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The Road To Survival – World Federation
By Benton Musslewhite, President of One
World Now
It is said
that the “greatest sin of all is indifference”
and one has to be completely indifferent to what
is going on in the world today not to see that a
global Armageddon is rapidly approaching, not an
Armageddon in the biblical sense, the “end of
all things,” but one where, as T. S. Eliot put
it, the world ends “not with a bang but [with] a
whimper.” Weapons of mass destruction
certainly do pose the threat of a nuclear
“bang”, where the end comes relatively quickly,
as portrayed in “On The Beach.” Indeed,
the Scientists’ Doomsday Clock still stands at
seven minutes before “midnight.” Instead,
I think that, unless we take on a sense of
urgency like the world has never done before,
and immediately begin to deal with the global,
interconnected and devastating crises that are
already threatening us and will continue to
threaten us at an ever accelerating pace, we
will find ourselves in a slow, agonizing descent
into a hellish existence of incomprehensible
suffering and a painful disintegration of human
society.
There is no secret about the practices and
forces that are combining to push humankind to
the brink of ultimate disaster. Global
warming is at the forefront and Al Gore’s recent
movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth,
sets forth the cold, hard facts about where we
are headed as a Planet and a civilization.
There is a rising consensus that we only have
about ten to fifteen years left before the
cancer of global warming becomes lethal and
incurable. With the clash of
civilizations, the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction, the persistent and deadly
reality of global terrorism and the continued
reliance upon war to resolve our differences,
world peace seems more elusive than ever before.
And all the while, humankind is stupidly pouring
over one trillion dollars per year down the
black hole of arms, war and killing each other.
General Douglas MacArthur was exactly right in
the late 1940’s when he said that “[we] have
our last chance. If we will not devise
some greater more equitable system,
Armageddon will be at our door.”
But, how do we confront this enveloping
dreadnought that is so rapidly approaching?
How do we, indeed, keep Armageddon from Mother
Earth’s door? Many Americans, and for that
matter many from around the world, will say that
we should continue to rely upon the Nation-State
system, with some help from the present United
Nations, to deal with the present global
predicament. But the Nation-State system,
which arose out of the ashes of the Thirty-Years
War with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, has
just taken us through the bloodiest and dirtiest
(environmentally speaking) century in history.
As Emery Reves, in his noted book, Anatomy of
Peace, put it, “we cannot risk reliance upon
a method (the Nation-State system) that has
failed miserably hundreds of times and never
succeeded once.” In the vacuum of
international anarchy in which we now live, the
only legal means we have for handling global
problems is the treaty process but that process
is slow and treaties contain no real enforcement
mechanism. Bismarck was right, “Treaties
are made to be broken.” Indeed, the Kyoto
Treaty on CO2 emissions is
essentially a failure because the biggest
polluter in the World (the U.S.) simply refused
to ratify it.
As to the present United Nations, I agree with
Paul Kennedy, and many of his observations about
the good things the U.N. has done over its 61
year existence, as expressed in his recent book,
“The Parliament of Man.” But the stark
reality about the U.N. cannot be ignored.
It was – primarily because of the single nation
veto – still born in 1945. Prime Minister
Churchill, just five years later, recognized
that it was not working and stated that “unless
some effective supranational government can be
set up and brought quickly into action, the
prospects of peace and human progress are dark
and doubtful.”
Thus, it is obvious that we can rely upon
neither the Nation-State system nor the present
United Nations to act swiftly and effectively
enough to extricate the world from “harm’s way.”
But what kind of a system must we have to save
us from almost certain self-destruction? Mahatma
Gandhi gave us the answer in 1942: “… the future
peace, security, and ordered progress of the
world demand a world federation of free nations,
and on no other basis can the problems of the
modern world be solved.” Emery Reves
states that world federation “is not an ultimate
goal but an immediate necessity,” noting that
“it has been overdue since 1914.” Many
great thinkers, leaders and institutions, both
before and after Gandhi, have manifested the
same higher moral cognition as Gandhi and
supported a world federation or something
similar to it – Alfred Lord Tennyson, President
Ulysses S. Grant, President Harry S. Truman, E.
B. White, H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Justice
William O. Douglas, Winston Churchill, Arnold
Toynbee, Thor Heyerdahl, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Hubert Humphrey, Peter Ustinov, U Thant, Willy
Brandt, Norman Cousins, General Hap Arnold, the
Catholic Church (Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul
II and the Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter of
1983), the United Methodist Church, the
Episcopal Church (Episcopal Bishops Pastoral
Letter of 1962), and the Baha’i Faith.
Why is it that we do not listen to these wise
people and institutions and recognize how urgent
it is that we immediately create a federation of
the Nations of the world that is democratized
and empowered to take the global actions that
are essential for our survival? If you
mention “world federation” to American
Congresspersons, most of them, both Republican
and Democrat, run for cover; they think it is
political suicide even to discuss the subject.
