European critique of the inadequate programme which 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.
For this, it is necessary to subscribe to our three fundamental demands: 1. I promise that I shall never, personally, 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. In the first stages one can demand a neutralisation of the defense programme of states by their transference into an Armed Force controlled by the United Nations. At the same time military programmes of conquest could be submitted to a world organisation like U.N.E.S.C.O. though radically transformed and divested of its dependency upon state bureaucracies. This organisation would coordinate the development of spacial-interplanetary activities of different groups into a perspective of human solidarity. Only the unification of our military traditions in the whole world towards a spacial expansion can guarantee world peace, the alternative of peace and atomic war being false, because in fact there is no choice. The choice which imposes itself upon modern man is the continuation of imperialist competition of human destruction or the Renaissance of humanity on a spacial 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 in transforming it into spacial expansion, 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 the intellectual Americans is their defense, devoid of imagination, of the actual peace which they wish to preserve. Nobody really likes this peace, which nourishes 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 cybernetisation. 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 manifesto will join us in this perspective, which can give a future to your direction.
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