Bypassing the State, War and Symptoms
From the Red Cross to the World Summit
The World Summit movement sees that governments and capitalism are not only incapable of solving our problems — they ARE the problem. Glaring proof of this statement exists if we take a look at one very old and successful self-governing movement, and the reason it exists in the first place. The Red Cross has operated outside of, and indeed because of, government failure all around the world since 1863. According to their own website, The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is the world’s largest humanitarian network which is made up of almost 97 million volunteers, supporters, and staff in 186 countries. The Movement is neutral and impartial, and provides protection and assistance to people affected by disasters and conflicts. As stated in Wikipedia, “Up until the middle of the 19th century, there were no organized and well-established army nursing systems for casualties and no safe and protected institutions to accommodate and treat those who were wounded on the battlefield.”
Cleaning Up The Bloody Mess — Band-Aid Solutions
Let’s pay attention to what should be quite obvious by now from centuries of history, as well as our current news events — governments are really good at causing problems but not good at fixing them. Governments are good at rising to the challenge of fighting wars, or causing wars, but they are not very good at preventing them, or taking care of their soldiers afterwards. Ask yourself this…why do we have so many veteran charities? CharityWatch currently rates 53 different veteran and military charities in the United States (half of which receive an “F” grade).
While many of these are reputable charities doing important work, shouldn’t our governments be doing this work? Shouldn’t governments be paying for it? Shouldn’t governments be calculating into the equation all these externalities before they go to war? And regarding donations, I wasn’t able to find out how much money in total is being donated every year to veteran’s charities (please let me know if you find out), but it’s safe to say it is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.
Self-Governing Since the War of 1870
The Red Cross has been cleaning up bloody messes since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In his book written in 1892 The Conquest of Bread the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin beautifully summed up the self-governing capacity of humans, as the Red Cross exemplified back then:
“Imagine somebody saying…“The State, capable as it is of massacring twenty thousand men in a day, and of wounding fifty thousand more, is incapable of helping its own victims; consequently, as long as war exists private initiative must intervene, and men of goodwill must organize internationally for this humane work!” What mockery would not have met the man who would have dared to speak thus! To begin with, he would have been called a Utopian, and if that did not silence him he would have been told: “What nonsense! Your volunteers will be found wanting precisely where they are most needed, your volunteer hospitals will be centralized in a safe place, while everything will be wanting in the ambulances. Utopians like you forget the national rivalries which will cause the poor soldiers to die without any help.”
Now we know what happened. Red Cross societies organized themselves freely, everywhere, in all countries, in thousands of localities; and when the war of 1870 broke out, the volunteers set to work. Men and women offered their services. Thousands of hospitals and ambulances were organized; trains were started carrying ambulances, provisions, linen, and medicaments for the wounded. The English committees sent entire convoys of food, clothing, tools, grain to sow, beasts of draught, even steam-ploughs with their attendants to help in the tillage of departments devastated by the war!
As to the prophets ever ready to deny other men’s courage, good sense, and intelligence, and believing themselves to be the only ones capable of ruling the world with a rod, none of their predictions were realized. The devotion of the Red Cross volunteers was beyond all praise. They were only too eager to occupy the most dangerous posts; and whereas the salaried doctors of the Napoleonic State fled with their staff when the Prussians approached, the Red Cross volunteers continued their work under fire, enduring the brutalities of Bismarck’s and Napoleon’s officers, lavishing their care on the wounded of all nationalities. Dutch, Italians, Swedes, Belgians, even Japanese and Chinese agreed remarkably well. They distributed their hospitals and their ambulances according to the needs of the occasion. They vied with one another especially in the hygiene of their hospitals. And there is many a Frenchman who still speaks with deep gratitude of the tender care he received from the Dutch or German volunteers in the Red Cross ambulances. But what is this to an authoritarian? His ideal is the regiment doctor, salaried by the State. What does he care for the Red Cross and its hygienic hospitals, if the nurses be not functionaries!
Here is then an organization, sprung up but yesterday, and which reckons its members by hundreds of thousands; possesses ambulances, hospital trains, elaborates new processes for treating wounds, and so on, and is due to the spontaneous initiative of a few devoted men.
Today, a century and a half later, the 17 million volunteers of the Red Cross are still cleaning up the mess, still patching the wounds. They are still distributing clean water and food and providing medical support to natural disaster victims, such as in aftermath of the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, or risking their lives to fear-based attacks during an ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — all without the need of a state government to organize them. The point is this — people, not governments, do everything meaningful. But perhaps now is the time to move beyond patchwork.
Moving from the Symptoms of War to the Root Causes
In a thought experiment, let’s try to imagine the incalculable amounts of money and volunteer hours, as well as the literal blood, sweat and tears that go into the noble work of putting bandages on the soldiers during war and healing them afterwards. (Let’s not even discuss the better ways we could spend the $717 billion U.S. military budget because we will never reach those better ways since money and government ARE the problem.) Now, let’s imagine these four very real possibilities:
- We can repurpose the volunteers of the Red Cross away from the ravages of war in faraway lands by ending war, and shifting them towards regenerative human healing in our own local neighborhoods
- We can bring our soldiers home safely by dissolving what President Eisenhower called the “Military-Industrial-Complex” and repurpose them as soldiers of peace in a Manhattan-Project scale effort to regenerate the earth with green energy and sustainable agriculture to provide nutritious food for everyone (Read The Conquest of Bread) on land which will be recognized as the common heritage of all of the world’s people
- We will make 1 and 2 happen by repurposing volunteers and resources to the World Summit in addressing the root cause, so that we don’t have to keep plastering over the symptoms of an outdated socio-economic-political system
- We the people, all people, via the World Summit, are moving beyond thought experiments to “activate” groups around the world to make 1, 2, and 3 happen by creating new non-hierarchical systems of self-governance that will make war obsolete and usher in a post-scarcity, post-capitalism world that works for everyone
Let’s End the Blood Money $
The World Summit, a self-governing non-political movement open to people of all faiths, colors, and orientations, is now launching its Unified Patreon Platform to provide peer-to-peer funding (not dependent on governments or corporations or foundations) to the visionary, purpose-driven delegates who wish to come to our new Synergy Hub in Playa del Carmen, Mexico right away for urgent full-time work with the World Summit. We are flipping the paradigm and creating a new world beyond politics, poverty and war within the next year and a half.
In a sober yet enpowered recognition that we are at war with ourselves and will self-terminate as a species unless we radically change course, the World Summit urgently invites Red Cross International and other groups and movements around the globe to unify with the World Summit, to “activate” with us in creating the more beautiful world that works for everyone. We can keep tightening the tourniquet to stop the bleeding, or we can prevent the bloodshed in the first place. When we unify, together as one, we will finally begin to fulfill the Red Cross’s ultimate mission — “to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering” — and thank them for their efforts as we put them out of business, because their services will no longer be needed.
Stay tuned for our upcoming “Open Message to the Soldiers of the World”
