The Gaza Holocaust

I contend that the genocide in Gaza being committed by the Israeli government can also be termed a holocaust. This is actually not much of a leap; what is surprising is that American mercenaries—retired U.S. Army officers working as subcontractor security forces at food distribution sites in Gaza—have also enjoyed the sport of shooting adult and even children Gazans under the reasonable assumption of impunity. As the funder of the subcontractor, the U.S. Government can be considered as an accomplice even more directly than in merely supplying Israel with the weapons to use to kill off the population of Gaza. The sheer inertia of the American electorate and the intractability of the federal representatives can itself be viewed as a subtle accomplice in the ongoing atrocity of the Gaza Holocaust. Even in the E.U., the electorate and its federal representatives have been slow to adjust, as for instance E.U. President Von der Leyen made an excuse in July of 2025 not to end the trade agreement with Israel. With the U.S. so ethically compromised, the world wisely looked to the E.U. and even to China to step in and stop the holocaust, especially after an American who had witnessed the killing publicly described the horrendous role of both the Israelis and Americans providing “security” at the food-distribution sites.

Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Army employee who had served a quarter century in the Special Forces as a Green Beret, worked as an independent subcontractor for UG Solutions as armed security for GHF, which is funded by the U.S. Government to manage food-delivery sites in Gaza. So he is very credible. He ended his contract on June 14, 2025 “after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.”[1] That is, a retired U.S. Army employee working as a subcontractor witnessed not only Israeli soldiers, but also American mercenaries, carry out atrocities “against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.”[2] The IDF lied that soldiers have used their guns at the sites only to “deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.”[3] Aguilar has stated, “(a)ll four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone.”[4]

In other words, it is no accident that Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries have shot so many Gazans at the food-distribution sites. Perhaps it could even be said that the idea for the sites was part of a wider strategy in the Israeli government to kill as many Gazans as possible while seemingly placating objections by other governments that Israel had been deliberately starving Gazans under the ethically-discredited notion of collective justice. Similar to the Nazi strategy of representing the concentration camps as labor camps, the Israeli strategy seems to be to turn a humane response—food distribution sites—into a means of shooting even children under the false claim of “crowd control.”

The Israelis’ Gaza Holocaust and the Nazi’s Jewish Holocaust resemble on another in that extermination of a people (i.e., people who group-identify themselves in a particular group) can be said to be the goal. In fact, the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza goes beyond the Nazi’s Jewish ghettos. Put another way, whereas the Israeli government has sought to render Gaza as uninhabitable so the residents would suffer for an extended period of time before dying, the Nazis did not render the ghettos uninhabitable before the Jews were taken to the camps. In this way, the Gaza Holocaust is actually worse, assuming that it is unethical to intentionally make people suffer, especially if severely. An Israeli government official even stated that death is not bad enough for what the Gazans deserve, as if even the children were culpable for Hamas’ attack back in 2023. Perhaps therein lies the real difference between a genocide and a holocaust.

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1. Sanjana Karanth, “’Nothing Is Going To Buy My Soul’: GHF Whistleblower Reveals Horrors In Gaza,” The Huffington Post, July 31, 2025.

2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Israel Kidnapping at Sea: On Absolutist National Sovereignty

In the dark of night on June 9, 2025, Israeli military forces intercepted The Madleen, a yacht operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), a political-activist group oriented to getting food and medicine to the residents of Gaza in Israel. Activists from the E.U., Brazil, and Turkey were on the boat until they were forced onto an Israeli boat and taken to Tel Aviv’s airport, where they were pressured to sign a document that they had entered Israel illegally and agreed to be deported. Once back in the E.U., its activist Greta Thunberg told reporters that Israel had committed “an illegal act by kidnapping us on international waters and against our will, bringing us to Israel, keeping us in the bottom of the boat, not letting us getting out and so on.”[1] She had agreed to give her written consent to be deported (even if that meant being permanently banned from Israel, she likely would have welcomed the stipulation), but she refused to admit that she had entered Israel illegally. She had, after all, been kidnapped in international waters. Being forced to enter a country by its government, whose officials reason nonetheless that the entrance is illegal, merits the spotlight on enquiry, as this actual mindset can be said to be pathological in nature. I submit that pathology with governmental sovereignty is never a good mix.

