By David Gallup
On May 25, 1948, Garry Davis stepped out of the US Embassy in
Paris after taking the Oath of Renunciation of citizenship. No longer a citizen
of one exclusive nation, Garry claimed his status as a citizen of the world.
Why would Garry Davis, a Broadway actor and comedian who just
wanted to make people laugh, give up his US citizenship in favor of world
citizenship? To answer that question, I will need to take you back to the early
1940s.
As a child and teenager, Garry loved acting. To Garry, the
script of a play was like his prayer book and the theatre was like his temple,
his mosque, his synagogue, his church, his place of worship. The audience was like his parishioners. He
wanted to make the audience happy, and in their laughter, he felt their love.
Garry’s dream of a life in theatre and movies came crashing
down when he heard the news that his brother Bud had been killed in Salerno on
his battleship. Garry’s sadness turned to anger and then to revenge. He became
a bomber pilot set on destroying Hitler’s war factories.
But thousands of feet up in his B-17 airplane, as he was
dropping bombs on villages, he knew he was killing women, men and children. His
revenge turned to remorse. He would rather have been entertaining these people,
making them laugh, rather than killing them.
When he came back from the war, he was disillusioned with the
nation-state system that made him kill his fellow humans. He was shell-shocked.
He suffered from post-traumatic stress from what he witnessed and from the acts
of violence he committed.
He wanted out of the war game. He had heard of a young man
who had gone to Europe to rebuild the churches that were destroyed during the
war. And he read a book called Anatomy of
Peace, by Emery Reves, a book that explained how humans could transcend the
problem of war by coming together at the world level. So he decided to go to
Paris, legally renounce his US citizenship, and begin to rebuild the world he
had helped to destroy.
In his memoir, My
Country is the World, he explains why he would give up his citizenship, an
act that at that time was considered highly controversial and unpatriotic. He
writes, “Homo sapiens, man calls himself. Sapiens: knowing, the perception of
truth. But one of the tragedies of our times is that modern man, as man of ages
past, doesn’t know himself. He has lost confidence in his own innate capacity.
He restricts himself. And only then does he yearn to be free.”
He continues, “Man’s deadliest, self-imposed, restrictive
device is nationalism. You and I may be fellow humans, but we are not fellow
nationalists. I am a fellow who willfully withdrew from the co-partnership of
citizen and national state and declared himself a world citizen. I have for my
trouble, hung my hat in 34 prisons and two ships’ brigs. If spending time in
the jails of the world, however would further the understanding of one world
and one humankind, I would gladly forfeit my freedom again this very day.”
Garry saw the world holistically. He viewed the whole world as his home, as his
house of worship. He wanted us to see the
world, itself, as holy, as a sanctuary for our imagination. He loved to quote
Albert Einstein who said that imagination is more important than intelligence.
Garry wanted us to imagine and then create a world that would
work for everyone. When he renounced his national citizenship, he became
stateless, persona non grata, with no country and nowhere to go. He needed to
create an identity and status for himself to ensure that his rights would be
respected. This is when he decided to declare himself to be a world citizen,
with universal rights that should be universally respected, no matter where he
found himself on earth.
Garry Davis devoted his entire adult life to promoting an
awareness of this view of the world. Of the world as one. Of the idea that we are
all world citizens with rights and duties to each other and the earth.
To create a just, sustainable,
equitable, and peaceful world, it’s no longer enough to consider ourselves exclusively
as citizens of one nation or another. We must all claim our status as world
citizens!
You may register officially, legally and politically as a
world citizen through the World Service Authority at www.worldservice.org/reg.html.
You do not give up any lower level allegiance by claiming a higher allegiance
to humanity and the earth.
