Speakin’ of Fan mail. I got a funny lookin’ card the other day headed
Kriegs Statlag XXI A.
with the prisoners number runnin’ up into the thousands.
Dear Mr. Pound. If this card reaches you and you can manage it, I would be very grateful if you will send me one or two of your recent works on economics. Reading matter from England rather scarce at present and not very enlightening.
Signed. So and so.
Well, mebbe this is all very flattering. But the point is the TIME LAG. If a man has to be made a prisoner of war before he will read my works on economics—what good does it do him ? Or let us say what IMMEDIATE good. Of course he may be gittin’ ready to make a home fit for a hero; in a new order England when he GITS out of Gefangenenlager.
But wouldn’t it have been a sight easier if he and his 12000 fellow recliners in the Genfangenenlager had STARTED readin’ my economics just a bit SOONER?
I ask particularly my American hearers, whether the START on the new economics, which would have PREVENTED the war and let the now so mangy ole worm eaten Trafalgar lion go on lying down with the French Rooster, and the assorted eagles of Europe; and left the old Killyloo bird screechin’ away on the 4th of July every summer, and no bone broken, and a lot fewer oil ships sunk, and more cars on the American roads, and more rubber for tires. And abundance, no longer potential: but real. Wouldn’t it have been bit nicer?
Mr. Brown, known as Buffalo Bill, tellin’ you I am in propaganda. Waal, damn it all, I was runnin’ this SAME propaganda, back before Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich.
I don’t mean I dug down into it, not down to the bottom, I was leadin’ the pleasant life, and to men like Hitler and Mussolini, if they had ever got wind of my bein’ here, they would have thought me a possibly harmless eccentric. HOWever, in my perlite and refined manner, I did try to do a spot of work educatin’, here or there, puttin’ in a drop of enlightenment.
I didn’t go in hell for leather, economics EXCLUSIVE, straight at once. I had to find out how the old show was runnin’. Runnin’ DOWN.
I say it was runnin’ DOWN. I began to say that in my poetry. “This land turns evil slowly.”
Treatin’ it by way of young man’s intuition, I said something about getting the SENSE of a city, like the savage hunter has the sense of the forest. Somethin’ was running DOWN.
There is a poem, not by me, back in Blast, about a mud hydro. That was healthy mud, by comparison.
Then after I saw it was BAD, I began to wonder how you could fix it. After ten year askin’ questions, askin’ 'em of Bank Lawyers, askin’ 'em of Max Pam or any other wise guy I could git near to. After ten years, I say, I began to get top sides with the subject. Usury, profits, monopolization of money. Then I began diggin’ into American history, and other history. All there plain as a biscuit. But the means of TELLIN you people ? That was the question. Oh Hamlet. Oh village hamlets. Big papers did NOT want open discussion—it had to be bootlegged.
Then there was “education” beginning with the top shelves of the colleges. I am goin’ to quote from a paper with an equine title printed out in Wisconsin. A little magazine, the kind that comes up alive and dies down usually rather sudden, inside a couple of years. Along in the Spring of 1935 I came up with this answer to those young editors in their quarterly as follows:
The best I can do in reply to yours is to offer programs recalling a few FACTS. For 30 years I have been trying to reorganize the study of literature so that it would be of some use to the student, and for 15 I have been trying to reorganize education, in general, to the same end.
The best I can tell you to date, is contained in my ABC of Reading and in my ABC of Economics with the volumes following it, Social Credit, an Impact; Jefferson and/or Mussolini (then in press).
Why aren’t they used as YOUR textbooks ? For advanced students, there is my Make it New, which must be correlated with my ABC of Reading if you are clearly to see what it is driving at.
If American students will recognize that Universities are there to prepare students for life in a given country and in a given TIME, and insist on finding out what will help them to LIVE in that place and time, they can get their four years’ worth. No body can do this for the students. They have got to do it for themselves.
“Mark Hopkins on one end of the log, and the student on the other.”
When Abelard was kicked out of the University of Paris 5,000 students followed him into the country, [where] there were no dormitories and million dollar gymnasia. That is the sort of thing that spells “revival of learning” or “intellectual rebirth.”
My generation was brought up ham ignorant of economics. History was taught with OMISSIONS of the most vital facts. Every page our generation read was over shadowed by usury. Not only was the press false, but every current idea had been warped by generations of antecedent perversion.
The ACID TEST of public men today is plain and simple. MISTRUST any man, no matter how high in office who tries to get you AWAY from the questions:
WHAT is money?
Who makes it?
How is it issued?
Why can’t the WHOLE people buy what the WHOLE people produces?
Start on that at once, and throw out any man who won’t give you a straight answer. You can not cure Wisconsin in Pekin. I mean, start where you are. Don’t let anyone wriggle out of LOCAL honesty, by talking internationally. Investigate the Carnegie Peace Foundation. When you find out why they avoid the study of the economic causes of war, you’ll be part way toward preventing another.
Printed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1935, LONG before Hitler was so influential in world affairs.
You can lead a Rocking Horse to water, but you can’t make him drink it.
And young America’s problem is what was young England’s problem. And the answers were KNOWN; the answers COULD have been broadcast, the answers could have been printed in daily papers, they could have been taught in the schools, they could have been used as the basis for action. I mean political action. And WHAT prevented it?
Waaal, go ask yourselves what prevented it ? Ask yourselves why these things were NOT widely printed ? Why the real thought of the American founders was hidden, stuffed into corners ? Why every man in England who foresaw disaster, and who saw HOW England could have avoided it IF ... Why these men were NOT heeded. Why they were hugger-muggered out of the way, or reduced, shall we say often by FEAR, into silence.
Not all were afraid, some were prudent. Where are they ? Some of ’em got out in front. Now where are they ? Where are the back seaters, the men who knew, but saw no way to ACT on their knowledge ? The men who assembled tiny minorities ? Waaal, where are they ? And when will the people learn wisdom?
OZeus.
O Chan Ti, how long is the time lag?
I unhooked my radio the other night and the word REVOLUTION came floatin’ over the ambient air. Very English voice, usin’ the word RE VO LU TION.
And I thought, yaaas, very nice but HOW’ ? How CAN they revolute.
Conjure up to my mind the pale grey light in Kensington Gardens, and the gulls floatin’ over the round pond, and the so very quiet demeanor of the nicely dressed females that used to float up the broadwalk, along about 1910. How CAN THEY revolute?
Yaas, I hear Bela Kun was over in England, he was a revolution, bloody murder and all the trimmings. But does Kensington revolute?
I am so old I can remember the end of the nineteenth century, that is the century before this one that is gettin’ on to be nigh half gone. How impressed the American visitors were by the beef-eaters in the Tower, and the teacups at Windsor and Stratford-on-Avon, with the coats of arms glazed into the chimney, and the quiet lawn in the park, and a time when the Route du Roi wasn’t so rotten. The Row, not of course that I knew the riders, save occasionally Mr. Cunninghame Graham, a fine figure on horse back, and ole Colonel Jackson, suggestin’ I should dine at his club, he wantin’ to see the expressions on the faces of his contemporaries when faced with the vorticist movement. Well, all that must be fairly well bygone.
The question is how do folks revolute ? The Rooshians do it with fire and sword, and very unpleasant tortures. Very unEnglish, as England used to be in my memory. How DO you revolute?
Can you revolute without contacts, without collaboration, without COMMUNICATION ? I think not.