What a pity! They claim to be our leaders
but they prove once again the imperative of
present day democracies: “if the people lead,
the leaders will follow.” There is no
doubt about the power of people literally to
change the world. In view of what the
“people” did in the second Russian Revolution
(where, with almost no shot being fired, they
threw off the shackles of a communist
dictatorship), there is no reason why “the
people” cannot wreak the ultimate change on this
Planet Earth – the creation of a democratized
and empowered Federation of all Nations.
But how do we get from here – a world of
international anarchy – to there – a world
justly governed by a democratized world
federation? One World Now strongly believes that
the only way to get there is by
using as a model the American Constitutional
Convention process of 1787 and by carrying out
that process through a Charter Review Conference
under Article 109 of the present U.N. Charter.
The
Articles of Confederation rendered the
Continental Congress almost as impotent as the
United Nations is today. Neither had or
have the essential powers of a real government.
Our forefathers persuaded the Continental
Congress to call a convention to “amend” the
Articles of Confederation but they ended up
writing a completely new Constitution. If
they had not had the courage to step up to the
challenge and create a real structure of
national governance, we would not have today the
America of which we are so proud. This
kind of courage is precisely what is now needed
on the global level. Emery Reves put it
plainly, “the Articles of Confederation had to
be discarded and a new constitution created and
adopted … because that was the only remedy then
and it is the only remedy now.”
Captain Tom Hudgens has written in his booklet,
Let’s Abolish War, that the world can, as
did our American forefathers, “solve the
[global] predicament” it now faces by
comprehensively “reforming the United Nations to
create a federal republic with strong
legislative, executive and judicial branches
[and] with strong checks and balances on each.”
And, he added, the American Constitutional
Convention “can serve as the model for this
global federation.”
As to the legal mechanism for creating a
democratized and empowered federation of the
Nations of the Earth, there is only one place we
can find such a mechanism – what we call a
legitimization process – and that is Article 109
of the U.N. Charter. Article 109 provides
that 2/3rds of the members of the
General Assembly can call a Charter Review
Conference and 2/3rds can adopt a
comprehensively amended United Nations Charter
at that Conference. These first two steps
of the Article 109 process can be carried out
without the consent of the five Nation-States
with the single-nation veto (U.S., Britain,
France, Russia, and China). However,
Article 109 does require that the third
step of the amendment process, the ratification
of the newly amended Charter by 2/3rds of the
Nation-State members, include ratification by
those five Nation-States.
Many will say that the United States will never
ratify a new Charter creating a democratized and
empowered federal republic because it will never
yield the sovereign power that is necessary for
such a structure of governance to exist.
There is no doubt that we will have a long, hard
battle to complete the Article 109 ratification
process, much like our forefathers had in 1789.
Indeed, at the Constitutional Convention only 39
of the 55 delegates to the Convention would sign
the Constitution. In the first year
thereafter only 11 of the original 13 states
ratified the Constitution, with Massachusetts
ratifying by only 17 votes, New Hampshire by
only 11 votes, Virginia by only 10 votes and New
York by only 3 votes. North Carolina
initially rejected the Constitution but finally
ratified it a year later and Rhode Island, the
thirteenth state, did not ratify until three
years after the Convention.
To say that the United States will never ratify
a new U.N. Charter establishing a democratized
and empowered world federation is, I believe, to
sell the American people short. First,
upon navigating through the first two steps of
the Article 109 process, which can be
accomplished without the consent of the United
States, and with the inevitable rapid growth of
People Power the world over supporting the
Article 109 process, it is our belief that the
global momentum for ratification will become so
compelling that the people of the United States
will recognize that America cannot afford to say
no and will apply sufficient political pressure
upon the Administration and the Congress to
secure ratification. To be sure, as
Americans, we should insist that the United
States, the world’s greatest democratic
federation, not just support the Article 109
process but take the lead in getting it done.
More and more Americans are realizing that our
effort to “manage the world” is creating
devastating fiscal deficits, making the tax
burden on the American people ever more
intolerable, costing far too many precious
American lives and severely aggravating the
depth and breadth of anti-Americanism around the
world.
Furthermore, there is, I believe, a rising
consciousness in America of the fact that there
really is only one Earth and that all of us on
this Planet – of whatever nationality, race,
culture, religion or economic station in life –
are in this together and that we are all
fighting for our planetary lives. Indeed,
many Americans who have read the proposed new
U.N. Charter written by One World Now (see
www.one-world-now.com), have come to realize
how much a democratized and empowered world
federation is in the best interests of
Americans, not just because it is our best
chance for saving the Planet, but because it is
the best way to guarantee a safer world and thus
a safer America. It can be seen from the
proposed new Charter how one of the geniuses of
the U.S. Constitution – the checks and balances
that protect Americans from what de Toqueville
described as “the tyranny of the majority” – has
been carried forward into the proposed Charter.
