|
| Home |
 |
| About Us |
|
| Writings |
|
| Audio & Video |
|
| War & Peace Digest |
|
| World News Update |
|
| Links |
|
| Donate Now! |
|
WORLD OPINION FORUM - A War & Peace Special Project
Current WORLD OPINION FORUM project:
"THE PEOPLE VS THE BOMB: SHOWDOWN AT THE UN"
CUNY TV Hiroshima Day 2008 Special Report
................................................................................................
Preface
“This comes as a ray of light.”
Johannes Gutenberg on his invention of the moveable type printing press - 1450
..........................
"We seek with this great instrument to help enlighten the world and its peoples. We seek not profit, power nor glory. We gather the best we can and offer it free to all people everywhere.
And for ourselves, we seek not a place in the sun, but a place in the stars."
Lord Reith announcing the creation of BBC radio - 1922
..........................
“Television is a gift from god, and god will hold accountable those who utilize this divine instrument.”
Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of TV transmission - 1956
..........................
“The instruments of the communications revolution are creating a new central nervous system of all humankind.”
Arthur C. Clarke – originator of global communications satellites - 1976
..........................
“We will spend the next hundred years just thinking up things to do with limitless bandwidth.”
Stewart Brand, Editor, Whole Earth Catalog – 1980
..........................
Each advance in communications has opened new possibilities for more enlightened community and governance – not always fully explored.
As we enter the third millennium and the dawning digital age - even in its cave-painting beginnings, greatest of human revolutions - opportunities unique and vast emerge for humans to cohere in the first planetary civilization in our local star system.
This UN NGO proposal - supported by War and Peace, together with the World Federalists and the Earth Society UN Peace Bell at Equinox - outlines an omni-media, omni-langage approach to support such an enterprise.
.....................................................................
A world citizens' news service was first proposed in 1968 by journalist,
Arthur Brackman who called for a global news research digest to study and report on propaganda in newspapers and magazines and to
"prepare a scaffolding from which to construct a better media so as to build a truer democracy."
A "C-Span of the UN" was presented in 1997 at the UN Earth Day ceremony by then Chairman of the Earth Society Foundation,
Kevin Sanders.
The proposal has evolved since into "World Opinion Forum" with support from UN NGOs The War & Peace Foundation, The World Federalists, Earth Society UN Peace Bell, the Samuel Rubin Foundation and others. The first World Opinion Forum event took place at the UN in 2003 – a day-long conference at the UN with keynote speaker Dennis Kucinich on "World Opinion: A New Superpower." A follow-up conference on "The Future of the UN" with keynote Walter Cronkite took place in 2004
World Opinion Forum is currently focused on nuclear disarmament.
The nuclear weapons threat has unique and continuing urgency and imminence. Carl Sagan would tell people the only reason you are here is that twenty minutes ago neither the US nor Russian leaders decided to launch their bombs. Yet the solution is swift and simple. Admiral Noel Gaylor, former commander of the American Pacific fleet, and later head of the US National Security Agency said: "The way to get rid of the bombs is to get rid of the bombs." That is what the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) is for. We are optimists; the only practical philosophy. We hope and expect the Mayors for Peace 20/20 Vision of complete nuclear disarmament by the year 2020 will be realized.
Indeed, we are counting on it. (See "Hello Alpha Centauri" below)
.......................................................
In 2005 World Opinion Forum provided the only complete documentary TV coverage of the NGO presentations to Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the UN:
The program will continue to be updated with new developments and responses – by governments, groups and individuals - to the continuing crisis in nuclear disarmament and control. It will be re-played multi-media every 6th August: Hiroshima Day
.......................................................................
IMMEDIATE:
Support for the next Hiroshima Day multi-language, multi-media world release, and full live coverage of the 2010 Review Conference of the NPT at the UN, for a World Opinion Forum special report: "The People vs. The Bomb; A Reckoning."
contact:
worldopinionforum@gmail.com
The current program follows the 1996 War and Peace coverage of the month-long hearings of the World Court on the legal status of nuclear weapons.
"People vs The Bomb: Judgment in the Hague," the one-hour report by War and Peace Director of Special Projects,
Kevin Sanders played on the PBS Flagship station in New York, national TV in Canada and cable, university and public stations around the world.
The People vs. The Bomb series will continue to be updated with new developments and responses – by governments, groups and individuals - to the continuing crisis in nuclear disarmament.