Yaas, there is Cripps. He didn’t use to be there so much. In fact my sole memory of Stafford is secondhand, old Nelly Weaver saying “A DREADFUL man!” Seems like she had a cousin, that was manager, or editor, or managing editor of a paper called Pig and Piffle, I mean by its own staff in private. And it sold for a lot less than it cost, I mean it cost, let us say, ten pence a copy to print, and sold retail for a six pence, and turned over ten or twenty thousand a year in net profits.
Anyhow, Nelly’s cousin died, and left his sons in Cripps’ charge, Cripps being trustee or guardian, so my memory of Stafford boils down to Miss Nelly a sayin’
“A DREADFUL man! Heaven KNOWS what he is teaching the boys!”
Waaal, if heaven didn’t know then, mebbe heaven will find out during the next few week’s course of hostilities.
I mean internal hostilities. I don’t know that England learns from abroad. I dunno that the fall of Madras, or Calcutta will teach you folks anything, cause Hong Kong, Singapore and the Island Indies don’t seem to have started you. But mebbe a few INTERNAL hostilities ? Heaven knows!
Back in Queen Elizabeth’s time, farmin’ out their estates to some usurer, gettin’ out of their feudal duties, Cobbett and Hobhouse—all sorts of velleities toward reform; confined to a few special segments. Lord, can you call ’em segments. They were mostly kind hearted fellows, thought to be CRANKS by the public.
Can you have ANY collaboration if you don’t MEET ? How can you meet in a CITY, unless you are financed?
Yaas, you can, or COULD meet on a street corner, or in by Mubble Arch, so long as you didn’t do anything SERIOUS.
Ole Kun, Cohen, Béla was serious. People in Budapest found out he was serious. Mebbe Sir Stafford is SERIOUS. The bolo agents in England were serious, when I was last there, the top numbers in the Communist Party were all paid by Moscow, which as you know is sometimes paid by New York or London.
It WAS known to your intelligence service, all their numbers were listed, all of ’em engaged in industrial espionage. I am not tellin’ anything to you that some of your own rulers don’t KNOW.
And now we hear of the SCORCHED EARTH policy. Git ready for an invasion. Cit ready to destroy all that is left you. Bum down your houses.
Waaal, WHO is a going to live in those ruins?
An invading army, if it ever gits into London, would, one would suppose, pick its own quarters; and a man that had burnt down his own bedroom would be left to sleep in the ashes.
Margey Daw, see saw, and the rest of it.
Do you think the people who tell you to burn down your houses and get ready for bombing raids for North Ireland, droppin’ leaflets saying they only do it to help you ? Do you think that these people LOVE you?
Have you got any data about the Ukraine ? I am movin’ toward this proposition. I assume that some of you did NOT want Mr. Churchill. He was not a pig in a poke. He may have been a Baldwin piglet, but he certainly was not CONcealed from the purchaser.
Take Carolyn Bellairs, for example, Carolyn Bellairs did NOT want Mr. Churchill. I dunno whether he, Bellairs, has yet joined Domvile in Jail. We do NOT git detailed news of your family squabbles. But I assume the Navy and the Army did contain at least a nucleus of men, with enough sense NOT to want Churchill.
I assume that there was a tiny, and languid minority who did NOT acquiesce DEElightedly in a war, which was KNOWN to be going to have such consequences as the whole world now sees it havin’.
Revolution di PALAIS ? Is that it ? Do you think you can balayer the palais ? Do you think you can have a nice little revolution, in the colors of Mr. Watt’s Hope Soap and Charity?
AH yes, but the MONEY. I am castin’ about in my mind for some way you could CLEAN your own sewers.
Oh, but you say, we don’t WANT to clean the sewers, we just want to dust out the draaaawin’ room.
I comprehend you. But is that just what you can do?
I was for years all for a nice sensible bit of reform but Mr. Rothschild, and Mr. Sieff, and the rest of the British powers, Mond, Kataan, Sas soon, and the rest of ’em weren’t very keen to nice reforms discussed in their papers.
They put in such blokes as Eden. They put OUT anybody who said anything sensible. Nice old gentlemen, who would edge up to the truth, talkin’ about remonitization of silver, or some VERY mild infraction of the gold-bugs monopoly. They, the nice old members of the respectable knighthood, or elderly colonels, who remembered the end of the other war, they would get sent out to Karachi, to keep ’em from impeding the traffic (traffic in gold, and in loans at high interest) or at low interest, sometimes not more than 30 or 40% on the real money handled.
CAN YOU MEET one another ? Your air isn’t free. Open organizations have been “put inside.” No chance of marching ’round swinging green banners; presenting petitions to the King, about Coventry. Nothing but SECRET organization. Ever hear of the Fenians?
Or revolution in the PALACE ? Well, where do we go from here ? Art revolution ? Need three or four men even to make an ART movement function.
Can’t do it in politics without at least some sort of COMMON ground, common agreement.
You do NOT believe in the total abolition of property—meaning of private ownership of your homes, and fir fields. Lord, who has any FIELDS left ? I dunno. Say your house and suburban garden. What about homesteads ? The air is NOT yours. The press is NOT yours. Communications by private automobile are said to be gettin’ scarcer. In London you do not MEET, no man knows any other, at least not to any extent.
How can you defend your homesteads from Cripps ? Homesteads ? Your bed chamber, your kitchenette, and your telephone, all of ’em rented. God help you. You better start SOMETIME.
Ezra Pound speakin’.
Yaaas, SOME time, while Sir Stafford is goin’ big out in India, agreein’ on the TOTAL abolution of private property, him and the Aga Kahn, and the gaekwar of Baroda. Pardon me, the Tovarish of Baroda.
It was not the present speaker, but an Englishman, I believe an absolutely loyal Englishman, a sort of Royalist, not Mr. Eliot, but at any rate a King’s man, and so far as I recall a man who had no Fascist or Nazi sympathies, who on May 11th, 1939 uttered the statement I am about to repeat to you. Get the date, May eleventh, 1939.
There is NO mystery whatsoever about the disappearance of Mr. Litvinov from the political scene. The Soviet Foreign Minister vacated his office because he failed to deliver “the goods” demanded by the masters of Wall Street and Moscow. New methods to secure these “goods” will now assuredly be given a trial.
What are these “goods?” Nothing other than Great Britain, captive and in chains. Great Britain stripped of her empire, above all Great Britain, ruined financially by the collapse of the Pound Sterling and the system called “barter trading” which is based upon that money.
There, gentle Briton, you have it. Your own heroes have told you. And your own true men you have heard NOT. You have not heard your own true speakers. You have lain down and died in the gutter because you would not hear your OWN friends; your own loyal speakers.
Now as I keep on tellin’ you, my friends and/or acquaintances in England, were not of any one group. There were a few of ’em Fascists; but the most of ’em were IDIOTICALLY anti-fascist. They were most of ’em plum stupid about the Italian regime. I am not offerin’ you the ideas of a sect, I am as the strength is vouchsafed to me trying to remind you or tell you of a few home truths, that you COULD have learned not only from me, but from dozens of Englishmen.
Seems like it must have been more like HUNDREDS of Englishmen, trying to tell you for the past twenty-two years.
Now WHY did you not listen ? Well, if that implies retrospect, bring it down to the true British question: W’ere do we g’ae frm ERE ? I ask you.
I ask you still more HOW do you [go] from here. I can’t see that any other white race in Europe is going to be very anxious about Anglo Saxon survival belong to what is usually regarded as a branch of that race. Racially, English went to America along sometime after 1600, 1632–38, along up till 1700.
