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Menuhin's Plea for 'Global Conscience'

(Following is the edited text of an address delivered by Lord Menuhin, the world-renowned violinist and coordinator of the World Cultural Commission of the World Government of World Citizens, at the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco.)

Your Royal Highness (Princess Margaret), Mr. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali of the United Nations, ambassadors and servants of States, my fellow-citizens of San Francisco, and last, but not least, my 99-year old mother-

I have come back to San Francisco with my beloved colleagues of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, as well as some young ones from my school at Stoke d'Abernon near London, in a program designed to represent music and musicians from Asia joining in a universal music-making, to mark this half-century that has passed since I gave the inaugural concert here in my hometown of San Francisco for our United Nations Organization.

San Francisco is again host to the world, as befits a city which has been blessed by so many cultures. Here there are old and new neighborhoods overlapping, in which the various communities gather as birds of a feather. It is, however, their very proximity to each other and their intermingling which accounts for San Francisco's particular magic and fascination.

Many have known a very hard struggle. Despite this, I feel it is unlikely that any leader or diplomat will appear who will incite them to avenge themselves on their neighbors for their suffering. Nor will they be urged to draw hard and fast lines, zigzagging through our city-marking walls and frontiers intended to isolate each group in its assumed "purity."

My dear friends, you may laugh, yet that is what we, the United Nations, have countenanced in Berlin and in many other places, most recently in former Yugoslavia.

One would imagine that with six million Jews and 500,000 Gypsies destroyed in the most agonizingly prolonged manner, and with countless other hapless millions likewise destroyed for speaking the "wrong" language, following the "wrong" religion, being the "wrong" color or holding the "wrong" opinion, that we should by now have learned to choose our leaders and to question the validity of sovereign nations being alone in charge of humanity's fate.

Is it not the time to establish the representation of cultures to counterbalance the example of sovereign states?

Of course, the United Nations is still imperfect and has a long way to go before it will fulfill its great mission. It is still stressing the hypothetical rights of humans whilst avoiding reference to the concomitant responsibilities of each to the other, each group to its neighbors, and all to our threatened earth, which supports our life with its life. I wonder if one day the Security Council might become more representative of the new international configuration of peoples and their cultures? [applause]

Notwithstanding these difficulties, the United Nations, cruelly denied its rightful support by the richer nations of the world, who would both exploit this body when convenient and abuse it the rest of the time, has given evidence of its, of our, higher purpose. There is already the first glimmer of what I would like to call "a global conscience."

The brave blue-helmets will one day be groups of people from many cultures, highly trained at United Nations Academies to fulfill the combined roles of soldier, teacher, protector, social worker, rescuer, in the tradition of the London "bobby." But unlike the wonderful blue-helmets, unprepared for their world role, they will comprise a world police. These men and women would intervene in the earliest stage of social threat to extinguish the flames of intolerance-exactly what we failed to accomplish when Hitler told us what he was about-whether it be in former Yugoslavia or Chechenya or so many other places.

This global conscience represents for humanity a new awakening, a dimension evident in so many spheres which are already global: communication, commerce and banking, technology and science, as well as in treatment of diseases and general afflictions like global unemployment.

Sovereign nations, as they are called, are extremely backward in respect to developing global conscience. Cultures, however, have no walls or frontiers; they have sacred origins, but their seed is dispersed as if by wind and water over the greatest distances and the highest obstacles.

The disregard of and disrespect for cultures is costing us an ever-mounting toll in the emergence of blind fundamentalism, fanaticism, rampaging nationalism, instead of cultural autonomies. These would allow accommodation between the cultural independence of a given community and the larger community of states and/or of peoples to whom it must adhere for collaboration and protection.

Is it really the best way to peace to await the moment when our arms dealers will have sold to surviving Amazon tribes an atom bomb to use as a means for understandable revenge? This will only cause them to further destroy themselves and their glorious forest, along with their land-greedy persecutors.

The voiceless are many, some with no power at all-political, economic, or social. The hideous commerce in organs of young human beings reduces all and everything to a consumer's market, be it coffee, cotton, sugar-cane, or man and woman.

Be that as it may, the global conscience is already well-awake in the more educated youth of our world. I have spoken to them in schools and universities in many countries. We share the same global concerns; they are better informed and less blind than were their elders. I place my hope in them.

They see a world heading for disaster; that is why they have so little faith in their politicians and diplomats. But this in itself undermines support of democracy and may well prepare the ground for new tyrannies.

We are all suffering from a highly contagious disease: the spirit of mistrust and ill-ease with ourselves, of which violence is the symptom. The roots lie in the tortured conditions of a searching humanity seeking a new moral order which will restore a sense of the sacred.

It is a pity that I, seemingly alone, should carry for the moment this universal message. There are others far more qualified than I, men of unimpeachable spirit, philosophy and experience, who should be here with us to warn and to guide us-people like Michel Serres, French philosopher, teaching at Stanford University and Paris; Richard von Weizsaecker, retired President of Germany; Constantin von Barloewen, holding the only Chair of Comparative Cultures and Religions in Germany; and people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama.

Tomorrow morning there will be fine speeches skillfully crafted by many learned heads and hands. I hope you will forgive me for adding my own words-a musician's-from both heart and brain.

I know that you are aware that this concert is dedicated, not only to the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, but also to her sister organization created and conceived in London during the latter years of the war-Unesco, signifying the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was deemed an indispensable non-political counterpart to the United Nations. Its first secretary-general was Sir Julian Huxley, the noted biologist.

This organization is, officially, out-of-favor in Washington and London. I understand that soon this attitude will be revoked, and that Unesco will again be recognized by our two errant countries for the invaluable and irreplaceable cultural and human work it is doing. [applause]

Unesco is concerned with the real problems of humanity in its daily life-the problems of peace, not of war. The battle for peace is forever. It consists of refusing to accept the unacceptable. It is a determined and courageous battle to avoid war. It is an active, not a passive state. Peace must not be confused with death, nor the battle for peace with war.

I am glad to tell you that in a letter to me the Secretary-General, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a man of dedication, selflessness and courage, expressed his wholehearted approval that Unesco share our tribute tonight and throughout the tour.

Now, as you can so obviously see, I am neither a diplomat nor a politician, but simply a humble, concerned musician. Let us return to that most communicative of all the arts-let us go back to the music of Peter Maxwell Davies, of Elgar, to the lament of Takemitsu and to the New World Symphony of Dvorak.


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