R. I. P. That, and a dark epiphany during a bombing run over Brandenburg, Germany, Garry Davis later wrote, would alter his life’s course. “Ever since my first mission over Brandenburg, I had felt pangs of conscience,” Mr. Davis wrote in a 1961 memoir, “The World Is My Country.” (The volume was later reissued as “My Country Is the World.”) “How many bombs had I dropped? How many men, women and children had I murdered? Wasn’t there another way, I kept asking myself.” The other way, he came to believe, was to eradicate conflict by eradicating borders. In November 1948, six months after renouncing his citizenship in Paris, Mr. Davis stormed a session of the United Nations General Assembly there. “We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give,” he proclaimed. “The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.” His act, reported worldwide, earned the support of the intelligentsia, including Albert Camus, and of the French public, so recently racked by war. Less than two weeks later, speaking at a Paris auditorium, Mr. Davis drew a crowd of 20,000. In 1949, Mr. Davis founded the International Registry of World Citizens and was soon inundated with requests to join from around the globe. “We’re bigger than Andorra,” he told The Boston Globe in 1981, when the registry was a quarter-million strong. Today, more than 950,000 people are registered world citizens, according to the World Service Authority, based in Washington.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 11:34:14 +0000
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