Of her kidnapping in international waters north of Egypt, over 100 miles from Israel, Thunberg humbly relativized her own plight by adding, “But that is not the real story here, the real story is that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and a systematic starvation following the siege and blockade now, which is leading to food, medicine, water—that are desperately needed to get into Gaza—is prevented from doing so.”[2] Her priority in directing attention to the condition of the residents of Gaza is eminently valid; even so, I contend that it should not totally eclipse the glimpse afforded to us by the public response of the Israeli foreign ministry to Israel’s interception of the boat and abduction of its occupants.

As if Israel’s blockade off the coast of Gaza extended into international waters, the ministry “insisted the blockade,” and thus the interception of the boat, “was ‘consistent with international law.’”[3] Stating furthermore that “unauthorized attempts to breach” the blockade “were ‘dangerous, unlawful, and undermine ongoing humanitarian efforts,’” as if one small humanitarian effort would undermine others as if “collective justice” would mean that all aid would then be blocked, the foreign ministry was stating, in effect, that motive is sufficient for such a breach even while a boat is still in international waters, just north of another country rather than off Israel’s coast.[4] As against the international illegality of surrounding a boat in international waters, harassing its passengers, spraying them with a white irritant, and forcing them to leave the boat and be taken to Israel (as they were not yet even in Israeli waters), motive of intent to eventually violate Israel’s blockade by approaching Gaza from the sea means that Israel did not actually violate international law. Treating motive as an unauthorized attempt to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza even outside Israel’s waters is a misuse of the military doctrine of preemption, which in turn can be traced back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq two decades earlier.

Accusing the kidnapped of illegally entering Israel adds insult to injury. Furthermore, such a cognitive warping as, “I forced you here and you came here illegally” implies that the Israeli government had acted illegally, since that government’s action caused the illegal entry. In addition to twists of reason, the ministry’s statement reveals something heinous about the mental boxes of the powerful whose use is not subject to a higher authority and whose unrelenting, still unspent hatred toward another group warps perception and judgment as well as clear thinking. The resulting dissidence reflects back on extraordinary arrogance fed by over a year of de facto impunity internationally in decimating a captive population. “Drunk with power” is yet another way of characterizing the presumption of arrogance, which, sadly, is human, all too human. Yet even before the conflagration in Gaza, before the dreadful yet much more limited attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, an Israeli government presumed itself entitled to go into another sovereign country and kidnap Adolf Eichmann, so even though he, unlike the humanitarians on the boat, deserved his fate in court, the pattern of hyperextending beyond Israel’s borders to kidnap non-Israelis can be discerned, and this pattern suggests a sordid mentality of extenuated self-entitlement. Such a mentality running a sovereign government is problematic internationally, and thus this case reasonably comes under the purview of the international community.

From this case study’s glimpse of a problemed mentality of government officials in a foreign ministry, the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which not only Israel, but the U.S., Russia, and China have held onto as if it were a sacred dogma, can and should be up for review. Absent any international coalition of willing countries to militarily enter Gaza to protect and feed the residents, and Israel’s ongoing naval blockade of food and medicine, which strongly suggests a motive to exterminate the population so Jewish settlements could repopulate Gaza, proposals to check national sovereignty at the global level, whether by removing vetoes from the UN Security Council, making resolutions by the General Assembly binding on countries, or establishing a rival institution capable of governance and enforcement to at least some degree should be considered. To Kant’s point that an international federation of countries would make peace merely possible but not probable can be added the crucial element of whether such a federation would have some governmental sovereignty of its own with which to act as a real check on abuses of national sovereignty by national governments.

In short, the kidnapping in international waters by a national government with impunity reveals for us a mentality that is dangerous when it can draw on national sovereignty to act out aggressively as a predator. That such a sordid mentality is able to enjoy Hobbes’ proverbial state of nature of “dog eat dog” (so life is short and brutish as there is no superordinate power) should be a sign that the post-World-War-Two world order was in dire need of serious reform or being replaced outright such that abuses of absolutist national sovereignty could be checked by limited yet effectual authority beyond the nation-state yet accountable to a super-majority, with minority rights protected by an international court whose rulings could be enforced against the resistance of guilty national governments.

The implications of the decision that was taken by the Israeli government as if its jurisdiction extended into international waters brings up more than merely that government’s legitimacy, for the world order itself could then be perceived as woefully inadequate, even broken. Constructing the UN in the wake of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and in the midst of the nuclearized Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not go far enough, and thus underestimated the depravity of human nature drunk with unlimited national sovereignty.

