We may be facing a new dark age, an unrivaled epoch of Stygian darkness. Only we citizens can prevent it. Only we can demand our leaders do better. We may fail. Indeed, humanity may fail and go extinct just like so many other species. But we can resist. And resist we must.

Depending on your citizenship, write your congress person, your member of parliament, your mayors and other public figures. Go to the town halls and let your voices be heard. As that famous civil rights campaigner John Lewis put it: “get into good trouble.”

Without justice and equality for the least of us there will be no peace, no justice, for the rest of us. Let your voices be heard. Protest. Protest. Protest. Get out on the streets!

Citizens of the world – those in more-or-less democratic countries where voices still matter – must rise up in protest. We must do everything in our power to pressure our politicians to cooperate in supporting human rights institutions, international law, and efforts to improve the human condition.

Dictators like Putin and Xi, and would-be dictators like Trump and Netanyahu, seek - a world where war, and war crimes, and even the crime of crimes, genocide become the normalized and acceptable currency of the powerful.

Even Trump’s tariffs and his imperial designs on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal must be seen in this light.

These so-called leaders would substitute naked power for rules that, however inconsistent and hypocritically enforced, on the whole have advanced collective human needs over the kleptocracy and corruption of the ultra-rich and powerful.

They are part of an effort to subvert the entire edifice of the post-World War II rules-based order. Similarly, Trump’s bullying Ukraine’s President Zelensky puts the United States squarely within the effort to elevate might-makes-right over international laws and norms.

And Putin

We changed the world alright but not in the way we hoped. We gave the world George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump (and Putin, Netanyahu, et al.). The Greatest Generation was followed by the generation of avarice, rapacity, cupidity and greed. Shame on us.

But I weep for the world we old farts are leaving behind. My generation of baby boomers blew it. We started so hopeful with our Vietnam, civil rights and environmental protests. We were going to change the world.

If Trump, Xi and Netanyhu succeed in dismantling the human rights and international criminal law movements, then we are in parlous times indeed. I am old and this spiraling, downward march to dystopia may pass me by (at least directly as I am not face-to-face with the bombs of the oppressors).

As western dominated as it is; and as full of convenient gaps for the rich and powerful to slide through - as defective as it was - it was, and is, light-years ahead of the Grotian, "might makes right" rules that the world followed from the 17th century to WWII.

We need to see a world where the use of such weapons is not simply illegal, but is eliminated.

Putin, and his henchmen, can cry and scream retribution, but as a practical matter there is little they can do, and for once, the international community will quite properly do nothing as well. Moreover, one can hope that Russia's illegal use of chemical and biological weapons will be hampered.

Unlike (very unlike) the Israeli Defense Forces attacking in Gaza, it appears that these considerations were scrupulously followed by the Ukrainians. Therefore, whatever one might think of the assassination ethically, it was lawful. The world is less one more thug.

Non combatants (which includes civilians, POWs, and the sick and wounded) must not be targeted directly, and in any armed attack the issues of distinction and proportionality must be assessed to eliminate the likelihood of disproportionately affecting non combatants.

Kirillov was an active combatant under the laws of war and therefor a proper target wherever he was including outside his home. The only issue under international law revolves around whether the special forces considered the likelihood of civilian casualties.

We don't punish much less execute criminals without a trial under international law; Manifestly evil and criminal acts do not justify exploding a bomb on the streets of Moscow to eliminate the evil-doer.