I think you lose by not thinking about this problem as RACIAL.
Yes, I know I went at it from the economic part of the picture. Brought up on American principles; no prejudice against any man for race, creed, or color.
Waaal, the chemist is not supposed to have prejudice against any particular chemical; in the laboratory some stink and some do not. Some explode and some do not—chemist’s business—chemist in American sense, not the man in the drug store; say the chemical experimenter or chemical engineer is supposed to look at different chemical elements with a fair eye and mind.
So I don’t reckon to go along my road as with prejudice. I have tried to see the thing straight.
Birth control, bad national health, neoMalthusian preachin’, scarcity economics, all workin’ Britain’s downfall. Question is: Ain’t you fallen down about FAR ENOUGH?
Can’t you stop somewhere at least near the TOP of the dung heap, with out having the whole midden flop over on top of ye?
And HOW are you going to do it ? That is what I ask: HOW are you going to do it?
You certainly are NOT going to do it by abolition of all ARYAN ownership, and the mortgaging of all England to a half hundred Kikes in New York. That is NOT going to give you a new British order.
CAN you understand, can any of you understand, that a few of you must club together, and at least try to find out what you BELIEVE?
You do NOT believe in the abolition of ownership ? You do NOT believe that you should be ruled from abroad by Kuhn, Loeb, and Warburg, of the dregs of the ex-ghettoes of Europe, now planted on the neck of the American people.
Have you any hold on the country ? Let us say on the Land?
I see it is increasingly difficult for any two men to meet outside London. Who meets INSIDE London ? Do they still disagree about EVERYTHING ? Do three social credit parties instantly arise wherever two social creditors gather together?
Is there ANY common bond, apart from hysteria induced by your jews-papers? Or the common interests of men who hire their “seats.”
I mean SEATS in the Commons. Difference between those seats and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange is that in New York the men BUY their seats, and in Westminster the members rent ’em. The New York Stock Exchange system has an advantage; it may even be more democratic. I never heard democracy discussed in this connection.
But a man BUYS his seat on Change, openly and the price is known, I believe in most cases.
Whereas a member of Parliament is a renter, he is said to pay in an in definite sum per year, to DEFRAY.
Defray is, I think, the word used, defray party expenses. Contribute to the funds of the party.
That is democracy. Is it ? It has never been the American IDEAL of representative government.
I have murmured on the ambient air, now and then a few soft words about my own splay footed country. Real representation when the place was more or less agricultural. Method of geographic division O.K. when many people were engaged in growing the crops of one sort or another, and the seaboard in tradin’, and fishin’.
Rough sections still kept in the United States but no one havin’ any say now, but the banks and the Warburgs. People who FEED the lot always voted down by the RULERS. Naive blokes, populist, subject to caricature. All lead up to GUILD organization.
Which does NOT appeal to abject NON-producers. Does not appeal to exploiters, that is the rub. Early socialists were boneheaded; didn’t dig down into problem of money.
I dunno how far you now KNOW what the same men took twenty years tellin’ you, and that your press took those same twenty years keepin’ from you.
Even supposin’ you do NOW begin to see something, how are you going to GIT OUT of your present trilemma ? If SOME Englishmen could see where England’s course was leading back before this war started more of them ought by now to be seeing it, seeing that Singapore is no longer called by that name. What was the Sassoonery is now Shonanko. How do you save your homes ? Revolution behind the scenes in the palace ? A group of officers of the Army ? Or guild formation ? Movement coming up from the mines or the land?
You can NOT eat minerals, and then HEROES ? The reformers all used to take it so easy. The new bright world was to be arranged over the tea cups. Why DIDN’T you settle it over the tea cups ? DID any one care for England enough to rattle the teaspoons, or risk cracking a saucer ? AND now your politicians talk of CONDUCT of the war. Don’t you realize that the only men with brains enough to conduct a war are the men who foresaw what the war would be; the men who tried to keep you OUT of it, and who would now try to CONDUCT you out if it ? You have NOT made it a war of honor. You could have made a hopeless stand, a forlorn despair of an expedition into Poland, and been defeated with honor. Of course it would not have been right at bottom, because the guarantee to Poland was faked. It was not to or FOR Poland. But even so, you could have made a gesture and been defeated with honor.
Can you not see that the outrage of the bombardment of Paris is but one of a series of attempts to make real peace impossible, and to prepare for the war after this one ? Needless hate—sewing the SEEDS of hate for to morrow. Does it mean nothing to you that in this war you have inflicted more and worse wounds on your Allies than on the people you said were your enemies ? Can these things go on forever without some glimmer of light reaching the British mind, to show the real causes of the conflict—the real forces IN conflict ? Usury against peasantry, usury against farmland, usury against every man who does a day’s work, physical or with his mind.
Ah, against consciousless exploitation, against monopoly, against bank deals and swindles. Against EVERY race in Europe that takes the responsibility for being a nation and administering openly, as a government in the eyes of the people.
Against the crawling slime of a secret rule, a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE rule, that takes NO responsibility for the welfare of races, and nations, but eats like a cancer into the heart and soul of all nations. Even that where of its central staff is composed.
It is a privilege to fight against gentlemen. And the European radio station seems to me to have been as ready to show respect to General McArthur, as they are, and RIGHTLY are, to show absolute and utter contempt and loathing for the war profiteers, and the gang of unmitigated newts, and vermin who have thrown the world into war in the hope of establishing a gold and money lending monopoly, and blotting out the good life in five continents. They have done this from their lust for secret and irresponsible power.
And the place to fight these syphilis bugs is NOT on the frontiers, but in the centre of your own nations.
This more than bubonic plague passes over all frontiers as Dante already perceived. It rots the heart, and the soul of the nations. It is silent, ceaseless in its action. And the PLACE to resist it is for every man LOCALLY—the means to resist it are LOCAL.
And by that fact they are hard to bring into coherence. The embezzler, working behind false laws, can mobilize quickly; the farmer, worker and peasant can not.
The embezzler sets up his papers, dailies and weeklies. That curse of God Willkie was puffed up by the Weeklies. The plague does not stop with the dailies. It sets up publishing houses, it grinds down all private liberty—economic—I mean, fewer and fewer men or groups have the MONEY to run a paper. Every cranny is infested. Every college campus has a book store. LOOK to these bookstores. Look to the LAST vestiges of approximate freedom of the press, even the scholastic press, that gets out small editions. Communicate, Communicate, and CO MUN ICATE.
A plot was outlined years ago to blot out classical scholarship, to blot out the historic sense. It went about on soft paws, making no noise, it was DEADLY.
It worked while the nations slept. A contempt for the Latin authors. The idea Greek was useless. The concentration on innocuous authors. Erotic poems and NOT the state of life as shown in the Athenian law courts.
The aesthetic angle, that the whole of my generation grew up in, all LOOKING harmless, so HARMLESS.
America was killed by the kid-glove generation, looked simple. Henry James describes these innocuous flops: on the beach at Newport, none of ’em meant any harm, after the Civil War the American people was tired. I’ll say they were tired.
With reason. Killed each other off to make room for the vermin.
After Cato’s death there was no Republic, says some old Roman historian. Perhaps after Lincoln’s death there was no United States Republic. Bowers, the TRAGIC ERA, go read it. Johnson couldn’t hold out against the infection. Civil War dragged on. WITH INTENTION. Halleck, why was he general ? Or at least why in command ? Waaal, that is old scandal. Can’t fight Antietam now. Can’t go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now. Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and banners, to KEEP the nation’s mind OFF the causes—off the REAL causes. Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City.
