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A Guru's View of World Government (Cont.)

(With world government being such a controversial subject these days, given the United Nations' abject failure to address humanity's problems, World Citizen News continues the serial reprinting of Guru Nataraja's 1956 Memorandum on World Government, which treats the subject holistically or, as he wrote, "geo-dialectically." Viewed within the context of the guru's wisdom-though he passed away in 1973 and despite his gender-exclusionary language-readers can enjoy a fresh and timely perspective on an engrossing subject.)

SECTION II

OTHER PARTIAL APPROACHES

1. All approaches hitherto either negative or relativistic

To the natural question why we should not join hands with other organizations working already in the field of internationalism, we have to answer that there is the fundamental drawback that all of them are vitiated by either a 'negative' or a 'relativistic' approach. What we mean by these two expressions must be somewhat clear from what we have already said.

By negativism we mean that proposals for peace or disarmament have been based on a regret or a fear connected with wars just fought or wars expected. At such moments there is a great volume of collective emotion available, and those who offer quick results get nations to pay large sums for preserving peace or in the name of security. The regret, however, passes, as also the fear. Positive attitudes take their places, and one organization which failed to fulfill its contract is succeeded by another in a modified form.

This how the League of Nations was displaced by the United Nations. The latter may be expected to go the way of its predecessor as soon as its impotency in the matter of security peace becomes evident to all. It is patent that in spite of its declared intentions, the U.N. has not been able to make its member nations reduce their armaments, nor has it been able to mitigate the national excesses of its member nations.

Of course in some matters it is better than nothing, but in other matters it is worse than nothing. Representatives of major nations get the chance of calling each other names at the glorified debates held under these bodies. With the points of order, the explanations of votes, amendments, counter-amendments and arbitrary powers of veto or methods of filibustering or blocking through satellite members, the U.N. has no power to implement even the smallest item in its own declaration of human rights, not to speak of objecting to the dangers of atomic tests. Actually, it is used by power groupings to sling mud at each other. At best it is a glorified debating society employing thousands of interpreters, stenographers and clerks who live and move in a beehive of modern buildings. They are obliged to keep the powers that be in good humor. Every effort has been made already to try and work through the U.N. by the sponsors of the present World Government. The story is too long to relate here. Suffice it to say that it has been a signal failure.

By relativism we mean that some sort of duality as between 'free nations' and others who are not so is still retained in the structure of the organization. The organization is not unitively conceived according to any science of Absolutism. Representation, admission, or expulsion are based on no uniform norms of any science universally or publicly formulated.

2. Private, partial or party organizations with world programs

There are various religious, political or even commercial bodies which influence world affairs. There is the Communist Party which shapes the trend of world politics. Then there is the Catholic Church and various other bodies which have world programs. Commercial combines and banking agencies fulfill openly or secretly many functions which properly should belong to a World Government. These serve humanity in good, bad or indifferent ways, but as long as a correctly formulated World Government is not there, no one has any right to find fault with whatever service they render or even with whatever exploitation they consciously or unconsciously exercise in world affairs.

International organizations exist in many departments such as the Universal Postal Union, etc. Member nations may or may not ratify their resolutions, and even when they do so, the limitations of their own arbitrary sovereignty or nationalism are not wholly discarded. The approach to such problems is not based at present on any exact science such as we claim to be at the basis of the World Government as envisaged in this Memorandum. This class of organizations can be almost good or at the next best, but just as one cannot jump a chasm in two leaps or expect a prize for the number nearest to the one that wins the prize, so the wholesale scientific basis of the World Government is all-important.

The science of geo-dialectics is based on a rare and precious way of higher reasoning without which no World Government can be expected to succeed. Such undertakings would not be justified even if they should obtain a large measure of success. Here almost true is not good enough. This same verity is couched in the old words that 'good government is no substitute for self-government.' The mandate for any government has to be derived from the people who are to be governed on the one pole and, from another pole, derived from the Absolute Justice implicit in any such government.

Like religion or morality, there are two different sources to World Government. It has to be the resultant of ascending and descending dialectical counterparts. Such principles, however, can be made clear only in the light of general dialectics, which has still to be formulated and taught in the proposed Institute of Dialectics. Meanwhile we are here obliged to state with seeming dogmatism that partial and unscientific approaches to the problem of World Government are not valid.


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