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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 570
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WCL 570 Oct 2007
Catch 'em young!
My family were politically-aware: reading included H.G. Wells and other radical writers, so when in 1939 someone brought in a copy of Union Now I read it at the age of 11. A Penguin Special by W.B.Curry entitled The Case for Federal Union was bought and having read that, my reaction was "Yes, of course it makes sense." I had, unwittingly, begun to abandon my nationalism and become a world citizen. The following five years of war took me into the air force and on 7th August 1945 I was in aircrew training in Florida, U.S.A.
The news of the destruction of Hiroshima by atom-bomb converted, within a very brief span, all the facts I had noted and accepted, into a solid belief in the need for world government to prevent war. Three years later I realised that others had similar ideas and joined Federal Union, of which my membership now stretches to almost 60 years. It has been a long and complicated intellectual journey, not to comprehend federalism, but to make out just why the majority of humans are so wedded to outdated ideas and less rational, more violent and competitive beliefs.
Throughout my life that has been my main preoccupation. Over the years, writing innumerable articles, a dozen pamphlet and two book, plus talks and speeches and editing federalist work has been some sort of diversion from the tedium of watching our world stumble into crisis after crisis. Conflict after conflict, all of which required the application of law and rational behaviour for their prevention or solution, have succeeded each other in most painful procession. In 1945 federalists foresaw and proclaimed the inability of the United Nations to achieve its stated aims, in just the way that it is still failing "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
Even if the world has learnt so very little in 60 years I believe I have adapted, no longer seeing the principal challenge as one to explain that habitual and traditional methods of international action must be replaced. True, they must be - by global organization to create the proper structure for a peaceful and law-abiding world. But more and more I have felt the need to start where I began in 1939 to see myself as a world citizen, because only when people feel that world citizenship for themselves will they also feel obliged to search for the solutions that federalists have worked on for so long.
Accordingly, I have concentrate on world citizenship, not because it is the chief priority if we are going to stop the world being destroyed by our friends and neighbours. There are already millions of world citizens, engaged in every sort of activity, from campaigning against nuclear weapons and the arms trade, to trying to save the environment and whales or other wild life. But until we have millions more who proclaim themselves to be world citizens we shall have no chance of stopping the madnesses that afflict our world.
For 50 years our greatest threat was the recklessness of our rulers that could bring us into new conflicts which their paltry wisdom could not escape from. Nowadays it looks likely that the greater disaster of global warming will arrive before we have managed to achieve that particular fate. Either way we shall have brought the world to devastation by refusing to take the steps to the peaceful community that a federal world government would make possible.
Only world citizenship can avert that.
John Roberts
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