My ole great uncle had a wooden leg,
went stumpin’ ’round after Gettysburg.
Ole uncle dot and carry one,
and every gun was a golden egg, for the Bankers in New York.
For the bankers in New York, OHoooooo.
No wonder old uncle Hiram wrote poems about P [J. Pierpont] Morgan, that as a kid of nine I didn’t understand. NO wonder the profit of 15 thousand on a lot of condemned rifles, looked like pretty poor stuff to men who had lost legs and eyes for the union.
After them came the kid glovers. Too refined to touch politics. THAT was an error. But you can’t very much blame ’em. Tired of five years war, of bad food, and army blankets. Also the weak’uns left, Henry James, Henry Adams, John, John Quincy, then Charles Francis in London. That part of Henry Adams “Education” is still EDUCATORY. Read it. Charles Francis Adams workin’ against Lord Russell, as cold a son of a fish as ever got into Parliament.
Then he came home, Charles Francis, and didn’t make a fight for the presidency. Possibly it would have been useless and then Brooks Adams trying to set down the real reasons.
Where is BOSTON ? Damn it, is the Kike and Kahal radio station all that is left of Boston?
Is New England a midden ? The war you ought to be fightin’ is NOT five thousand miles OUTSIDE Boston. Or five thousand miles outside New York, or even outside San Francisco. It is INTERNAL.
And if you let ’em bilk you with the idea. that they will PROGRESS AFTER the war is over, and a few million of you under the daisies, you will be being worse FOOLS than the Hindoos.
This war, internal war, can go on QUITE as well, SIMULTANEOUS with General McArthur gettin’ killed in a hopeless fight against Aguinaldo’s successors, as it can after the war is over: if it ever is over.
BEING at peace for twenty years AFTER Versailles did NOT conduce to a victory of the American people over the shysters. WHY should the twenty years after THIS war be any more favorable to setting up an honest government and killing off the Morgenthau and Warburg Satrapy: and having a United States of America State or REPUBLIC ? What earthly argument is there against cleaning up and cleaning out the embezzlers DURING the present conflict ? How can you DO it ? Damn it, you can start by cleaning up your own minds. You can clear out the crap that you JOURNAL ISTS KNOW is crap: when they write it.
You can then clear out the crap that journalists BELIEVE along with their fake news, along what the advertisers LET the OWNERS (so called), let the editors PUBLISH. There is a second layer of crap that newspapermen believe to be real. BUT it is not grounded on a real knowledge of ANYTHING.
They have NOT gone into the documents. They have not read the real history. They chase one butterfly after another.
NOW the facts are NOT wholly hidden. There are fifty authors whom you could read, Brooks Adams, among ’em. You could read the works of the men who fought for the making of the Republic, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, hidden or kept in shadow by punk propaganda.
You could get down to the usury swindles, lit up by Demosthenes. Will you wake up to the fact that the gradual elimination of the classics had a purpose, a damn dirty purpose ? Get boiled down to a few harmless authors, say to Tibullus and Virgil, taste for the unreal in poetry, and the student’s eye got off the reality.
Look at John Adams’ paideuma. Look at what a man in those days, with no million dollar library, could learn while living on American farm land. Boston having about 15 thousand inhabitants.
No, it is the habit of “not being interested in takin’ things as seriously as”— —That refers to a young American college graduate tellin’ me his friends and acquaintances weren’t interested in taking things as seriously as I do.
Waal, it would have been just a bit better for ’em and, as Mr. Patchen remarks in the headin’ of one of his poems “I don’t want to alarm you, but we are most of us going to be shot.” Also a fellow named Caidwell, I think it was, went to the Spanish red war. These fellows got around to taking it serious.
What are you fighting for ? Fighting for the starvation of Europe ? Fighting to spread famine in Asia ? Fighting for vain boast proved false ? Fighting for the Sassoonery ? Are you fighting for the National Heritage ? For the heritage of wisdom, the heritage of Washington, and of Monroe, of John Adams and Lincoln?
I’ll say you are not.
You are fighting AGAINST what all these men stood for. And it will take more brains than I got, to get you out of it prettily.
Ezra Pound speakin’ from Europe for the American heritage.
When are the American and English people going to take note of the pattern, the pattern in which wars are made, not one war, but wars, in the plural?
Whether you go back to the start of THIS war in 1696. 1696, when the virus of death, the invisible silent virus, more deadly than syphilis, was shot into the English people. Bank of England, makin’ money from VACUUM, and levying interest tax in respect to it.
Waaal, you can’t all be students of history. Look to what you can remember, if you are over 40.
How was the last war started ? Murder at Sarajevo. Look back at the assassinations that have served as a spark for wars. And at those that were intended to start wars, but something went wet in the fuse.
Connect ’em up. THINK what might have been back of ’em. To use a people, to send a people into war UNPREPARED is called destroying the people.
Ideogram of the knife and the sliver. USE people in war UNPREPARED. That is called destroying the people. ALL right, do you see anyone still blotting God’s sunlight with their swollen bodies ? Roosevelt and Churchill, for instance, who have pushed the American and English into the war. That is the first phase. Hurl people into wars they CAN’T WIN. KNOWN in England in 1938 that England would LOSE.
Damn it, I was told in London in November 1938 that England would lose. Military expert sez to me (a furriner): “WE will lose India, we will lose all our eastern possessions.”
WELL, why weren’t men like that LISTENED TO ? Why didn’t the British people listen to THEM, and not to the dirt off the hog’s hind leg, like they did listen to ? What causes that ? Astor, Times, Manchester Guardian, and the rest of ’em. Chief Usurer’s usurious brother at the head of the B.B.C. before that stable was cleaned that much, and an equally mendacious traitor to the people of England, put there to replace him, to be followed by another S.P.O.B. and Mr. Churchill’s last by-blow. Yaaas, and what is the SECOND phase, or second link of the poison offensive—London OR Washington?
Cries for prosecution of the war (not of the bastids that caused it).
Bevin and company in the HIRED fake labor pseudo-opposition crying for more energetic, etc.
Get the nation’s neck against the buzz saw, and then PUSH. Russians in the last war and in this war. Something pushing ’em. Someone HAD BLUNDERED.
DAMN it all, every man that dies in McArthur’s army is sacrificed to Frankfurter’s friends. But NOT to WIN. To destroy himself, to destroy any nation, one after another. Not that the Russian empire should survive, that the Austrians should survive, that England or the British Empire should survive, but to pull down the mighty.
Will you OBSERVE what these forces are, that shove nations from one disaster to another ? France hurled against the unbeatable Germans, England pushed unprepared, and the climax of unpreparedness, the Lehman, Frankfurter, Morgenthau SUCCESS, of SUC/Cess in hurling America into the conflict, and now yelling for MORE disasters.
I did NOT stand with Lindbergh. I am not a pacifist of the prize-taking variety. There are times when a nation should fight, even without what appears a chance, as Finland against Russia.
When threatened with extinction. SUCH was NOT the case in 1939 with the United States, NO one for the past hundred years had dreamed of threatening the United States of America with extinction.
A damned fool, or a half hypnotized vacuum in our White House threatened Japan with starvation, sent silly school girl notes to Mussolini and Hitler, threatened to starve the world, talked TOSH to the Axis powers and to Japan. The world has seen that propaganda and smelt the stink.
