Ronnie Dugger
Feb. 12, 2005
Keynote speech at coming-out party of the World Citizens Party for a Democratic World Government, of Massachusetts
First Parish Church, Cambridge MA
© Ronnie Dugger 2005

(For the past three years a group has been meeting monthly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning democratic world government.  To promote such government, they have now formed the World Citizens Party, which is officially recognized as a candidate for qualification in an election for party status in the Commonwealth, and they are interested in the formation of other such parties in other states and in collaboration with consanguine groups in the country and the rest of the world.  On Feb. 12 in a conference room at the First Parish Church in Harvard Square the coming-out party of the WCP was held, during which Ronnie Dugger gave this speech.)


Wars of Aggression, or Democratic World Government

After half a century trying to help strengthen the United Nations, we are finally forced by our own country to see the UN for what it is and isn't.  The United States committed a war of aggression, bombing and invading Iraq.  The Secretary General of the UN said that war is illegitimate and illegal.  The UN does nothing to stop it.  Here it is.  We'd need to be blind to miss what it means.

The UN is not a federal, democratic world government.  Not at all.  It is a consultative world institution of, by, and for national sovereignty.  No person is a member.  Only nations belong.

Every nation has one vote.  National sovereignty is sacred here, even though it is not at all representative government based on one person, one vote.  Togo equals the United States.  The two million people of Panama equal the billion people of India.  This of course is absurd.

The General Assembly of nations then convenes, but has no power.  Has no independent military.  Has no taxing power.  After 60 years there is not yet even a UN rapid-response force to stop genocide or for other emergencies, even though that has been advocated by as far back as by Secretary-General Trygve Lee.

The nations of the UN agree to be governed, on war and genocide, by the five most powerful nations that had been left standing when it was formed, but only if they can unanimously agree.  "Reforming the UN" as to the Security Council simply means bringing in perhaps half a dozen additional powerful nations, or perhaps rotating members in from a group of eight or nine.  There is no serious talk of ending the one-nation veto.  On that point, a pin dropping would sound like a cannonade.

On war and peace the UN is nothing more than an attempt to evolve force majeure several shy steps toward consensus unless any big power vetoes it. 
Now, when reforming the UN in the light of its failure on Iraq is on the table, we should stand forth again with the intelligently idealistic goal of a democratic federal world government.  Even if that is still beyond our grasp, we will then at least be reforming things toward the future instead of back toward the past of primitive nationalism.
Someone should do a history of the world government idea and movements.  In my lifetime I have experienced the modern part of it. 

When I was a freshman at the University of Texas 57 years ago a world government of peace-loving nations was the national collegiate debate topic.  You had to be ready to debate either pro or con at a moment's notice.  The schizophrenia of communism v. the West was just emerging; my debate partner and I won a national collegiate tournament by, when assigned the negative, arguing you couldn't co-govern with Stalinist Russia, and, when assigned the affirmative, springing it in our second speech that we excluded Russia from the peace-loving nations of the world and, therefore, from our first-stage world government.  We won every debate.

I joined the World Federalists, and the Atlantic Union.  Those days our gurus for world government were Albert Einstein, Jean Monnet, Bertrand Russell, Hans Morgenthau.  But the cause in this country simply disappeared into the Cold War and the UN foiled by that Cold War; what little life was left in the project here was frightened to death by the violence-prone racist and militia supernationalists who turned the UN's black helicopters into the symbol for their hate of aliens and international governance.

How could you hope for world government, anyway, when a third of the world was totalitarian, a third was civil libertarian while emergingly corporate-capitalist, and a third were the impoverished battlegrounds between the first two?  We fell silent and just watched and waited, while having as much useful to do with things as we could.
The State Department conducted a packed forum on the Soviet menace in Dallas in about 1958, the height of the Cold War.  From the government it was all war talk, formulaic stuff, leading to Armageddon.  I went to the microphone in the audience and asked the State Department what the government was doing to reduce tensions with the Russians, and returned toward my seat.  Before I sat down the government man replied that that was "communist language."  I headed back to the microphone in fury--evidently this cookie-pusher had forgotten he was in Texas.  Before I reached it he had backed down and away, completely.  Such a moment of course meant little; the typhoon was year-round and lasted almost 40 years--

As Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and Hungary. As the CIA overthrew the democratic socialists Arbenz and Mossadegh and Allende.  As North Korea invaded South and Truman just barely pulled MacArthur back from starting a war with China.  As we decided not to use nukes to save Dien Bien Phu and then the Vietnamese killed 58,000 of us and we killed 3 million of them.  As John Kennedy and his brother Robert pulled the world back from nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis.  As Reagan betrayed his oath of office financing the contras with drug money.

