REASONING

Published by the Commonwealth of Humanity Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity
Date: April 9, 2026

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THESIS

Thesis: No government has the right to commit crimes against humanity, yet powerful Western leaders and ruling-class actors repeatedly commit them without punishment, so we are organizing to document these crimes, expose the people responsible, and demand accountability.

FOUNDATIONAL FIRST PRINCIPLES

1. Human beings have inherent worth.
2. Therefore they may not be treated as disposable.
3. Therefore human coexistence has objective moral constraints.

PRINCIPLES

Human beings are morally prior to states.

Every human life matters equally, across nationality, race, religion, class, and political alignment.

Governments have no legitimate right to commit crimes against humanity under cover of law or office.

The legitimacy of a government does not come from mere control, elections, courts, uniforms, or existing institutions.

The legitimacy of a government is measured by how well it serves human beings within moral limits.

A human community of any size with sufficient moral standards has standing to judge criminal power when states refuse to judge themselves.

Law decreed by a state is not the highest moral standard and is easy to corrupt; Natural Law is higher than enacted law.

CLAIMS

Claim: Human beings predate every government, every court, and every law written by those who claimed authority over us.

That's unassailably correct.

Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed for roughly 300,000 years according to all known geological records.^[1] The earliest known states, with centralized governments, courts, written laws, and rulers claiming authority over subjects, appear no earlier than about 5,500 years ago.^[2][3]

Sumer in Mesopotamia, with its city-state system and early written law, came thousands of years after the appearance of our species.^[2][3] Everything before that -- tens of thousands of generations -- was stateless: small bands, tribes, or chiefdoms. No coercive monopolies on law, taxation, or violence. No government, no court, no statute existed to bind them.^[4]

The archaeological, genetic, and anthropological record confirms this.^[1][2][4] Every claim of "authority" is a late cultural invention, not a precondition for human existence.

Humans hunted, gathered, traded, raised families, settled disputes, and built complex societies for hundreds of millennia without any self-asserting authoritarian government.

The timeline is simply a fact.

Sources for the preceeding claim:

Claim: Rich Western governments have repeatedly launched wars that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, yet the people at the top have almost never faced criminal punishment.

This claim describes a pattern that is easy to see. Rich Western governments have launched wars and military campaigns that left civilians dead on a massive scale. Iraq, Vietnam, and other major Western-led wars are not obscure exceptions. They are some of the clearest examples of modern military power destroying civilian life on a huge scale. Whatever differences separated those wars, the basic result was the same: vast numbers of ordinary people were killed.

Iraq Body Count documents civilian violent deaths from the 2003 military intervention in Iraq, while population-based mortality research estimated far higher excess deaths after the invasion.^[1][2] Vietnam's official estimate, released in 1995, put civilian deaths on both sides at as many as 2,000,000, and the Pentagon Papers plus National Archives war datasets document deep U.S. responsibility for the war's planning, management, and prosecution.^[3][4][5]

The pattern does not stop there. Korean War scholarship drawing on truth-commission work describes more than 2 million dead overall and mass killings of civilians by South Korean and U.N. forces.^[6] The United States atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki directly killed at least 100,000 people, with at least another 100,000 later dying from radiation-related illness.^[7] Yale's Cambodia archive and related research show years of U.S. bombardment beginning under Lyndon Johnson and escalating under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; scholarship tied to that archive commonly cites tens of thousands of civilian deaths and often 50,000 to 150,000.^[8][9]

The same pattern appears in coups and proxy atrocities. Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the armed confrontation, and the CIA's own declassified Guatemala collection chronicles agency involvement in the 1954 coup that helped shape the later regime structure.^[10][11] In Indonesia, scholarly work describes a consensus estimate of approximately 500,000 deaths in the 1965-66 mass killings, and declassified U.S. Embassy files show that Washington tracked the killings in detail and supported the Army's suppression campaign.^[12][13] In Chile, the Rettig Report recorded more than 2,000 killings and disappearances under the Pinochet dictatorship, while declassified records show covert U.S. efforts to undermine the elected Allende government before the coup and document the violent regime that followed.^[14][15]

These cases differ in mechanism: invasion, strategic bombing, atomic attack, covert action, coup support, and support for partner forces. But they still identify the same underlying pattern: powerful Western state actors repeatedly participated in or enabled mass civilian killing, then treated those outcomes as manageable costs rather than prosecutable crimes.^{[1][3][6][7][10][12][14]}

The second half is just as simple. The ruling-class people who ran these wars, profited from them, and protected them -- presidents, prime ministers, generals, oligarchs, financiers, weapons contractors, and arms dealers -- were almost never criminally punished. They were not treated the way ordinary people would be treated for causing death on such a scale. Some were criticized. Some were investigated. Some faced protests, hearings, or bad press.