Indeed, the motives and actions of Israeli officials against the innocent residents of Gaza at the scale of an entire people to be moved or else exterminated answers the question asked in the wake of the Second World War of whether the world would learn its lesson. Evidently, Hitler did not sufficiently jolt humanity into engaging in sufficient political development internationally, for Netanyahu’s cadre can arguably be placed in the same class as the Nazis. In a way, the impunity enjoyed by Israel and its very likely ability to continue as a nation makes this case more dangerous than that of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of human rights, for the lesson going forward could be that crimes against humanity do pay off.

Even in refusing to go back to its 1967 borders, Israel as a country had been in violation of international law for decades, again with such blatant impunity that the country’s government went on the offensive against a subjugated and captive population of Muslims. The mentality is the same as that of kidnapping foreigners in international waters only to accuse them of illegally entering the country: Ignoring the violation of international law as to borders (as well as the rulings of international courts on the occupation of Gaza) only to go on the offensive in bombing and starving entire cities in Gaza. The mentality of aggression in this case is two degrees of separation from the normalcy of recognizing and atoning for one’s own previous actions. It is astonishing that the hubris of arrogance does not trip over itself as if running on stilts while throwing rocks. Such a mentality renders the absolutist version of national sovereignty not only dangerous, but deeply flawed from the standpoint of human nature.  

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1. Jaroslav Lukiv and David Gritten, “Greta Thunberg Deported, Israel Says, after Gaza Aid Boat Intercepted,” BBC.com, June 10, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Beyond Description, Atrocious, Inhumane: The New Normal?

“The situation for Palestinians in Gaza is beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond inhumane.”[1] So wrote Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, on May 17, 2025. He could have been looking at films taken when the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945 at the end of World War II. It was a shock to the world back then. The scale of the inhumane atrocity of over a million people living in rubble and starving by design in the next century raises the question of whether extreme inhumanity toward a group in searing hatred was becoming normalized, and thus tolerated by the world absent even a coalition of the willing to step in and counter what even democracy could inflict.

At the very least, the impunity enabled by Israel’s major ally pointed to a fatal flaw in the post-World-War II world order, including the United Nations. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union made the world vulnerable, given the bias in there being one less superpower. “A policy of siege and starvation makes a mockery of international law,” the head of the UN wrote.[2] He added that annexation and settlements in the Palestinian territories are illegal, and “nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” or, I might add, of any people.[3] Yet even such strong phraseology is but dry parchment while Israel killed over 100 residents of Gaza on next day—bombing a hospital no less in an attack called Operation Gideon’s Chariot.

To be sure, the Israeli government announced it would “allow a ‘basic amount of food’ to enter Gaza ‘to ensure a famine crisis does not develop’ after blockading the territory for 10 weeks.”[4] Lest humanity be presumed to be the motive, Israel’s IDF made the recommendation “out of the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting” as Israel’s army expanded its presence in Gaza.[5] A similar logic may have been behind Eichmann’s frustration that there simply were not enough ovens so the number of people gassed daily had to be reduced. In both cases, group-identification led to viewing some humans as not human.

It is as if the world and especially the Israelis learned nothing from the disclosure of Hitler’s brutality, for by the 2020s, group-identification itself had still not come to be viewed as dangerous, especially when the obsession becomes reductionistic, and large-scale, planned-out atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine were allowed to go on. Eerily, were the Russian government successful in riding Ukraine of Ukrainians and the Israeli government successful in exterminating the Palestinians in Gaza, would the rest of the world blink? More likely, the tyranny of the status quo would turn a blind eye and go on as if nothing atrocious had happened.

I think it very likely that not even Guterres’s strong words would be enough to translate any political will into action to forestall the victimizers even by the UN. The lesson is perhaps that having strong allies can indeed enable a government to enact Nazi-level atrocities with impunity while the rest of the world looks on as if collectively helpless. What was shocking in 1945 may be viewed going forward as a precedent rather than a “never again,” line in the sand. Remembering past systematic atrocities by governments, whether of Hitler or Stalin, that were oriented to punishing or even eliminating a people out of hatred doesn’t help if such large-scale inhumanity is actually (i.e., de facto) to become precedent. In the midst of destructive, large-scale technology and the banality of efficient state organizing, the world could do worse than come up with a new world order in which having a powerful ally does not give victimizing governments a de facto veto over countervailing efforts to protect peoples from being exterminated out of sheer hatred.

