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YEREVAN, JULY 30, ARMENPRESS: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,reportս Armenpress referring toRaw Story.
Davis passed away in a hospice in the New England state of Vermont, where he had lived for many years, last Wednesday, the executive branch of the World Government of World Citizens told AFP on Monday.
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.
The Cold War was heating up, the Berlin air lift was to begin in a matter of weeks, and 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.
In 1953, in the small seaside town of Ellsworth, Maine, the stateless Davis declared the foundation of the World Government of World Citizens, with the World Service Authority as its executive branch.