I did not, however, take Lindbergh’s line, wrong line as I see it. The Nordic race seemed to be wholly ignorant of the nature of England’s owners, expressed sympathy with England, NOT distinguishing between the nice Englishmen that one meets, and the gang of thieves and murderer’s pimps who have been in control of the London government.
Out-in-front-men, for the in-behind-men, Beits, Goldsmid, Sassoor’s, and Sieffs and Rothschild. I said the cause was rotten, it was ROTTEN, and it was KNOWN to be rotten, and it was known that MOST of the gold in the world is in the United States, in the British Empire and in Russia. And as I was told in our National Capital, any attempt to diminish the power of them that held it will meet with fairly serious resistance.
Waaal, it was NOT honest resistance, witness dirty Donovan, in Yugoslavia, witness the betrayal of one after another by the nations who are CONTROLLED by the gold VERMIN. William J. Bryan must have been unhealthy. His family is so gone to rot that they can let Hank Wallace say, “NO PEACE without restoration of the gold standard,” and NOT shove Hank’s head into a milk pudding, and treat him for progressive infantilism.
WHERE are the men of the sons of the men who had the sense to hear of the CROSS OF GOLD, are they all dead?
Anyhow, that dirty alley cat is out of the BAG. Whoever died at Dunkirk died for gold. Whoever was shot at Dakar died for gold.
AND the bombardment of PARIS ? As I have told you, NOT military, done to PREVENT the cessation of wars, done to so embitter French feeling that there can be NO peace between France and England. Oh yes, pullin’ in more nations, hope of stealing Martinique, and Madagascar.
But for God’s sake look at the POLICY, look at the pattern, how is it done ? Who now is drawing pay for demanding vigorous prosecution of war?
Vigorous prosecution of Frankfurter and that golliwog glove that covers his fingers.
Frankfurter down inside the Punch and Judy show booth, and that curse of God, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gesticulating and shrieking up there in front to distract the children, to get the boys into the trenches. And the papers, the hired press, howling that the interventionists musn’t be allowed to take advantage of the abysmal mess made by Roosevelt, that the war must be PUSHED.
The place to defend the American heritage is ON the American continent. AND no man who had any part in helping Delano Roosevelt get the United States into it has enough sense to WIN ANYTHING.
If Roosevelt were not BELOW the biological level at which the concept of honor ENTERS the mind, below the biological level at which human beings can CONCEIVE the existence of such a thing as HONOR, that liar would go out on to the steps of the American Capitol and commit hara-kiri to atone for the evils he has wrought on the American people.
And I say it. Here’s my John Hancock.
Ezra Pound speaking from Rome, speaking as an American citizen, and hoping to God there are still some Americans left as distinguished from IMPORTATIONS.
Ezra Pound speaking in the name of a little sanity and human intelligence. The mere distruction of vast amount of goods, tools, ships, etc. solves NO problem, save the temporary, artificial and man-made problem of: GLUT on the market.
It does NOT solve the market problem as a whole. The mere absence of GLUT does NO good either to marketer, maker or would-be buyer if the absence of GLUT is accompanied by the absence of everything else, or even of nearly everything else.
Sumner Welles and company have, I admit, opened up a market for tankers. Anybody who can make tankers can now sell them. IF he is con tent to receive Morgenthau dollars as recompense, regardless of what the Kike dollar will buy. The continuance of destruction does NOT remedy the effects of destruction.
You have lent some more “Money” as you call it to Chile, a country notoriously in default. The confessions of a bond-salesman, an informative work, written by an author who had learned very little from his own tribulations, might be reprinted. The author was pretty much of an ass, but an intelligent reader might derive benefit from his revelations. The Loeb Chart of Plenty, the Chart of United States potential production has just been reprinted here. That shows the opportunity that the United States once HAD. Shows the abundance that might have been if Lehman’s damn son-in-law had never been born, or if the American people had had sense enough to keep him and his likes OUT of the American Treasury, and if our lunacy commissions were more effective. NOW the American money system is cuckoo. It is dishonest. It is unethical, it is blitheringly idiotic, and every man fit to be called human knows it.
There are simple means of remedying it. Had they been applied, you would not now be at war. Applying them now will not mend all the harm already done by Kuhn, Cohen, and Company to the American people, but the LONGER you put off starting, the worse rotted the whole country will be by the financial syphilis, whose out-in-front chief protractor is Franklin Delano.
And NO war promises have ever been kept by usurers’ governments, not since Cain took a pot shot at Abel. IF the monetary reformers IN the United States of America don’t get busy NOW, the opportunities offered ’em at the end of the war will be NIL.
If you can’t learn from England’s experience in homes for heroes, and war veterans trying to sell matches in the gutters of the Strand, after the last war, then God help you.
A system wherein the public is MILKED and bilked of TWO dollars for every dollar spent by the government is not the way to win either a war or a peace.
And the usury (now the Warburg) system is as old as the gold brick wheeze. The money system practiced by Monty Norman, and by Baruch’s fireside cronies is the system of claiming MORE than there is.
The CLAIMS are printed on paper (in the old days they were printed on metal), they are also partly printed on paper, and those forms filled in with ink.
Twenty dollars printed on a gold piece will NOT buy eggs on a desert raft, where no eggs are. It is as impotent to get tungsten out of grass in your back yard, as is a claim for 20 bucks printed on a Treasury note.
The value of money, as Aristotle observed, is determined by what it will BUY.
Hence, the howls about INFLATION. I’ll say inflation. Baruch will NOT want inflation until he has got out money and put it into something else, or until he is two jumps ahead of the public in unloading a dying currency like the British STERLING, and getting into Pesos or [some thing able to rise if anything in the western hemisphere] can be considered as rising or promising.
OVER a hundred years of stealing and cheating the South Americans is NOT [the] basis for lasting delight. Morgenthau’s government can pump money OUT of the AMERICAN people and spend it on Brazilian Ambassadors, it can LEND it to insolvent countries, who have neither the intention nor the capacity to REPAY it.
The banks can UNLOAD some of the bonds onto suckers, of whom the United States seems to possess a super-Loeb-chart supply. CHEAP agricultural products can be BOUGHT in South America and dumped into North America to the ruin of North American farmers so long as the ships will carry the stuff. BUT you can not get tungsten or even petroleum out of the carcasses of Brazilian ambassadors.
In fact your chief purchases in South America seem to be GOVERNMENTS, and you have yourself got more government than you can use.
You are tied up to Moscow and you have not yet the faintest conception of what that union means. You are tied up to England in a somewhat de pressing hour. BUT the knot either may or may not prove a slip knot or noose. When the strangulation becomes excessively painful, Winston’s name may be spelled PAUL REYNAUD.
You should keep an open eye on these possibilities. I know Franklin has his EYE on Australia and on Madagascar and on the African gold coast the Belgian Congo, Liberia, and the whatnots.
BUT the dawg in the fable also had his eye on the meat, reflected meat in the water. The aqueous metaphor may be invidious.
If I start on all the whatnots and the might have beens, this talk may start gettin’ depressin’.
God Almighty, you go get out your readin’ books. They say no man knows more than his grandad. If you can’t learn about money from Jackson, Adams (I mean John Adams) and Van Buren, I dunno when you are I going to start learning to read. Of course, very few people HAVE read any history and it will become increasingly difficult for you to get the real books. Henry Adams’ Life of Gallatin cost 35 dollars last time I heard: and was out of print, nacterly, at that time. So I don’t even know what is in it. But you MUST someday either DIE or learn the nature of money.