John Locke knew that one rationale for government is that victims make lousy judges of their respective aggressors. That governments might view themselves as victims and leash out hyperactive vengeance may not have occurred to Locke, or even to Kant, who stated that a world federation would only possibly but not probably ensure world peace. It seems that political development beyond the nation-state needs to catch up to the modern reach and intensity of government being used as a tool of hatred. Even in 2025, Putin’s hatred of Ukrainians and Netanyahu’s hatred of Palestinians were of such intensity that both men should have been rendered unfit for office by international if not by domestic means.

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1. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, LinkedIn.com, May 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Wyre Davies and Rushdi Abualouf, “Israel Says It Will Allow Basic Amount of Food into Gaza, Ending 10-week blockade,” BBC.com, May 18, 2025.
5. Ibid.

Facing a Hot and Hostile Planet

On October 24, 2024, Tjada McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, and formerly in the Obama administration working on global hunger, spoke at Harvard on wars, hunger, and climate change then going on around the world. The pandemic had been a setback. In a world of pandemics, climate change, war, and hunger, there is no us and them. Lest this utopia be taken too realistically, 200,000 more people worldwide were hungry after the pandemic than before it. Since 1946, the highest number of state conflicts was in 2023. It was then that Russia invaded Ukraine and Israel decimated much of Gaza. In 2024, the UN’s high court found both aggressors to be violating international law, but they continued undeterred and with impunity. In the context of an epic crisis of displacement of civilians, with 339 million people globally having to rely on humanitarian assistance in 2024, the impacts of climate change exacerbated hunger and conflict in several states, especially in Africa. I contend that a serious obstacle was systemic, specifically in an antiquated global order relying on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Even the E.U. was not immune.

In her talk, McKenna said that decades of conflicts on land-access in Africa had been made worse by the impacts of climate change.  By 2024, there had been four failed rainy seasons in Somalia. In northern Kenya, similarly occurring droughts followed by heavier rains causing flooding exacerbated hunger.  Progress against hunger and diseases such as polio had been made prior the pandemic, but even so, 2023-2024 could be characterized as a time of catch-up in terms of global humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, voters worldwide in 2024 were most concerned then about increasing cost of living around the world. France and Germany decreased the global aid budgets in 2024, though I contend that focusing on E.U. states without considering the humanitarian spending at the federal level had by 2024 become  incomplete as well as antiquainted. Russia, by the way, was paying Moldovan voters and feeding them disinformation so to sabatoge Moldova in gaining statehood in the European Union while political opposition to supporting Ukraine's military was building in the United States. In short, politics was staying pretty close to immediate self-interest.

Therefore, the international system based on nations acting alone in self-interest (i.e., political realism) was not enough to address the global problems of political manipulation, climate and conflict. The U.S. Congress had dedicated $1.1 billion to preventing conflict around the world in 2019, but this was just a drop in the bucket. "A recommitment to international law and the international criminal court worldwide is necessary," she said in closing.

Thus far, I have presented McKenna’s views, albeit with a few caveats from myself. I submit that the talk was not utopian, for McKenna was hardly optimistic concerning countries taking on militaristic aggressors whether unilaterally or through global institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. “Conditions are right for bad actors,” she said, by which we might think of Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel in going too far with impunity internationally. McKenna said the world order was cracking, especially in terms of accountability. Unabashed optimism would not be appropriate, given the failures globally in 2023 and 2024 to hold Russia and Israel accountable and stop the wholesale and deliberate militaristic attacks against civilians. 

Nor was McKenna at all optimistic on a system based on sovereign nation-states mitigating climate change. A record amount of carbon emissions by humans in 2023 had made a mockery of a global approach that relies on voluntary targets, the very notion of which presupposes the absolutist version of governmental sovereignty being applied to each nation-state. I would simply add to McKenna’s lecture more of an emphasis on the need globally to reform or reconstruct the global order, such that national sovereignty would no longer be the basis, given that inherently global exigencies had already rendered the post World War II world order deficient and obsolete. 

