I’ve been seeing flags in support of Ukraine, which is great, but I would like to throw one out there in support of what Bertrand Russell once described as “quite clearly the only way you could ultimately prevent war.” That is, the creation of a Global Federation of States, a world government, a world where individual nation states have no militaries.

Organizations like the United Nations can never have any teeth in our present system of nation states. As world federalist Albert Einstein explained, “Decisions in the United Nations have no binding force on any national government, nor do any concrete means exist by which these decisions can actually be enforced.”

The competition inherent in our system makes war inevitable. A Federal Republic of Earth can change that. It’s a distant dream, but we need such dreams. We are only a small moment in the human story and our actions now must be informed by our dreams of the future.

When you walk at night, do you not use the light of the stars to see the path in front of you? If we cannot dream of what our hands are only now beginning to lend shape, then what motivations do we have to complete projects for the future? The moderates will call dreamers naive, but it is they who are naive to think our current society is set in stone.

So here’s a flag to the end of wars, to the realization of a dream and to a united Earth!

Anthony Fiori
Portland