September 4, 1986

WORLD GOVERNMENT CELEBRATES 33RD BIRTHDAY TODAY AS NATIONS CONTINUE ARMS RACE AT $1,000,000 PER MINUTE

Ellsworth, Maine, September 4-Thirty-three years ago today, before an audience of 40 curious onlookers, in a 2-hour speech during which he unfurled a make-shift World Flag, Garry Davis, (32), a native of Bar Harbor and former WW II bomber pilot, declared the World Government of World Citizens from the auditorium of the Ellsworth City Hall.

His mandate, he claimed, derived both from articles (21(3) and 28* of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948 and the 750,000 individuals registered as World Citizens by the International Registry of World Citizens in Paris between January 1, 1949 and that date.

Davis' World War II experiences culminated by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had convinced him that only a world government could prevent another world war and that a portion of national sovereignty would have to be relinquished to empower that government.

To make the point that the individual was the key element to this revolutionary change in political decision-making, he renounced his U.S. nationality on May 25, 1948 in Paris, France and declared himself a "citizen of the world."

From that humble beginning, the world citizenship movement began.

"The modern nation-state system," Davis said today in Ellsworth, "which began in the early 18th century to cope with the growing complexity of the industrial era, is not only an anachronism but suicidal given nuclear weaponry. It has war built into the system. No national leader can prevent world war. Gorbachev and Reagan never attack war as the ultimate foreign policy. In fact, they both need the international conflicts to justify exclusive national sovereignty. That's precisely why national leaders can't break away from (why national)their 18th century system, a system now teetering on global holocaust."

Since 1953, the World Government of World Citizens has registered over 300,000 citizens including such illustrious persons as Isaac Asimov, Stafford Beer, Yehudi Menuhin, Louis Kelso, Katherine Dunham and Peter.Fonda. But the major proportion of the registered world citizenry are refugees and stateless persons.

Through its administrative agency, the World Service Authority, operating from corporate offices in downtown Washington, D.C., the global government issues the official World Citizen Registration Card, a World Identity Card, World Birth Certificate, World Marriage License, as well as its global passport, a 40-page document in seven languages, now recognized by over 100 counties.

"The United Nations is not a government and was never intended to be," added Davis. "It has been given no power to prevent war. On the contrary, in condoning exclusive national sovereignty, despite many good works, it is the institutionalization of international anarchy.

"The World Government, on the contrary, recognizing both the individual and humanity as the co-existent sovereigns on planet earth, mutually interdependent, is the only actual and legitimate peace-making government on our planet."

When the World Government constituency grows into the millions, Davis, who announced his candidacy for its president in September, 1985, plans to hold a world constitutional convention for the elaboration of a constitution for the global government. "Already dozens of theoretical world constitutions have been written and proposed," Davis continued, "but with no organized and coherent world constituency to empower them, they remain sterile legal exercises."

A resident of Washington, D.C., Davis is also a declared independent candidate for mayor of that city in the November 4 election. (See attached release.)

"Like many people, I live both on planet earth and in a major world city," Davis said when he began his present campaign. "They share the common danger of nuclear war. World Politics and local issues therefore are now dynamically related. Moreover, neither Washingtonians nor Muscovites have any political say in policies which are deciding their very lives. Yet both cities are targeted by the two national governments. As residents of these two opposing capitols, we are living on 'ground zero'. This is a common terrifying fact of the national insanity. In a real sense, we are both 'stateless'.

"In reality, since war is still the final option of all nation-states, the citizens of all major capitol cities are being held hostage by their national governments. As a declared world (both 'stateless')citizen, represented politically only by the World Government, I am the only local candidate representing the people of the world city of Washington in terms of global security, a security threatened not only by the Soviets but also by the U.S. Government itself."

On August 21 at the municipal election board, Davis filed 3200 signatures of D.C. voters on petitions for placing him in the ballot as a mayoralty candidate.

"Before it's too late," he concluded today, "we must empower ourselves with world citizenship in order to guarantee our survival along without our well-being. My candidacy on both levels, the global and local, is meant to relate practically the two in the minds of the ordinary citizens threatened by both internal inefficiency and corruption as well as the external inefficiency and deadly corruption of the national system itself." Davis, whose entire campaign is being run on a total budget of under $250, will hold open house between 5 and 7 p.m. every day in Farragut Square in downtown Washington beginning September 10th when he returns after a short visit in Sorrento with his 91-year-old mother, Mrs. Meyer Davis.

*"The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine election which shall be universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures." Art. 21(3), UDHR

"Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized" Art. 28, UDHR.