How the "Political Space Age" Started
Garry Davis
"Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegience and the broad humanity of which we are born a part."
The Wild Flag, E. B. White
On November 22, 1948, with friends, from the gallery of the Palais de Chaillot, I interrupted a session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris calling for "one government for one world." Our peoples' interruption, supported by Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Claude Bourdet, Emmanuel Mounier, Robert Sarrazac and many other French intellectuals, among others, continued for an hour after I was hustled out by UN Security guards.
Two months before, on September 11, after having expatriated myself legally from the United States of America as a protest against the continuing war game of nations, and after having received from the French government an expulsion order to leave France or face imprisonment, I claimed "global political asylum" on the tiny plot of ground dubbed "international" at the Place de Trocadero facing the Eiffel Tower where the General Assembly was to have its 3rd session.
What made the claim more unusual and even historic was that five months before, on the day I renounced my nationality, May 25, I laid claim to the status of world citizenship.
While holding for 7 days that "international" territory as "home" before being "expulsed" back into France by the French gendarmes at the behest of the frustrated UN secretariat, I petitioned the United Nations to hold a review conference provided by Article 109 of its Charter to transfer itself into a world federal government. This idea was not new even to the Member-States. Thirty delegations at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 where the UN was founded urged the new organization to incorporate legislative powers in order to outlaw war among nations, the lack of which caused the League of Nations to flounder and finally blow up in World War II.
E. B. White, monitoring the conference wrote in the New Yorker magazine that "Law is, unfortunately, not law unless it is enforced, and the 'laws' of warfare are in their very nature unenforceable, being a mere set of rules for quarelling, which any country can disregard if it chooses."
Since that interruption in 1948, member-states of the United Nations have fought over 75 wars between themselves. Trillions of tax dollars have been spent on weapons; tens of millions have been killed, wounded and made homeless; the earth has been devastated, irradiated, and raped by armies both in the field and on manuevers, the oceans polluted with oil and radio-activity from buried submarines and the very space around the planet used as a war zone and dumping-"ground" for the "toys" of Man's war games.
I use "Man" here deliberately since war is strictly a man's so-called game. Based on artificial division, it's underlying philosophy is we-against-them. That's the credo of the nation-state system itself.
It's also the basis of the oxymoronic "United Nations," the two words diametrically opposite in meaning and application.
In 1945, shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasai bombings, Emery Reves wrote in the runaway best-seller, The Anatomy of Peace: "As the twentieth-century crisis is a worldwide clash between the social units of sovereign nation-states, the problem of peace in our time is the establishment of a legal order to regulate relations among men, beyond and above the nation-states."
The UN's own Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed on December 10, 1948 as a "Common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations," in both articles 21(3) and 28, ironically exposes its abject failure to address global issues. The former claims that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government..." while the latter flatly contradicts the UN's very premise: the inviolability of national sovereignty: "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized."
People found governments. From villages, towns, cities to nations, the people have joined in a social contract in ever-widening social concentric circles for both the common and individual good.
The United Nations is merely a symptom of an anachronistic and suicidal system which has run its historic course.
Norman Cousins in the August, 1948 Saturday Review of Literature wrote "Already he (Man) has become a world warrior; it is but one additional step - though a long one - for him to develop a world conscience...He shall have to recognize the flat truth that the greatest obsolescence of all in the Atomic Age is national sovereignty."
As humanity approaches the 21st century, only world citizenship and world government can bond each to each and each to all.