The Plague, the Spanish Flu, and the Coronavirus: Equivalence and Progress in Infectious Diseases

History forgotten is history to be repeated, for evolution occurs over such vast oceans of time that for our purposes, human biological nature is fixed. Yet history kept fresh can permit progress such that the species is better equipped to combat problems such as pandemics. At the time of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, serious comparisons to the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Black Death of the fourteenth century were lacking in the American media, including by public health officials and government officials even as claims of vague equivalence were made. Such claims, I submit, were erroneous. In fact, they did more harm than good by instilling excessive fear in the population.

Hearing the coronavirus being referred to as a plague on National Public Radio in the United States, I instinctively bristled at the assumed equivalence. A plague is a contagious bacterial disease with a high mortality rate. Coronavirus is a virus rather than a bacterium. The Black Death was a plague pandemic that “devastated Europe from 1347 to 1352 CE, killing an estimated 25-30 million people.”[1]  Paris buried 800 dead each day of the peak, or apex, there. “On average 30% of the population of affected areas [in Europe] was killed, although some historians prefer a figure closer to 50%, and this was probably the case in the worst affected cities.”[2] In 2020, two months after the first recorded death from the coronavirus in Europe, 97,000 people there were dead. The global mortality rate of coronavirus as of March 3, 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), was just 3.4%, which is much closer to the 1% from seasonable flu.[3] Therefore, the coronavirus pandemic was not a plague.

The coronavirus pandemic was also publically likened to the Spanish Flu, which hit the U.S. in 1918. At least both were viruses, unlike the Plague. “The Spanish flu of 1918 lasted only a few months but took an estimated 50 million to 100 million lives around the globe, including 675,000 in the U.S.”[4] Ten days short of two months since the first death from the coronavirus in the U.S., 38,917 people were dead from the disease and less than 5% of the population had been infected. Worldwide, at least 158,000 people had died.[5] Clearly, the two pandemics were not equivalent. The assumed equivalence in the comparisons in 2020 demonstrates not only ignorance, but also a lack of interest in acquiring even a bit of historical knowledge so as to make tolerable comparisons.

In spite of historical knowledge being available and there being advances in knowledge, weaknesses of our species exerts a countervailing wind on the road of progress. The Spanish flu itself may not have been more virulent, however, because medical and public-health knowledge was so significantly less in 1918 than a century later. To put the two eras in perspective, model-T cars were on the road in 1918, whereas electric (and hybrid) cars were being driven and self-driving cars were being tested by 2020.

Parades and “other large public gatherings were common, contributing to the spread” of the Spanish Flu.[6] American governments facing the coronavirus pandemic prohibited or recommended people to maintain a physical distance from each other and stay home as much as possible (e.g. shelter-in-place orders). Retail businesses either shut voluntarily or by government order. Medically, antibiotics “to treat secondary bacterial infections that often accompany the flu had yet to be discovered” by 1918.[7] In addition to antibiotics, physicians in 2020 could put patients struggling to breath on ventilators.

It cannot be assumed, however, that people in 2020 could not have improved their chances of staying healthy by learning more about the 1918 societal protocols. During the Spanish Flu, it was thought “that keeping windows open would deter the spread.”[8] Trolley cars in Cincinnati, Ohio displayed fliers encouraging the practice, “which was utilized nationwide.”[9] In contrast, bus drivers in Phoenix, Arizona kept the bus’s narrow upper windows closed during the coronavirus pandemic a century later. Missing the larger point, the bus company’s management claimed that even open slits were unsafe because passengers could throw small objects out of the buses. Even though medical knowledge was clear that the coronavirus stays airborne relatively long due to its small size among flus and could even be transmitted by normal breathing, the bus company in the desert did not bother to read up on how trolley companied had dealt with the pandemic in 1918. Nor did the passengers figure that physical distancing applied to getting on the bus (i.e., giving deboarding passengers some space). In grocery stores in Phoenix, employees and customers alike overwhelmingly ignored the store policies on keeping at a distance from other people. In spite of the signs and announcements, the managements did not have control over their own employees.

In grocery stores in Phoenix, employees and customers alike overwhelmingly ignored the store policies on keeping at a distance from other people. In spite of the signs and announcements, the managements did not have control over their own employees.

