our way to innocence. We cannot purchase it with slogans or performative gestures. But we can take one essential step:

We must publicly dissociate ourselves from the crime.

This is the minimal moral duty of anyone who believes in justice: to refuse to lend their name, their money or their vote to the machinery of mass killing.

That is the purpose of the “Stand and Be Counted” pledge. It is not a partisan campaign. It is a line in the sand: a refusal to cooperate with genocide. A declaration that our humanity has not been negotiated away behind closed doors in Washington.

Conclusion: The Fire Next Time

History will remember those who remained silent just as it remembers those who turned away from the cattle cars.

Let us not be among them.

Just as the world judged the German population after World War II—not only for the crimes committed by its leaders, but for the silence and acquiescence of its citizens—so too will we find ourselves in the moral docket. As the international law-based multipolar order rises and the Western-led 'rules-based order' collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy, the judgment of history will not overlook those who remained passive in the face of atrocity.

The burden of proof now lies not with the victims but with us:

Did we know—and did we act?

If we do not sever ourselves morally from this abomination now, then we stand condemned not only by the standards of international law¹²⁴⁵ but by the deeper law written on every human conscience:

Thou shalt not kill the innocent and call it self-defense.

(If you are a registered voter in the United States of America please join today with those of us who have pledged our vote to support only candidates for federal office who oppose the genocide and support the people of Gaza at StandandBeCounted.org!)

Footnotes

1. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Articles I–III. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Common Article 1 and Article 146. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949 ↩ ↩²

3. U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2 (“Supremacy Clause”). https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artVI-S2-1/ALDE_00000613/ ↩

4. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), Articles 25–28. https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf ↩ ↩²

5. Nuremberg Principle IV, codified by the International Law Commission (1950). https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/draft_articles/7_1_1950.pdf ↩ ↩²

6. International Court of Justice (ICJ), Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro (2007), para. 430. https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/91/091-20070226-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf ↩

7. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 25–30. ↩