VALID FILE The Human Family Section
Introduction


World history, until the last century, has excluded the individual human from its horrific events. War and nationalism have been the identifying features of world history. But war is the contradiction of morality. It is the bankruptcy of reason itself. It is the denial of order, trust, justice, freedom and love, which are human values. But it dominated and is still dominating world history. Until mid-20th century the individual moral person had no "territory" on which to "stand," no political meta-ground from which he/she could exercise innate morality so long taught by humanity's sages and religious leaders.
In short, humanity had no spokespersons, no political voice. It didn't exist politically.
That changed on May 25, 1948. A willfully stateless person, having legally divorced himself from the exclusive horizontal nation-state system, declared himself a sovereign "World Citizen." Since all states exercise the same right to impose exclusive citizenship of all new-borns within their alleged national territory, this claim could not be denied. The legal principles involved are jus solis (by right of land) and jus sanguinis (by right of blood).
But by revealing a new and global "territory" which the individual could legitimately claim and from which he/she could exercise morality, the chain which bound humans to the horizontal, we-they political divisions was forever broken.
It was the beginning of the functioning of political humanity threatened by the so-called Nuclear Age.
The following pictorial display is concrete evidence of that dynamic reality.
The photos came with the application forms received by the World Service Authority over the years from individuals requesting the human rights documents issued by the World Government of World Citizens.
They represent the two true aspects of sovereignty.
The first is the sovereignty of the individual. Each photo is of a real human who has exercised his/her inalienable right of political choice.
That choice is world citizenship
There is no arrangement of the photos according to nationality, gender, age, religion, economic, social or political status, residence, or any relative difference. Each individual has expressed his/her sovereign human will in a new political domain: world territory. This personal sovereign act is what might be called "vertical" since the human concerned is relating him/herself to the world as such transcending all relative differences. (See the article "Human Rights and World Territory" in this issue.)
The second aspect of sovereignty is represented by all the photos taken together. There are no artificial or fictional frontiers, either implied or actual between them. Therefore, on this "horizontal" level, the only definition is that of humanity itself.
The sovereignty of humanity itself is vividly revealed in its unity and legitimacy.
There are no "enemies" here, national leaders to the contrary notwithstanding.
This, in brief, is what these panels of photos represent. Indeed, they are the living response to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC and to all memorials to those humans who, as national soldiers, died so that we survivors, we World Citizens, could chose to live together as humans. on our home planet Earth.