I told you about that chap in a prison camp, writin’ to ME for some of my books on economics. Seemed to me a bit late. But anyhow, he is still livin’. You CAN read about money in a Gefangenenlager, but you can’t read about it in Davy Jones s locker. You can NOT. When are you startin?
INTEREST on money. When does it become a title to what don’t exist ? When can you divide the fruits of nature and Labor?
You can divide ’em AFTER the harvest. England, by REFUSIN’ to put that into law, is now losing India. Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Bombay tomorrow. CAUSE she would collect taxes before the harvest. Farmer hadn’t got any money. Even TITHES can not be paid before harvest, so Hindoo had to borrow MONEY from the bunyah, the kike, to PAY taxes, and got more and more into debt.
DEBT. Debt, or the white man’s burden. The people of the United States may be fairly low in the scale. I doubt if they are much lower than others, but your Washington government still HOPES that South American Indians are and WILL STAY sufficiently ignorant of how bank swindles are swoggled, to keep a gang of theives above water, for the next twenty years.
The last hope of [the] North American war party is a victory in South America.
That yaller hound Dawg Franklin Roosevelt was complainin’ the other day about “indecision” or people favorin’ indecision. I trust there is nothin’ Undecided about my position.
I think Roosevelt ought to be jailed, if a committee of doctors thinks him responsible for his actions, and I think he ought to be in a high walled gook house, or insane asylum if he is NOT.
And I do not belong to that romantic school of writers who think lunatics are interestin’ or that their characters are necessarily more admirable than those of plain low down crooks.
I trust this statement is perfectly DECIDED, and that Lord Halifax will not get any more free feeds with Finkelstein. To have conspired to bring down the United States to a level where Finkelstein can get by the Ellis Island or other port authorities on ANY excuse whatever is to deserve ILL of the American people.
And I think Mr. Morgenthau is outside Sing Sing, through an IMPERFECTION, or indecision or lack of foresight on the part of our national legislators. I trust there is nothin’ undecided about that statement EITHER.
I do like to be CLEAR. SOVEREIGNTY inheres in the right to issue money, and the American sovereignty belongs by LAW to the people, and their representatives in CONGRESS have the right to issue money and determine the value thereof. And one hundred and twenty MILLION suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this “DECIDED law,” and have been DIDDLED since along about the time Abe Lincoln was getting himself bumped off. Since then the people OUTSIDE Nebrasky and Dakota have been signally slack about demanding a legal GOVERNMENT of our country. AND there is NO time like the present to STOP being such asses as the American people have been for the past 80 years, or 79 years or whatever.
THAT is the first point.
The point at which embezzlement of the nation’s funds on the part of high officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by a hand picked set of JUDGES hired to support illegality. BUT the swindles performed by the present administration should be ANALYZED carefully while there is still some faint memory left among us as to what the United States Constitution once was. The American nation will never win a war or a peace or anything more than the support of a few BRIBED South American ambassadors and bought governments, as long as the Frankfurter, Lehman, Morgenthau, Roosevelt amalgamation is settin’ on , the top of our government, not if the war goes on FORTY years; you won’t win it with that set of Kikettes running the nation, and the treasury acting like one huge running sore. And I haven’t the latest items, I have only some old reports signed by the mute in the treasury. I use the term mute in its technical, its highly technical, significance.
I trust I am bein’ clear and decided. I objected to having the United States governed by British espionage service. I object to having it governed by secret committees who have NO responsibility for the government and NONE by law to the people. I trust I am being DECIDED.
AND I do NOT want the United States to lose Hawaii. I do not much hanker to have us become a race of cheats and thieves makin’ war (de facto) on the South American people for the sake of a job lot of loan sharks, but that may be beside the immediate question. A government worthy of the name from 1932 onward WOULD have made sure of the Caribbean defenses, instead of dragging Japan into war.
That is the sort of thing that I incline to regard with disfavor. I mean the neglect of what is near, for the sake of attempting to starve out some far distant nation in the interest of a kike-like Sassoon, or some other hook-nosed exotic. I am not flattering some of the so-called old timers. The stock broker is NOT my ideal. He is NOT a sport. A poker player plays with his own money; if he loses, he loses. A man who buys a lottery ticket takes his chance with the other purchasers of lottery tickets, neither gambles with the bread of the people.
Hence the old disparagement or contempt for stock jobbers, long away back when there still was some perception of ethics, and men were supposed to LOOK at the consequences of their acts, before thinking they were being both honest and clever. This remark will make me exceedingly unpopular among the American rich, if any of ’em become aware of my saying it. There are various devious and twisty ways of arguing about the uses of short selling, etc., none of ’em, NONE of ’em would cut any ice with a jury of IMPARTIAL and disinterested men sufficiently intelligent to understand the question. NONE of ’em have any ethical weight. A century ago a congressman could rise to the creation of such a phrase as “a very undigested system of ethics.”
That is what the stockbrokers have mostly got wrong with ’em.
Except those who say frankly that they are predatory ANIMALS, and want to rob and predate. Well, that predatory spirit is NOT inspirin’ Europe at this present moment. Certain primitive types go out of fashion, one might almost believe in social progress, the cave man, the robber baron, etc. are not in the front line. They are relegated to history. And anyone interested in the theory of historic PHASE might by now lay a conjecture as to whether the old Wall Street ideal of robbin’ the widdys and orphans by means of stock deals, and rigged markets etc., may not be driftin’ OUT of the picture.
EUROPE is on. Europe is distinctly ON to the speculation racket. On to what it does to a country, how it injures the plain common people.
Hence of course Mr. Eden’s war. Mr. Churchill’s war, Mr. Roosevelt’s WAR, and the support or pursuit [or at least the tail end] CHASE of that war by six hundred renters of bench room in the British Westminster Parliament. An assorted set of skin games; sort of palm’ out in the bright lexicon of European Youth, in this the year XX of the Fascist Era. ALL in favor of the men who want to do an honest day’s work either physical or mental, or by using skill that combines both the labor of hand and brain, and git for it a wage that will support at least a man, his wife and two children. I said two children MINIMUM, cause if two people don’t reproduce two people, the race DIMINISHES and you get invaded: as the United States has been invaded by VERMIN, among whom the Rothschild, and Sassoon, and Warburg, are more deadly than syphilis.
The danger to the United States as a system of government is NOT from Japan, but from Jewry, and whether that invasion has been absolutely SUCCESSFUL, having been gradual since 1863, but accelerated since Taft was eased out of the White House.
Waaal, that remains to be seen. But if the remains of the AMERICAN settlers population, if the remains of the races that got there and made the country don’t git into action shortly, then the United States of America will register one K.O. or Knock Out. And it will be pretty right as decisive as any executive can desire. Possibly the LAST chance for the American SYSTEM of government will occur in the oncoming Autumn.
Ezra Pound trying to tell you. The danger is not that you WILL BE invaded, it is that you HAVE BEEN invaded.
I came alongside a COMIC paper the other day, English of course. It was ten or twelve days old, that is, the DATE antedated the day I read it by 10 or 12 days, via Lisbon. But in another sense it was “Old”; it might have been the TIMES for March 1912, so far as the naked eye could perceive. And I first groaned “how LONG can they keep on saying it?” Then I hit an article about Italy, “Voices of Fascist ITALY.” And my face was wreathed in smiles, I declined to hand over the paper to a friend, I wanted the cream for myself, precisely for this broadcast, which will be delayed into April or mebbe MAY, ’cause I have more serious communications to make to you. But some day or other I shall read out my notes on the “Old Thunder er,” old thunderer still mousin’ along.
