Letter to W. 12 November

Dear W.,

I am not fond of 'Pan-European', because Europe has gone everywhere on this planet, and 'pan' also means everywhere. Therefore, to say 'Pan-European' is like saying everywhere-everywhere.

On the other hand, it is like M.K.Gandhi famously said: Europe would be a good idea, but it has not yet been put into practice. The respect for the individual human being, for instance - it may be typical today to speak about it, but still it is not typical.

Now, I am not reproaching you personally, but the Europeans did not respect the original inhabitants of your Continent.. 'Killing the brutes' has been the typically European practice. It has to come to an end.

You speak European languages, and the habits of your mind have always been European. So it is with myself, a Finn; because my country, too, has been europeanized. Even our bodies are European. But they would not need to be, because 'European' is not a bodily feature. 'European' is a spiritual thing. The European spirit has by now conquered the whole world through the British, French, Dutch, Belgian etcetera colonial Empires and the more recent American business Empire, with its 1000 military bases outside the USA. The European spirit even rules in China, through Marxism-Leninism, which is the synthesis of Classical German Pilosophy, English Political Economy, and French Enlightened Utopianism, plus some Asian Despotism. What could be more European than that combination? The teachings of Jesus Christ, perhaps (if they would be followed), but was not Jesus a Jew, or an Arab, rather than a European?

My conclusion is that, because 'Europe' is both everywhere and nowhere, it means everything and nothing. Europe is a contradiction, which it is up to us to solve.

Therefore, let Europe mean denuclearization. Not as an ideal, nor as a geographical area, but as the unilateral realization of the good idea, of which Gandhi sarcastically reminded us.

- Mikael

Letter to W. 13 November

Dear W.,

my previous letter was one-sided. Of course, we also must think of Europe as a geographical area, which you can leave and to which you can return, for instance, from Australia. But I wanted to underline the omnipresence of Europe in the philosophical sense. Philosophically speaking, Europe is everywhere, and there is no return to the time when it was limited to a certain geographical area.

Secondly, that "pan-Europe" has reached another point of no return, where it has to change or perish. From being 'nuclearized' it must become 'denuclearized'. To achieve that metamorphosis is the challenge of our time. Neither the global warming, nor mass starvation nor the emerging GNR-technologies (genetcis, nanotech, robotics) and the potential new GNR-based WMD, will make that challenge go away. On the contrary: the transformation from 'nuclearized' to 'denuclearized' is necessary precisely to stop the global warming, to organize the production and distribution of food for all, and to steer the technological development towards peaceful and beneficial purposes. And it has to start somewhere.

As you quoted: "How can you sleep when the beds are burning?"

Yours,

 - Mikael