Finally, more and more Americans are beginning
to comprehend the reality of what scientists
like Dr. Martin I. Hoffert are saying. In
order to deal with the impending global warming
disaster, Dr. Hoffert, physics professor at New
York University, states that the world needs
immediately to “embark” on “six or seven energy
research programs on the scale of the Manhattan
Project that built the … atomic bomb ... or the
Apollo program that put man on the moon” and “be
prepared to invest several hundred billion
dollars over [the next] ten to fifteen years” on
developing renewable sources of energy such as
earth-based solar, space-based solar, wind, next
generation nuclear, hydro/geothermal, wood and
plants and carbon storage, as ways of
substantially reducing CO2 levels.
However, these kinds of projects can take place
only through an empowered structure of
global governance. George Soros
believes that a Carbon Tax can provide a great
incentive for all of us to take these urgent
actions but such a tax would also require a
structure of global governance as a vehicle for
its adoption, implementation and enforcement.
What America did in World War II, the world can
do now through such a structure of global
governance. I was only ten years old when
the United States entered World War II. I
still remember gas and sugar rationing, the
Victory Garden and the War Bonds. But
America rose to the occasion. Our
government did not institute gas and sugar
rationing on a voluntary basis. It made it
a crime not to comply because there are always
those who will cheat unless forced to comply.
And the great majority of Americans, knowing
that all other Americans were forced by law to
ration their use of gasoline, complied willingly
and America went on to a noble victory.
The world is faced today with a much more
dangerous situation than faced America in the
1940’s. We face a war against ourselves,
to prevent an E.L.E (Extinction Level Event).
Humans in most of the world, led by America, are
obsessed with the automobile, consumerism,
materialism and with an overall
self-centeredness that did not exist in the
1940’s. There is no doubt about it, if the
world is going to win this battle against
climate change and all the other potential
catastrophes facing us, all world citizens
are going to have to make the same kind of
sacrifices Americans made during World War II
and these sacrifices will have to be instituted
by world law through a structure of global
governance that has the power to initiate and
enforce such laws. Indeed, E. B. White
was right on point when he said: “Government is
the thing. Law is the thing. Not
brotherhood, not international cooperation …
Where does security lie, anyway – security
against the thief, the murderer, the foot pad?
In brotherly love? Not at all. It
lies in government.”
The greatest danger we face in trying to “beat
the clock” on global disaster is that posed by
those who seek only incremental reforms of the
U.N. Charter. I was very disappointed that
Paul Kennedy, in the Parliament of Man,
expressed the view that “massive constitutional
restructuring of the world body … is not
possible right now, even, if the merits are
undeniable” and that the “transformation [of the
U.N.] will have to be partial and gradual.”
If Professor Kennedy is correct, then the world
is doomed. We simply do not have the time
to make, on a “partial and gradual” basis, the
radical changes that are necessary to save the
world. In 2005, a few minor reforms were
adopted at the behest of Secretary General Kofi
Annan and they were hailed as a “first step” in
the right direction. Emery Reves had this
to say about such blandishments: “We are
always beginning … we never continue, never
carry on, complete or conclude. We never
take a second step … our international life is
composed of an unending sequence of beginnings
that do not begin, of first steps that lead
nowhere. When are we going to tire of the
game?” We must not let a few minor reforms
of the U.N. act as an “opiate of the people.”
Truly, we can avert the “gathering global storm”
only if we immediately and comprehensively amend
the U.N. Charter to create a democratized
federation of the Nations of the World.
I can see the day coming when the great majority
of the people on this Planet will join
arm-in-arm in a great and grand march toward the
“sunlit upland” of self-governance, a global
democracy where every world citizen has the
right to vote, where peace prevails, where the
Bill of Social Rights (safety net of food, clean
water, adequate medical care, educational and
job opportunity, and social security for the
aged, disabled and unemployed) is available to
every World Citizen, where we live in an
environmentally sustainable world, where each
human being enjoys the basic individual, human
and civil rights to which we are all endowed by
our Creator and where, together, we have
overcome the dark and dangerous challenges to
our very existence and we have fought the battle
for survival and we have won.
Through the irrepressible People Power we have
in our hands, we must demand that the
politicians do our will and do it urgently and
comprehensively. If we fail to do that,
then Senator Byron Dorgan will have been right
when he says that “brain-dead politics are
selling out America” and Abraham Lincoln will
have been wrong when he said that we have a
government of the people, for the people and by
the people. However, I say that Abraham
Lincoln was absolutely right. There is no
reason on God’s Earth why “we the people” of
this Planet, led by America, cannot bring about
the world so beautifully described by Alfred
Lord Tennyson in 1842 in Locksley Hall:
For I dipt into the future far as human eye
could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder
that would be.…
[Where] the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the
battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the
world.
ONE WORLD NOW!
P.O. Box 1145 Houston, TX (USA) 77251-1145
Tel: (713) 528-2000 Fax: (713) 526-8568
lobm@airmail.net |
