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“Human rights take shape and meaning when they are associated with representative government involving responsibility and duty. So far, the peace proposals do not include popular representation in the council and the assembly, and the people therefore assume no personal responsibility for anything and will therefore gain no personal rights. Commissions (stop us if we are wrong about this) cannot create human rights.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“We walked home in the cold afternoon past Franklin Simon's windows, where the children of all nations revolved steadily in the light. Most of the stores were concentrating on the gift aspect of the Nativity, displaying frankincense, myrrh, and bath salts, but Franklin Simon advertised the Child Himself, along with a processional of other children of assorted races, lovely to behold. We stood and watched passers-by take in this international and interracial scene, done in terms of childhood, and we observed the gleam in the eyes of colored people as they spotted the little colored child in with the others. There hasn't been a Christmas like this one since the first Christmas--the fear, the suffering, the awe, the strange new light that nobody understands yet. All the traditional characteristics of Christmas are this year in reverse: instead of the warm grate and the happy child, in most parts of the world the cold room and the starveling. The soldiers of the triumphant armies return to their homes to find a hearty welcome but an unfamiliar air of uneasiness, uncertainty, and constraint. They find, too, that people are groping toward something which still has no name but which keeps turning up--in department-store windows and in every other sort of wistful human display. It is the theme concealed in the victory which the armies of the democracies won in the field, the yet unclaimed triumph: justice among men of all races, a world in which children (of whatever country) are warm and unafraid. It seems too bad that men are preparing to blow the earth to pieces just as they have got their hands on a really first-rate idea. Our Christmas greetings this year are directed to the men and women who will represent the people of the world at the meeting of the United Nations Organization in January. We send them best wishes and a remembrance of that first Christmas. Our hope is that they will shed the old robes which have adorned dignitaries for centuries and put on the new cloth that fits one man as well as another, no matter where he lives on this worried and all too shatterable earth.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“Many excellent sites have been proposed as headquarters for the United Nations, but the location we like best is the Black Hills of South Dakota. Staunch advocacy of this site appears from time to time in the appendix of the Congressional Record, and we have been following it, first with interest, lately with enthusiasm. Unquestionably, the seat of the new world league should be Dinosaur Park, near Rapid City, South Dakota, in the Black Hills, for in Dinosaur Park stand the cement figures, full size, of the Big Five of Long Ago--Tyrannosaurus rex (35 feet long, 16 feet high), Triceratops (27 by 11), Brontosaurus (90 feet long, weight 40 tons), and a couple of other plug-uglies of the period, all of them in combative attitudes astride a well-worn path. Much can be said for such a bizarre setting. Here let the new halls be built, so that earnest statesmen, glancing up from their secret instructions from the home office, may gaze out upon the prehistoric sovereigns who kept on fighting one another until they perished from the earth.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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