But finally, then, in 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan struck the great reconciliation, based on the death of Soviet communist dictatorship.  1990 should have been the year when we undertook the reorganization of the human race, the conversion of the UN into a real federal and democratic government whose citizens are the people of each different nation.

Instead, nationalists in power in the U.S., especially those known now as the neo-cons, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, decided to try to convert our temporary position as the world's only surviving superpower into our permanent domination of the human race, through an American empire.  This was a fell development, the emergent will in the most lethally armed nation in the world to dominate everyone else.  In the upshot it was an eventuation of pure evil, as now, through the seized Presidency of George W. Bush, we can see.

In 2002 the second Bush, using 9/11 as justification, announced that the United States will wage wars of aggression, attacking first, whenever he wants to, that the U.S. will allow no nation to equal or surpass our military strength, and that the U.S. will regard the use of nuclear weapons as justifiable because of three new provocations, including "surprising military developments." 

We have torpedoed the historic International Criminal Court as best we can, and the Kyoto treaty on global warming.  We are building a new kind of nuclear bomb, and designing a whole new line of them.  Evidently the President on his sole personal decision prepares now to risk nuclear war for the human race.  Under Bush we propose to station weapons in space, from there to dominate every nation on earth we hope forever.  And the Neocon Pentagon predicts that a $127 billion program will provide the United States with robots that fight and kill our enemies within ten years--the monster's dream of nationalism.

The neocons, who had been lobbying for the U.S. to attack Iraq for years, with Bush's complicity, lied us into doing that with their now famous mammoth lies.  We have lost 1,400 American GI's, and 90,000 more have been wounded; we have announced that we will not count how many Iraqi fighters we kill, nor count the civilians we kill; responsible studies have estimated the civilian dead alone at least 100,000, and severe child malnutrition has doubled since the war began.  All the bombings and killings by the United States in Iraq are war crimes, and the siege of Fallujah beginning with its hospital was a crime against humanity, for which Bush, et al., should stand trial. 

But not only this.  Consistent with Condoleesa Rice's assurance that attacking Iran is "not on the agenda at this time," Iran is next.  We have commandos scoping out the targets to bomb there. Or perhaps it will be Syria, or North Korea.  Bush and his men authorized torture, and torture was being done, until they were caught at it.  And now, as the New Yorker has just revealed, we are outsourcing torture:  American commandos seize, bind, hood, and ship whoever they want to kidnap to nations we know will torture or kill them for us.  As Bob Herbert commented yesterday in the New York Times, this is on a par with contract killing.  To this, we have sunk, and the worst is to come from the yahoo from Texas either we have just elected or as I believe likely has just stolen his second four years of the Presidency.

And so our country, the United States, has become the most terrifying major nation in the world, wildly and deceitfully out of control.  As we have been turning into this pass, we who called this meeting have chosen to establish the World Citizens Party of Massachusetts to revive and promote the cause of democratic world government, the only plausible alternative to leaving the human race at the mercy of militaristic nations. 

Just going on, under this primitive nationalism and ungovernable corporate power, in a world of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, is stupid; the status quo is madness.  One who has started out with us, David Lewit, has left us in disagreement, believing or fearing world government will become fascist and favoring instead, as in philosophical archaism, the building up of local and regional self-governments.  Ducking under the theory of anarchy to focus on local or regional government only would be, de facto, merely organizing locals of the impotent United Nations, thereby leaving the field of history so that the outlook and survival of life on earth will be determined by the strongest, the most brutal, the most selfish, and the most ruthless nations and corporations.  Our ethical duty now, as citizens of the United States and of the world, is to return to the intelligent idealism of democratic world government--justice, democracy, and peace with human rights for the world.  Rather than giving up on our country and leaving, to Canada, to France, we stay here and join our country, and ourselves, to a democratic world.

