We are forced to establish that, at the moment, it is in Belgium that one finds the greatest number (and the most rapid increase) of notorious imbeciles and suspicious people who try to approach the situationists without having the means to do so.

Considering the unity of the situationist movement, we are obligated to report that the severe sorting out of all those who are specialized intellectuals, so-called connoisseurs and collectors of objects produced by the avant-garde; more or less cheerful ralliers to a more or less exotic conformism; people more or less voluntarily ignorant of the nature of power, and worshippers of the efficacity of one police force or another -- the sorting out, we say, and the necessary treatment of such people, have been applied by the situationists in Germany, Scandanavia, England and France, constantly and in a manner of which no one can any longer be ignorant. It is thus obvious that the Belgians will not benefit from an exception to these rules, despite a species of gentle dissimulation that is the natural product of the acceptance of a debilitated politico-cultural amateurism.

Given that we represent new critical ideas and (because efficacity has chosen us, and not the reverse) the practical efficacity of supercession to the specialisists, whomever they are -- and given that their incapacity to understand this confirms it -- the specialists nevertheless must speak of us, so as to provide the preliminary proof that they have understood us, and that they have thus liquated their own baseness.

The truly indecent excess of a fuckery that addresses itself to us in the name of it-matters-not-what was reached, on 23 February [1963] in Antwerp, where an old failure of literary Stalinism and a handful of hysterical virgins came to propose to us, point-blank, that they be admitted [to the Situationist International] and that we co-sign the following three absurdities (stupidly written and entitled "Hands up!"): a) that fascism threatens to overtake Belgium; b) that, subsequently, the only revolutionary force one could apply would be the Belgian Communist Party; [and] c) that it would be good if we immediately made a choice between fascism and their own nullity, which has been frozen, conserved and transmitted since 1930. This exemplary case must be cited for the instruction of all their equals.

All attempts, even more discreet ones, to enter into relations of this kind with the SI in Belgium must cease starting from 1 March 1963.

(Published as a bilingual [French/Dutch] tract in February 1963. Mentioned in Internationale Situationniste #9 [August 1964], p. 31. Translated by NOT BORED! June 2005 from the French version published in Archives Situationnistes: Volume 1: Documents traduits 1958-1970.)