But that is not the same as a criminal charge, a conviction, or a prison sentence. For the people at the top, the usual outcome was protection, political survival, private gain, comfortable retirement, or a return to public respectability.

That is why the claim matters. It points to a double standard that does not need technical language to be understood. When mass violence is carried out by enemies or weaker states, talk of war crimes and prosecution comes quickly. When rich Western states do it, the civilians are still dead, but the people who made the decisions almost never end up in a courtroom as criminal defendants. People can argue over which war, which death toll, or which leader should be included, but the pattern itself is plain.

Another concrete example is Iran Air Flight 655.^[16] On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down a civilian Iran Air Airbus A300 over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board during a scheduled commercial flight. Later reporting and the Navy's own inquiry undermined the first U.S. claims about what the aircraft was doing. The plane was ascending on its normal route, not diving at the ship.^[16]

The United States later paid compensation to the victims' families, but without accepting legal responsibility.^[17] No senior U.S. official was criminally punished. No one at the top was held criminally accountable for the deaths.^[17] Compensation was paid, the chain of command was protected, and the case was closed.

Sources for the preceeding claim:

Definitions

Universal Moral Humanism
Every human being matters equally. No one becomes less human because of nationality, race, religion, class, passport, or political usefulness. If an act would be monstrous when done to your own family, it does not become acceptable when done to strangers far away.

Natural Law
Some basic moral limits exist whether governments respect them or not. A state can legalize theft, torture, invasion, starvation, or mass killing on paper, but that does not make those acts right. Law should answer to justice, not the other way around.

It is easy to understand the idea of objective morality or Natural Law. For ages, people have understood the idea of a deity giving us a path to rightness. The concept of a perfect being is pretty much impossible to completely comprehend, but it is easy to understand the qualities and character of such a being when one considers all the ways in which we ourselves are not perfect people.

It doesn't even matter if any deity actually exists or not. For the purposes of explanation, the mere idea of a perfect being is all that is needed. If a being is perfect, it is perfectly capable. Should all of Humanity try to become perfect? Sure seems like that would solve a lot of problems. But obviously, as anyone will tell you, nobody is perfect. Why not? Because no human being can be perfect.

But ask yourself, what would that look like? As difficult as it might be to imagine a single perfected being, now imagine two, co-existing. The arising paradox is obvious. Ignore the paradox. It is not relevant to the point of the thought experiment.

Now imagine 8.2 billion perfect beings on the same planet. Billions of Superpersons living together. Now understand how billions of perfect super beings resident on the same limited planet would have to behave in order to avoid a descent into the chaos that such a paradox would otherwise imply. If a being is perfect, it will get along perfectly with its fellow perfect beings.

Someone might argue that one person's idea of perfection is not the same as another person's. That is also not relevant, since it is obvious, especially our purposes in this endeavor, that any such unique standard of "perfection" that permits domination, cruelty, theft, torture, terrorism, humiliation, or mass killing cannot describe moral perfection at all. A truly perfect being would have no need to degrade, exploit, or destroy other beings in order to coexist with them. The moral standard is glaringly obvious.

So the universal method to develop a moral standard becomes obvious: When considering any action, simply ask oneself, if everyone were to behave this way, would chaos result? Or would we move toward a perfect order that makes coexistence not just possible but sustainable?

A moral principle that cannot survive contact with lived human reality is not objective enough.

Popular sovereignty
Political authority belongs to the people, not to kings, presidents, oligarchs, parties, armies, or foreign powers. Governments are supposed to be tools created by human beings for human beings. When they act against the people and beyond moral limits, they lose any serious claim to rule.

Anti-statist legitimacy
A government does not become legitimate just because it exists, has uniforms, wins gatekept and non-transparent elections, or controls police and courts. Legitimacy comes from serving human beings without domination, abuse, or fraud. If a state becomes a machine for organized harm, people do not owe it moral obedience just because it calls itself the law.

Anti-imperialism
No country, empire, alliance, or wealthy and powerful individual has the right to dominate weaker societies through invasion, occupation, sanctions that crush civilians, puppet rulers, covert sabotage, debt traps, coercion, or economic blackmail. Strength does not excuse crimes against humanity.

Anti-capitalism
Many people are taught that capitalism just means trade, supply and demand, or free markets. That is misleading. In real life, markets are just people exchanging goods and services. That kind of trade is governed by supply and demand.

Capitalism is something more specific. Capital means accumulated wealth used as power. When a small minority of very rich people own or control the things everyone else needs to live and to make a living, such as land, housing, tools, energy, food, medicine, and information, that is capitalism.

Economic life should be organized around meeting human needs. But under capitalism, rich people use capital to seize and hoard control over these essentials. They use that power over basic necessities to keep everyone else dependent on them. This gives overwhelming coercive power over nearly everyone to a small wealthy minority. They become rulers over us.

A decent society does not allow basic life to be governed by private control and private gain.