Somehow, nationalism: humanism--we have held on to the tension between these two pervasive considerations throughout these dark decades.  In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running his second time for President, spoke to thousands packed into a sports gymnasium at the University of Texas in Austin.  I was standing on the gym floor toward the far back, going up on my toes--I think I didn't see him at all that night.  But I clearly heard him say:  "Somehow we must learn to be loyal to our country and the human race at the same time."

"Every nation," said Martin Luther King, Jr., "must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
Indeed, John Kennedy, as he entered upon his brief Presidency, seemed already to know that the thoughtful people of the world are quietly bonding, in their thoughts they are afraid of, with each other beyond their nations.  Seeing in the newspaper a reproduction of part of President Kennedy's own handwritten script, on legal sheets, of his only inaugural address, I thought there must be some mistake, and went out to Kennedy Point to study it myself.  There was no mistake.  Thinking, as he was saying, of "a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved forever," suddenly John Kennedy addressed "My fellow citizen of the world."  The speech as finally delivered said "citizens," but no, passionately, in his own writing, President Kennedy addressed "My fellow citizen of the world." Against "the common enemies of man:  tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself-" he scrawled, "Can we forge…a grand and gglobal alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind?  Will you join in that historic effort?"

Can and will we?  It is characteristic of this subject that it encompasses everything that is human and is therefore treacherous and extraordinarily difficult to consider. 
Are you a humanist or a greedhead?  A cynic or an idealist? A nationalist or an internationalist or both? A libertarian or a dominator?  Where do you stand on nonviolence?  Are people all deserving of our care and empathy, or should the poor be left to rot and die?  Are billionaires just fine, or should everyone have food?  A hundred years ago, would you have been an anarchist or a communist?  Is it OK for gigantic corporations to rule the nations they conjure in?  Should government be robust, or do you hate all taxes?  Should religion govern?  Why democracy?  Why not anarchism, monarchy, a military junta, big-daddy authoritarianism?  Are rights equal, or fictitious?  Does your God and only your God know best?  Is killing OK?  Do you believe with the biologist E.O. Wilson that altruism doesn't exist?

None of these questions can be roped off from this subject. Therefore, it's been a long while coming clear.  But the very idea of democratic self-government, after all, is reconciliatory solutions for disagreements among us that continue.
In the idea "democratic," by the way, I do not mean what we have now in the United States, which I believe is failing, or what we generally regard democracy to be, which is too weakly to long survive, as it has been throughout the 2,600 years of its known history.  As we are present now at the collapse of the UN edifice back into subordination to our own primitive nationalism, so also we are present at the exposure of democracy as insufficiently girded up against presidential dictatorship and big-corporate corruption of elections and governmental decisions.  Big-corporate ownership and control of radio and TV must be ended.  As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said recently, 95% of the Republican Party and 75% of the Democratic Party are corrupted, because they both take corporate money and of course that corrupts them.  The emergence of all-electronic votecounting spells the death of democracy for any people who submit to it.  If we have had our "greatest generation," we need yet a greater one, whose challenge is to tighten democracy into real self-government and the UN into democratic world government at the same time.

Bob Brainerd of Quincy, Massachusetts, and I have written a description of what we would like a democratic world government to mean and be.  This is just a working draft, or positing, by the two of us.  We'll be glad to share our draft with you, but our idea is not to get tangled up looking too far ahead.  The idea of the World Citizens Party to promote such a government is uniquely Bob's, he is the founder of WCP.

Still, to me the most important characteristics of a democratic world government, when realized, should be these—

Every person, one vote

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the fundamental law

An elected collective leadership

Gender equality in that leadership

No one-nation veto

No membership for dictatorial or totalitarian nations

Personal membership for any person on earth

In elections, public financing (no private campaign contributions) and manual recounts on demand of actual ballots cast

All issues to be decided at the lowest level of government with logical jurisdiction over them, cherishing and protecting local and regional identity and distinctivenesses, while ceding to the world democracy decisions on and control concerning war, peace, genocide, mass murder, egregious national violation of human rights, and international corporations.