I’ll probably read those notes some day when there is a lull, some day when you ain’t losin’ a Hong Kong, or a Singapore, or Rangoon, or Bombay or Calcutty. That will be after I have remitted the museum piece, the evidence copy from Printing House, repaired square to its owner, who is a collector of such things. Of course the nature of the object bein’ the same, I shan’t have to say anything much new. I mean anything I hadn’t already said 30 years ago in 1912 about the venemous nature and dangerousness to the people of that frowsy old paper.
Ellerrnan Jew influence didn’t cure it. AND of course like all prestidigitators the Times takes the eye OFF the immediate, geographically, spatially, raumlich, visible object.
The Times does NOT tell you about the conditions in the collieries [and] potteries, what were distressed areas before this war was got goin’, nothing about the people who petitioned from Coventry for example. NO the Times don’t bring us much news of England, except insofar as it shows us a state of mind.
No, no, the Times tells us about Italy. That is an accident, ’cause of course the Times was printed to tell you about ITALY, and you are such mugs you believe it. The special correspondent, NO raumlich, or spatial or geographic address given, not his lodge number or his kahal cabala indication. I think he is a subjected Aryan, from the writin’. I have met Englanders of his mental calibre.
Wall, he starts off, and somewhere in the .very first sentence he sez “the maintainance of war sentiment in Italy becomes an increasingly hard problem.”
Oh, is THAT so ? sez the aristocrat, wrinklin’ up his nose with amusement.
So I continue readin’ the tidbits:
“A SINISTER image HAUNTS the rulers of Italy. It portrays (I’spose in some kind of language an image can portray, but I ain’t yet seen an IMAGE portrayin’; if the word portray means to paint a portrait. But let us pass the Times writer choice of words.) It PORTRAYS Britain emerging from the present struggle impoverished but still sound and strong. It portrays America turning her mighty industry ... and SO forth.
Waaal, now really. If some of the Sassoon’s last opium cargoes got toted up from what is now Shonanko, into the Printing House Square or Holland Park West, or wherever, there may be an IMAGE portrayin’. But the only reaction to America having an industry I have read was one about the multiplication of bed bugs; that was considered beneath the dignity of Rome radio, but might in time be found to be the only adequate reply to such nonsense.
As to Britain’s FUTURE might, you git “420,” quattro cento venti; the Italian penny comic and you will find what Italy is FEELING and thinking; during the 1914 unpleasantness “420” used to bring weekly pleasure to thousands with its “IMAGES” of Franz Josef. That is now what Italy THINKS about Roosevelt and England. And as for being strong but impoverished, there are still tender hearts, NO longer anglophile in general; but having traces of friendship for personal friends IN England and they have been known to wonder whether people who had 1000 sterling per annum will after this war have 100, and those that had 100, whether they will have 20 left ’em or the purchasing power of 20 pounds per annum left to their credit.
And IMPOVERISHMENT is not strength. Neither is the loss of your eastern possessions and the British Broadcasting Company view that Malta is a (textually) “LONELY OUTPOST of empire,” used to be umbelicus in my time; in the days of my heady youth.
After the comic prelude of the anonymous “special correspondent” not even alleged to be over in Lisbon, probably in Kensington West or South West, after the comic prelude he gets a bit dirty: usual mean streak of a man with a weak case. Then he talks about Apuleius and so forth. Dis liking Italian broadcasts.
Why don’t he stand up to the broadcasts from Rome transmitted in English ? Why is he such an abject moral and intellectual coward that he DARE not face the arguments about money that go over this air from me, as an independent speaker, and from the REGULAR staff speakers, whenever they touch on the problem of making money by FOUNTAIN pen scribblin’ instead of doing an honest day s work?
Why do ALL the British papers and ALL the British Broadcasting Company bunkosteers keep so gingerly OFF all the ground where there is ideological COMBAT ? Worse funk-holers [than] the Whore Behsha
WHERE are the Coventry marchers ? Where are the Green Shirts ? Suppressed of course [This] visible image EMBODYING thought on the hoof was prohibited before the Jews got you to fighting In the whole of your rotten parasitic ranks the whole of the British Broadcasting Company hireling company NO ONE dares and no one wants and no one would be there if they did want or dare to TOUCH the real issues.
Monopoly of gold components of your gold exchange, nature of money, how it is issued, how the people are bled, state of health in Your ISLAND.
Now to get down to brass tacks, to answer that ass in the Times. No ONE here expects you to do ANYTHING in this war save to LOSE it. From Dunkirk to Dakar, with at most a few successes over your onetime ALLIES. No one expects you to do anything with or IN this war save to LOSE it. BOTH to Germany and to Roosevelt.
Roosevelt portrayin’ (if you like the word) JEWRY No one expects you to do anything in or with this war but to lose it. If that expectation is an illusion it nevertheless EXISTS so that when the gent in the Fly Fisher s dub writes his next article, let him say that ENGLAND expects to emerge impoverished but fierce as [the] stone Trafalgar Square fountain lion of Briton, not as a stuffed lion skin, used as a bed mat.
But fer Gawd’s sake let him lay off saying this is what ITALY looks to. Italy just ain’t got that kind of jimjams. NO ONE here is surprised one atom at your fighting the war badly, from Dunkirk to Dakar, from Hong Kong to Calcutty. One is mildly set to wonder WHY you are fighting Europe instead of fighting Marx and P. Spencer, and Karl Marx and Lyons, and the one hundred enemies that had got you by the short hairs: and got you hog-tied BEFORE the war started. Over DANZIG, allegedly.
Over a year ago a man of the former social age, an international tennis ace, unsuspectible of political passions, the kind that jokes about these things, said his wife said to him, “WHY ever do they (meaning the English) FIGHT the Germans ? Don’t they know that is all the Germans CAN do ? Why do they go to WAR?”
Now firstly, the lady was inexact, as anyone who has read enough German philosophy, or heard Johnnie Bach’s music, or seen Albrecht Durer’s painting, or knows the work of the Frobenius Forschung’s Institute KNOWS. The Germans have quite a lot of assorted abilities.
But the question SUBSISTS ? WHY did the people of England LET them selves get catched by the short hairs and HOG-tied, and led into losing the eastern parts of their empire, and getting allied to red Russia?
Let the TIMES go into THESE things—TELL PAPA! WHY did the Times, which LOST YOU Hong Kong, and Singapore, and Rangoon KEEP the REAL news and the real thought of the past 50 years (yaaas, not 20 but 50) years OUT of its columns. What causes that?
Well my time at this microphone is drawin’ to a close for this evening and I haven’t leisure to go into the other columns of that issue of the Old Thunderer. But when you are sad and downhearted, git out your back issues of the Times Newspaper of London, if they haven’t been confis cated by the dog-catcher to make biscuit for miner’s children, and lull yourself with Tennysonian legends, such as “Dutch leadership in the Indies,” rivaling that of Luzon, resistance, all merry and bright.
I do hate to return that stray copy of the Old Thunderer to its owner. Lord knows when I shall see yet another one, and having my head chuck full of things I want to emit to you, it will be a long time before I again animadvert to the paleozoic habits of your island crustaceans.
