Not to brag, but I can say (immodestly) that I have something in common with Albert Einstein, the Dr Schweitzer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, François Mauriac, André Breton, Raymond Queneau, Marcel Marceau, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Ustinov, Abbé Pierre, Eleanor Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, etc. The list of celebrities who have declared themselves (like me!) “citizens of the world” is endless.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
At the end of the Second World War, many of us proclaimed “never again! “. Today, with the war unfolding in Ukraine, the perennial problem of the removal of borders – to which Garry Davis devoted his life – suddenly resurfaces.
The first citizen of the world
During World War II, Garry Davis, an American pilot, dropped bombs on German cities. After seeing the destruction they perpetrated among the civilian population, he found the situation unbearable. “How many men, women and children have I murdered? Wasn’t there another way? he wondered. And so, gnawed by remorse, he returned to Germany to ask for forgiveness. As a result, the aviator has become the embodiment of a visionary utopia, that of the obliteration of nations and unification under the aegis of a world government. His dream: a world without borders!
His reasoning was simple, his objective immense: if there were no nation-states, he thought, there would be no wars!
Three years after the end of the war, the first United Nations General Assembly was held in Paris. Davis took the opportunity to set up a small tent on the declared “international” ground for the duration of the historic meeting. He also surrendered his passport to the US Embassy claiming that he was now a “citizen of the world”.
At that time, my family and I (freshly released from Germany) had found asylum in Paris. I had just turned 13. We couldn’t go back to our country of origin, Lithuania, which was still occupied by the Russians (yes, still the same!). When my father, who shared the dream of Garry Davis, learned that he had set up camp at the Palais de Chaillot, he took me there to applaud his idol. I remember – and how could I forget it – that the crowd, gathered on the spot to see the “phenomenon”, of which the whole world spoke, was absolutely hysterical.
Thirty years after my brief encounter with him in Paris, I saw Davis again in Montreal. It was at the Book Fair. He was looking for a French publisher for his book.
Garry founded the World Government of World Citizens (still based in Washington), which specializes in issuing identity cards, birth certificates, marriage certificates and a world passport particularly sought after by refugees and stateless persons. Today, 800,000 people hold this passport.
As war rages in Ukraine more than ever, Davis’s ideas resurface in my head.
“Wherever we are, he said, we are under the sun at the same distance from the stars. Do astronauts take a passport with them when they go into space? If they happened to fall into an unintended corner of the planet, I bet there would still be some fool to ask them for their passport. There are no borders for radio waves, the telephone, the internet. Ecology knows no borders.
“Do you believe that acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer are concerned with borders? How can we think of preserving the climate and the forests of the world if a world government is not responsible for assessing the damage and applying sanctions on a global scale? The same authority on a planetary scale is necessary to regulate pollution, acid rain, toxic gases, the shameless waste of the Earth’s resources, poverty, famine, genetic manipulation and drugs. »
Need we remind you that Davis was one of the very first pacifists focused on opposing nuclear proliferation?
He always affirmed that, at all times, political regimes had only one point between them: war! According to him, to precipitate a realization here below, what is needed is an invasion of space. When the leaders of the countries learn that aliens are threatening to land on Earth, they will decide to unite for the survival of civilization. Faced with the imminence of danger, they will finally forget their nationalities and perhaps suddenly rediscover human solidarity.
Garry the Visionary passed away 10 years ago. He was 91 years old. Until his last breath, he remained faithful to the ideal which was his and which he was able to share with so many human beings who dream of living in peace.
Can’t wait for the coming of a new apostle who will succeed in making us true citizens of the world opposed to borders and… to the cursed wars.