European critique of the inadequate
program that has just been presented to President Kennedy and Governor Rockefeller
by the academic staff of Universities, Colleges and Research Institutes
for New York City and the Cambridge-Boston Area, with the aim of overthrowing
the absurd procedures of "civil defense" in the United States
WE SHOULD LIKE to point out the absurdity and complete emptiness of
the declaration made by you as the "Civil Defense Letter Committee" in
The New York Times of Saturday, 30 December 1961 (international edition),
unless one considers it only as a pure declaration of personal conscience
against the new American defense policy. We regret the fact that there
cannot be found a single element of real importance in all your oppositions,
and we propose that you join us in a concrete attitude toward our common
aim. We therefore suggest that you adopt the positive program of the "European
Committee for the Pursuit of Human Expansion," which proposes to create
a new cultural Renaissance, a new practical liberty.
For this, it is necessary to subscribe to our three fundamental demands:
1. I promise that I personally shall never, under any circumstances,
set foot in an atomic shelter. It is better to die standing with all the
cultural heritage of humanity, the perpetual modification of which must
remain our task.
2. I refuse to have anything whatsoever to do with the new aristocracy
of the caves, and never to drink in the company of an owner or builder
of an atomic shelter; for this subterranean aristocracy, even if it manages
to survive the disaster, will be of the quality of sewer rats, and could
in no case be considered a continuation of the human race.
3. At this point in our current situation, it is not so much the thermonuclear
war, but rather the threat of this war, that shows the absolute bankruptcy
of all the politicians of the world. The capitalist or bureaucratic leaders
of both East and West already make use of their bombs every day, in order
to secure power for themselves. Only if one realizes that they have placed
themselves beyond the law can one establish a new legality. I therefore
pledge myself not to expect the necessary upheavals of society to come
from any of the existing formations of specialized politics.
In the first stages, one can demand a neutralization of the defense
program of States by their transference into an Armed Force controlled
by the United Nations. At the same time, military programs of conquest
could be submitted to a world organization such as UNESCO, though [it
would be] radically transformed and divested of its dependence on state
bureaucracies. This organization would coordinate the development of spatial/interplanetary
activities of different groups into a perspective of human solidarity.
Only the unification of our military traditions of the whole world toward
a spatial expansion can guarantee world peace, the alternative of peace
and war being false, because in fact there is no choice. The choice that
imposes itself upon modern man is the continuation of imperialist competition
of human destruction or the Renaissance of humanity on a spatial scale.
But the new frontier of mankind is not only in Outer Space; it is in
the radical transformation of life on this planet. If the nations can
come to an agreement to maintain peace by transforming it into spatial
expansion, then - on the question of total expansion of mankind - we cannot
come to an understanding with the "nations." We are not unconditional
partisans of peace: the profound error of American intellectuals is their
defense, devoid of imagination, of the actual peace that they wish to
preserve. Nobody really likes this peace, which nourishes not only the
menace of such a war, but also the total alienation of actual daily life,
and the absolute boredom of a society on the road to cybernetization.
Peace remains, like this life itself, without importance, and what is
important is human expansion: the creation of events that suit us.
We are going to inform you in greater detail in our review MUTANT, which
will appear in the spring, of your underdeveloped attitudes, as well as
those of the Russians. We hope that many of the subscribers to your manifest
will join us in this perspective, which can give a future to your direction.