Arizona at the time had one of the worst public education systems in the U.S.; even bad judgment could be traced back to this factor. Perhaps it is too idealistic to assume that everyone can be educated enough to reason his or her way to better secure even self-interested self-preservation. Even with historical knowledge and advances thereof available, human nature presents a limit as to how much actual progress can be made against infectious diseases.

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[1] Marak Cartwright, “Black Death,” Ancient History Encyclopedia (accessed on April 18, 2020).

[2] Ibid.ev

[3] Tedros Ghebreyesus, press briefing of March 3, 2020. As Director-General, he headed the World Health Organization at the time.

[4] Aaron Kassraie, “Spanish Flu: How America Fought a Pandemic a Century Ago,” AARP (accessed April 18, 2020).

[5] Ben Westcott et al, “Global Coronavirus Death Toll Passes 158,000,” CNN.com, April 18, 2020.

[6] Aaron Kassraie, “Spanish Flu: How America Fought a Pandemic a Century Ago,”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

National Leaders Lag Global Crises: A Systemic Explanation

Surveying the world on August 19, 2014, the UN’s Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, claimed that the greatest humanitarian crises in the history of the United Nations were outstripping any solutions coming from the organization’s members. World leaders, he said, “have to sit down together with an open heart to negotiate in the interests of their people,” Ban said.[1] Yet there’s the rub, for even though the Secretary-General avoided the point (perhaps because it implies structural reform at the UN), national officials acting in the interest of their respective citizens do not necessarily have an interest in coming together with other such officials to take care of the mammoth human external costs of countries at war with themselves.

By the day of Ban’s astonishing declaration that the world faces the greatest humanitarian crises in the history of the UN, 6.5 million people had been displaced in the three years of civil war in Syria. The Russian-aided separatist movement in Ukraine had claimed 2,000 lives since the beginning of 2014. Fighting in Iraq and Israel were also among the humanitarian disasters in progress. In 2013, at least 33 million people had been displaced by such conflict—the highest figure ever recorded, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.[2]

Even though Ban complained about the lack of political will in the international community to resolve the ongoing conflicts or at least provide sufficient humanitarian aid to the displaced, the problem lies deeper. That is to say, it is no accident that national officials around the world were not leading on these global problems. Rather than merely being a question of leadership, thus idiosyncratic to particular officials, a disjunction naturally severs their political interests from their international “responsibilities;” for is it even fair to an elected official to say that he or she has an ethical duty to work toward solutions to problems outside the actual or best interests of his or her constituents? Similarly, would it be ethical for a corporation’s board of directors to disregard their fiduciary duty to the stockholders in committing funds needed in the company to societal problems that only vaguely negatively impact the company’s short- or long-term profitability? Certainly, global and societal problems cry out for help, and it is only human to want to respond, but what if the incentives and disincentives built into the system work tacitly against rather than for such a response?

In his statement, Ban Ki Moon admits both that national officials work in the interests of their respective peoples and that he himself cannot solve the crises or attend to their humanitarian external costs. “I can bring world leaders to the river,” he explained, “but I cannot force them to drink water.”[3] What lies only implicit, unfortunately, in relating these two points is the lack of any governmental sovereignty on Ban’s level, on which resolving humanitarian crises is not an externality. Depending on government officials on another level to respond as if this were so on their level too is foolish, not to mention erroneous. In fact, it may even be unethical, given the fiduciary duty of elected national officials to represent their respective constituents. That Ban backed off from mention of this structural flaw in the global fabric is telling, particularly given the conflict of interest that exists for any national official in deciding whether to cede some sovereignty to the UN or retain the authority. Ban wants to keep his job, and he knows where the true power lies in the UN.

Leadership, especially the visionary sort, does not respond to crisis after crisis; rather, a vision is of an alternative paradigm, and thus connotes structural change in governance systems. Perhaps political leadership had been so melted down into public administration and the culture of managerialism by 2014 that structural change even as an ideal could only be imagined as an oxymoron, and certainly not uttered in the public square. With such a tight straight-jacket, it is no wonder that pressures around the world built up and exploded. Are we then left with a tale of two cities—one gripped by a pathological fear of change and the other moved only in fits by revolutionary fervor? Is the want of visionary leadership in formulating, enunciating, and advocating systemic change to be forever sacrificed in favor of either Edwin Burke’s conservatism or Robespierre’s forced radical change?

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[1]Oren Dorell, “U.N. Chief: Crises at New High,” USA Today, August 20, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.