RIP Garry Davis.
A World passport. What a great idea.Peace activist Garry Davis, who dramatically renounced his US citizenship in the dark days of the Cold War and founded a government for self-declared "world citizens" like himself, has died.
Davis passed away in a hospice in the New England state of Vermont, where he had lived for many years, last Wednesday.
[...]
He would have been 92 last Saturday. The cause of death was not known, but he had been suffering from cancer in recent years.
"Garry Davis was an astonishing human being," said David Gallup, the current president of the World Service Authority, who spoke with him almost daily.
"He was working up to the very last minute... I thought he was going to go on forever," Gallup told AFP.
A one-time Broadway actor who flew B-17 bombers over Germany in World War II, Davis was 26 when he walked into the US embassy in Paris in 1948, renounced his American citizen and declared himself a citizen of the world.
[...]
Davis -- like many people in the aftermath of World War II -- dreaded the prospect of a third global conflict, this time involving nuclear weapons.
In a move that stirred up a lot of publicity, he disrupted a session of the UN General Assembly in Paris in September 1948 and called for the newly-formed world body to transform itself into a single government for the entire planet.
His idea attracted support from the likes of physicist Albert Einstein, novelist Albert Camus and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, and more than 20,000 people turned out for a rally he organized in the French capital.
[...]
Lacking papers from any traditional government, Davis traveled on a "world passport" issued by the World Government [which he founded], promoting what came to be known as the One World Movement -- and getting arrested or deported on several occasions as he did so.
[...]
Based in Washington, the non-profit World Service Authority still issues machine-readable, 30-page World Passports which, it says, have been stamped with visas by more than 150 countries "on a case-by-base basis."
One passport has been issued to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and another to intelligence leaker Edward Snowden after his US passport -- though not his US citizenship -- was revoked.
[...]
Over the decades, some 1.5 million people have registered as world citizens, while the World Service Authority has issued some five million identity documents of various kinds, including up to 750,000 passports, Gallup said.
Yahoo
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