The program will be available in all formats, outlets, and languages with outreach to NGOs, mayors, leaders, media and the UN.
It will be re-played multi-media every 6th August: Hiroshima Day until the last bomb is dismantled and the molds broken.
World Opinion Forum seeks to encourage and hasten the evolution of a transparent, self-governing, citizen-based Wiki-polity that could engage, assist, advise - and over the decades - include and subsume the ancient, imperial nations-state world order within a wider and more communitarian planetary civilization - a mosaic of city states, towns, regions and peoples, united within the ever-widening, ever-deepening digital mesh of cyberspace.
The UN - the only place where there are no foreigners - can play a unique role in the orderly ascent to such a Golden Age. World Opinion Forum could offer "The People" a larger and more direct role in UN efforts toward the goal of a secure, just and sustainable future.
Such a gathering will be - indeed, already is - the largest, most democratic, most powerful and best informed social, political and intellectual collective that has ever existed. Their skills, experience and knowledge are now more abundant than that of governments, leaders and their advisors. They know more than the UN. They are the
"The Peoples" in whose name the United Nations was founded.
The World Opinion Forum World Service
will report, encourage and facilitate their engagement at the UN.
And we will not be sentimental about the UN, nor unrealistic about its limits. We will invite people to look ahead and prepare as we humans ascend to an age beyond ancient nation-states and beyond the UN itself which, like all institutions, will outlive its death and become part of the museum of human governance.
.............................................................
Such reports and events at the UN such are examples of World Opinion Forum coverage of NGO activities. Proposed interactive, on-going, omni-language, omni-media NGO blogs, conferences and events at the UN would include such themes and issues as: NPT 2010: Halting nuclear anarchy Live coverage of events leading to the month-long Review Conference of the NPT in 2010 Global Warming: Changing course without swerving Kyoto and beyond - Transformation and Transition – A UN Energy Agency Global approaches to Food, Soil, Water Control and Prevention of Global Catastrophes Strategies for looking ahead, thinking ahead, early detection, early response, The Planetary Interest and Legitimate Global Power World Law and human rights, ecology, biosphere, population, WMD, stability, sustainability, immigration, poverty and war.
Power: Soft and less soft Exemplar, Education, Persuasion, Censure, Sanction, Boycott, Divestiture, Non-violent protest Global Village, Global City, Global Mind Local and regional entities; Mayors - Thinking global, acting local - and vice versa. The UN Military Staff Committee: Force without Firepower A standing, rapid-response, volunteer UN peacekeeping, protection, search and rescue service Securing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: From yellowcake mining to waste storage Universal, transparent, global nuclear monitoring and control - now and the next ten-million years Securing the Global Commons Ocean, Air, Biosphere, Arctic, Antarctic, Nuclear-Free Zones, Space, Moon,
Lagrangian Points Preparing for a Planetary Civilization: A mosaic culture, a Gaian politique Beyond nation and UN - Globalization, modernity, unity, diversity, cyber-tribes, space migration, Singularity, immortality, rewriting the vertebrate genome, redesigning the global ecosystem, terraforming the planets .
&
SPRING - March 19, 2020, 10:49 PM EST
HELLO ALPHA CENTAURI
As a UN Earth Day 2020 special event to celebrate the expected achievement of nuclear weapons abolition - the first step to complete disarmament and an end to war, as required by and agreed to in Article 2 of the UN Charter - the Earth Society Foundation plans to send the first message to the nearest star.
The event would coincide with the foundation's annual ringing of the UN Peace Bell at the moment of Spring Equinox - a marker moment of cosmic equipoise in our journey around the sun. UN Earth Day Co-founder, Margaret Mead called it
"Earth's first holy day."
At such a moment it is proposed that, as a neighborly gesture we send a message to Alpha Centauri, only 4.1 light-years away in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. The radio telescope array at Tidbinbilla, Australia has confirmed that it would be possible to beam a digital message to Alpha Centauri. After 9 years, telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere could begin listening for a response every year at equinox. What to say? When to send? World Vote
World Colloquium,
Last Updated Friday, August 01 2008 @ 09:03 AM EDT
Mom & Pop Media
United Nations Bureau, 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10017
Headquarters: 20 East 9th St. #23E, New York, NY 10003
Tel.: 1 (212) 228 5836 Fax.: 1 (212) 228 5791