Angelina Jolie

Citizen of the World

The breakthrough humanity needs to make is on the human level. And the bringers of the breakthrough are those who most feel the pathos of humanity and the instinct of nature...women.
Palden Jenkins, The Age of People

As a fellow entertainer who has been in four Broadway shows, I am extraordinarily pleased to welcome such a glamorous yet down-to-earth luminary as Angelina Jolie to the growing "constituency" of world citizenship.

My first awareness of Angelina Jolie was through the film "Beyond Borders." Here a famous, beauteous Hollywood star was in a film dramatically exposing the plight of the world's refugees for moviegoers over the world. The movie revealed realistic shots of refugee camps in Cambodia, Thailand and Chechnya. Desperate individuals in these areas frequently write to the World Service Authority for world passports and documents to help them find freedom. They are typical of millions* of refugees and stateless people throughout the world.

Following a trip in 2001 to Sierra Leone, a "war-torn" country with tens of thousands of refugees, Jolie confessed that "I got into some situations that were pretty intense and realized how completely naive I was to think I had a difficult life..It was as if someone slapped me across the face and said, 'Oh, my God, you silly young woman from California, do you have any ideas how difficult the world really is for so many people.' We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us."
August 27, 2001 at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.

Eventually, she became a "Goodwill Ambassador" for the UNHCR, visiting over thirty refugee camps in the world's most remote and forbidding and war-torn places. In so doing she called herself recently "a citizen of the world." (with incidentally, a world family. She is a "mother" to Maddox, from Cambodia; Sahara, from Ethiopia; Shiloh from Brad Pitt and recently, to Pax, from Vietnam.)

In brief, she is out trying to save the world as well as making movies and being a responsible and loving mother and companion. Real cool!

"A very beautiful woman," writes Tom Junod in this month's Esquire, "who sees herself as the underdog becomes very famous. Because of her fame, she suffers; because of her suffering she becomes more famous, the most famous woman in the world, she fulfils her vision of herself as the underdog; because she's the underdog, she connects to the world's genuine underdogs, and so, in the end finds meaning and a measure of happiness."

"These are people with the widest reach in the world and not by accident," says Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and he should know because he works and travels with them - Bono, Madonna, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. "When you consider what Angelina does or Bono or Madonna - these are real forces of nature; It goes beyond their fan bases. They are able to speak to ten of millions of people, and that goes back to how bright they are, how well they manage across their artistic work, their work in music or film. Their participation has been absolutely essential to the mainstreaming of these global issues into American life, Angelina goes at it with utter honesty, hard work, and deep feeling for the common fate of humanity."

Well, dear Angelina, on behalf of the entire world citizen "constituency," please accept this World Citizen's heartfelt and most sincere thanks for your magnificent efforts to help make our world a better place.

For your information, we are historically in excellent "company." So did Socrates claim to be a "citizen of the world" 2500 years ago. And indeed advised his fellow Athenians to do likewise. Then there was Mencius, Dante, Bergson, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, and revolutionary Tom Paine, who claimed in 1789 that his country "was the world." Then in modern times, Victor Hugo, Teilhard de Chardin, and, of course, that universally-loved "everyman," Charlie Chaplin, then Albert Einstein, "father" of the Nuclear Age, and master architect, writer and creator of the "World Game," Buckminster Fuller, then Martin Luther King, Jr. whose "dream" included one world, and, revealing its extraordinary eclecticism, even Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Carter in their inauguration speeches and, incredibly, Ronald Reagan in an address to the General Assembly of the UN, September 1, 1987. And let's not forget the 30,000 students at the City Montessori School in Lucknow, India and their billions of fellow students throughout the world demanding of us world law to outlaw war. Though history is sparse in citing women who actually "claimed" world citizenship due no doubt to manmade laws prejudicial to "female political rights," such renowned contemporary women as Jane Addams, Rosika Schwimmer, Lola Lloyd, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Theresa, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Shurin Ebadi, Aung San Sui Kyi, Rigerberta Menchu Tum, Princess Diana, and recently Wangari Muta, among others, all exhibited in action a universal humanitarian vision of the world.

Of course, Hollywood luminaries such as George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna, among many others, merit the title whether they claim it or not for their growing humanitarian work, not to forget Oprah Winfrey through her imaginative generosity to young South African girls.

But rare it is when a woman of global fame endowed with such iridescent beauty, in her dedication to make a better world, innocently without any pretence, declares that she is "a citizen of the world." And spreads the word.

In so declaring, in our humble opinion, she represents the "universal" woman; the mother, wife, daughter, sister, companion, the perennial Eve, the "yin" or intuitive aspect of humanity, not only willing to take on the world's suffering like Mother Therese but to right wrongs, and to find the just answers to global "accountability" for the horrors she herself has witnessed in her travels.

To that end, Tom Junod in the Esquire piece writes that she is now studying international law.

In this new educational mission, permit us to say that you, Angelina, as a "citizen of the world" have already defined and become THE SOLUTION: world law -in -microcosm! In other words, in recognizing yourself as a citizen of the world HERE and NOW, that world law which is the cause of world peace and all that follows begins with you and us. The remainder is only commentary and implementation.

That's the true meaning of sovereignty: the power of choice of the people of the world.

In his inaugural address, President Roosevelt said we had learned to be citizens of the world, but he didn't tell is where we might apply for our first papers. The world's department of justice is still a long subway ride from any given point, but to go forever unnaturalized in so promising a land, is unthinkable.
(E.B. White, The Wild Flag (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1945)

Now the next step is to obtain your global "naturalization" papers!

We at the World Service Authority, the administrative organ of the World Government of World Citizen, have been supplying those essential human rights ID's for world citizens since September 4, 1953. And that "subway ride" is now only an "online" stop away!

Therefore the application for your global "naturalization" papers as a World Citizen, Angelina, can be downloaded directly from our main web site: www.worldservice.org. Incidentally, for your new studies, with our compliments, our own books on world law, world citizenship and world government are in the mail. (See www.worldgovernmenthouse.com).

In the sense that "all the world's a stage," seemingly huge but increasingly accessible to one and all, we look forward with pleasure and profound respect to continue "performing" with you on it.

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* Refugee Population
As of 1 January 2007, UNHCR reported a total of 21 018 589 individuals falling under its mandate.
1: 7 979 251 in Asia, of which
2 580 638 in the Middle-East
2 974 315 in South-East Asia
218 584 in Central Asia
1 304 189 in South Asia
901 525 in East Asia and the Pacific
2: 4 740 392 in Europe, of which
1 617 214 in Eastern Europe
708 132 in South-East Europe
616 132 in Central Europe and in the Baltic states
1 798 914 in Western Europe
3: 5 069 123 in Africa, of which
1 359 175 in Central Africa and the Great Lakes region
2 105 314 in Eastern Africa
1 031 030 in Western Africa
434 427 in the Southern African region
139 177 in North Africa
4 3 229 822 in America, of which
717 545 in North America and in the Caribbean
5: 2 512 277 in South America