A reconceived and reorganized, separate democratic system TV and radio, radically democratizing ownership and access,  specifically excluding large private corporations from airwaves-media control

Absolute transparency

Corruption of the public trust elevated to a crime at par with murder, punishable by long imprisonment, for up to life

And feasible recallability of all officers and employees of the democratic world government.

Should all democracies have to belong?  I think membership should be voluntary, but the world government's jurisdiction must extend to aggressive warmaking, genocide, egregious national violation of human rights, transnational corporations, and schemes to seek unfair advantage or domination from without. 

But everything cannot be worked out in advance.  If we set our basic direction clearly toward world-around democratic self-government we can trust, it seems to me, to the aggregating tangles of interdependent self-interest and the long roll of human life on earth to bring us all into governance together to the extent that's best for justice, human rights, and peace.

Europe is well ahead of us on this.  The European Union is taking on pollution from airplanes and is tougher on antitrust than we are.  Expanded to 25 nations, the EU is voting now on a new constitution.  Hungary and Lithuania have ratified; Spain votes Feb. 20th; France this spring.

The U.S. having become a superpower practicing primitive nationalism, I believe that it is our duty to advance from here within our own American groups and parties the intelligently idealistic remedy for that very malfunction.   We should be moving the UN toward democratic governance and justice with human rights, away from tolerating wars of aggression through force majeure. 

The emergency issues of human life on earth are likelier to be solved sooner if we can attain a better, more democratic, and more unified approach to them.  The war in the Congo is now six years old, with 3.8 million dead-31,000 civilians die in that world-forsaken war every week.  The UN can't stop it.  2 billion people on earth live on $1 a day, although just 50 cents in every $100 of world income would abolish world poverty.  The all-powerful U.S., while asserting the right to attack any nation on earth and first, won't even muster 20 cents per $100 while legions are dying needlessly of hunger and disease.   And who decides who eats?  Monsanto controls 91% of the global GM seed market; two companies dominate sales of half the world's bananas; five control 75% of the international grain trade; 30 account for 1/3rd of the world's processed food. 

Yet at the instance of the first Bush in the early 1990s the UN dismantled its center on transnational corporations, freeing them to run wild the world over.  Global warming, ecocide, the polluting and plundering of the oceans, no nation can stop, nor evidently can or will the UN.  Nuclear nonproliferation has broken down and the U.S. locates targets in Iran and plans war there, and war on whoever the American President chooses, whenever the day comes that the president decides to attack.  Nuclear war floats back over our imminent future, the monster that can instantly snuff out our chance on earth.

In this very complex human emergency, which is centered, I believe, here in our country, we should insist on our right as human beings to play several roles, different at different times and in different groups and different political parties, and not necessarily consistent from the points of view of zealots.  Some may seek office in 2006 as Democrats, the better, for instance, perhaps, from positions of power, to help indict Bush, et al., for war crimes.  Jill Stein [who spoke earlier], David Cobb, and others may run again as Greens to build up the progressive movement.  Some of us may devote ourselves, wholly or in part, to cobbling together the WCP of Massachusetts as a real electoral option, especially if we can link that up to Instant Runoff Voting, which will end the third-party trap in which you either vote for the candidates of one of the two parties or run a high risk of helping elect the candidate you detest.  Jock Forbes here may go forward, too, with strengthening the UN as an intermediate goal.  At present, I intend to support Barbara Boxer for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 to consummate the re-stiffening of the Democrats and also to head off Hilary Clinton.  In shifting circumstances we need broken fieldrunners.  The different depths of future time are the field of this mortally important, possibly terminal game for humanity into which we have been cast.  We all fit together working in our various seriously chosen ways for a better world, or even for any world at all. 

After the last election, James Carroll wrote in the Boston Globe, many Americans found themselves "facing the truth of their status as passengers on a death ship whose course was set without them….Thousands and thousands of men, women, and children who meant us no harm are now dead because of our striking out so blindly….What a lonely nation we have become.  To how many fewer peoples are we the tribune of hope.  How like exile is our 'homeland.'"

Still, it is our homeland, so let us rise defiantly to make the case for world law through world government, to seek to do as Albert Einstein in his cold wisdom bade us do.

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space," Einstein said.  "He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.  Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

For your consideration, then, to expand our Circle of Compassion in these dark days, we recommend to you the World Citizens Party for a Democratic World Government.