I do not expect perfect and COMplete comprehension of these discourses on the part of all of my audience. I should be content if I get over even a small part of what I am driving at, and WHY I am drivin’. For over 30 years I have been driving at some of the same objective objectives.
I thought in 1908 and before then that a nation’s literature IS important. State of a nation’s literature, is important. Words, means of communication, literature, the most condensed form of communication, communication of the most basic and essential facts, ideas necessary for leading the good life, registered in the best books.
And man’s duty, as soon as he is fully a man, is to keep those books, to keep that tradition available. Keep it handy. And the public: American and English, but for the moment let me stick to the United States of America. [The] American public [is] rather like that lunatic in Pea’s novel Moscardino, chap in gook house who just wouldn’t believe that there could be enough microbes on the back of a postage stamp to knock a man cold. Thought it was doctors’ fables, in fact thought the doctors had heard it from other gooks in the asylum.
Waal, the Americans and the English just couldn’t believe that it made any difference what a man or a nation put inside its head via its reading.
Hence I was supposed to exaggerate when I bust out against such dung heaps of perfumed pus as the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s and Scribner’s, as they were in the year 1900 and ceased not essentially to be as long as they lasted. The stink of stale perfume contains the deadly gasses which finally poison. No language could quite cover the loathing I feel for a Sedgewick, but it doubtless seems exaggerated. Later in London I did a sottisier, trying to make a few people see why the printed matter on sale in that city would finally kill off the inhabitants; witness Dunkirk.
The XIX stinking century saw what is called an advance in science. People learned that bacilli can kill. Prophylaxis entered the general mind, but an older concept got knocked OUT of the popular mind. It had been possibly once a good concept, but it had decayed. It was what is or was called a theological concept. The age, called the age of faith, thought a wrong idea could bring evil.
In the Middle Ages they got a bit fantastic, got their eyes off the here and now, and thought the bad idea would land a man in perdition, eternal flames, purgatory, or whatever.
Then something got tangled, and the people got fanatic, and heretics were burned and so forth. And M. Voltaire tried to get that untangled, worked all his life against the cruelties of fanaticism, was called an atheist; which he was NOT. I strongly suspect that almost no heretics were burnt, at least not at the beginning, except those who interfered with the usury racket, those whose ideas were seen as inimical to the usury racket, leaving out the question. But so far as I know no research has ever been done along these lines. I am speaking of heretics proper, ideology, not people who went into witch persecutions.
The idea that a WRONG idea could damage people here and now was perhaps not fully developed. The British theory was that free speech was a blow hole. Let ’em TALK and they will DO nothing. Hyde Park corner, etc.
Gus Flaubert and I myself, and diverse others, includin’ if you must go so far back, Mencius and Confucius, saw something worse than just one BAD idea, and that was the corruption of the whole and TOTAL means of communication of all ideas whatsoever. The corruption of language, the destruction of all precision in terminology, which takes man back and down to the status of beasts, or what beasts are SUPPOSED to be; namely, unable to communicate with one another.
Yet even animals, packs of wolves, and wild dogs do seem to under stand each other, and to collaborate. Very well, I set up and gradually got some ideas as to combat tin’ this universal gonorrhea of language and this rotting of ALL Printed means of communication, monthlies, dailies, weeklies, mercantilist publishing system.
All of which has bloody well dished and ditched the pore old British iniquitous empire. Too late to save that now. And anyhow, I am speaking to the United States of America. Forty years ago Brooks Adams made a quite good study of England, foreseein’ she would bust up, and part go to the United States of America and part go to Germany with, if I remember it right, Japan gettin’ a look in. Nacherly VERY few people read Mr. Adams. I only know of ONE Englishman who has quoted him.
And I am not enamoured of retrospect. I ought to have been given Brooks Adams when I was havin’ a shot at American history in the University of Pennsylvania—that’s 40 years ago. Might have accelerated me in giving him a little publicity. In fact ALL history teachin’ in American universities ought to have got hold of Brooks Adams THEN, 1897–1900, 1903 his best volumes.
His weak an’ pindlin’ young brother Henry was not the man that his elder brother Brooks was. Brooks seeing what had happened in history, seem’ it pretty clearly, foreseeing what would happen in HIS time, but not seeing beyond that. Knowing that an age of faith, or ages of faith had existed, but did not see the next one. Livin’, you may say, in his own phase. Foreseein’ the down flop of England, that is, of the Empire, noting symptoms of England’s decline, which the English remained deaf to, and blind to.
BUT not foreseeing the Italian rise, not foreseeing the change of phase: from material to volitional.
Reactin’ against John Quincy Adams’ judized form of religion. I forget where he notes that, maybe in the preface to his book on New England.
ANYhow trying to figure out where John Quincy Adams, whom he greatly admired, had gone off the rails, not gittin’ back to his great grandad John Adams, the father of his country and inventor to some extent of General Washington.
Waaal, can’t get it all into one discourse. But if there is still some campus not yet invaded by the hosts of Belial and Jewry not wholly squashed under the dung-flow from Wall Street and Washington, I suggest you start taking notes and figures. Figure out this affair of the ruin of language, the falsification of all reports in the well paid magazines, the falsification of newsprint. And ALSO the attack on historic knowledge. The rise of TALMUDIC schools, quite UNNOTICED by the high class periodicals. Note when America began to be filled with talmudic schools, not listed and having big sign boards. Note when American history went out of fashion. When the kids in the lower grades heard of Lenin and Marx and Trotsky, and not so much of Lincoln and Washington. Watch the gradual creep up of obscurantism, the neglect, ab initio, from the start, of John Adams, Van Buren, and Johnson.
There ought to be 700 STUDENTS, and 30 professors, digging into this question, these questions. SOME DAY you will need to KNOW, need to know more than you do at present.
Lord knows what will come to you first.
For the United States to be makin’ war on Italy AND on Europe is just plain damn nonsense and every native born American of American stock KNOWS that it is plain downright damn nonsense.
And for this state of things Franklin Roosevelt is more than any other one man responsible. Of course he was puffed up, and put thaar, or kept thaar, and that dirty Kike Lippmann has declared that Roosevelt is MOVED by others; and does not act proprio motu.
All of which whatnesses do NOT adulterate the fact that WAR between the United States and Europe is nonsense. And its makers ought to be smacked.
How long it is going to take the American people to make at least a partial return toward their senses, I know not, I do not know.
I suggest yet again that you look at the way the WAR, this war, has been wangled. And HOW it has been conducted. FIRST, the American people were SANE enough to see that the war was phony. DANZIG, Poland, and all the rest of it, COOKED and the American people KNEW it was cooked. Second, England’s offensives effective against neutrals and Allies. Third, the United States offensives effective against England, Iceland, and Venezuela, at the cost of losin’ the Philippines. Well, damn the Philippines. We promised ’em independence, and the dirt in our national makeup prevented our keepin’ the promise. Our conduct as a nation to various is lands, let alone to South American republics, is NOT our title to glory. And Aguinaldo has as good a right to the Philippines as any God damn Jew in Roosevelt’s family caballa. I do hate to see Hawaii endangered. We got the Sandwich Islands more or less decently, and they could have been held as a defensive position.
The Philippines WERE NOT, they were an offensive position, and the conduct of Roosevelt’s government was plain downright silly, not to say nasty, not to say mean, not to say stinkin’, it was all of these things put together.
Anyhow, one of the LIES of this war is the LIE about the anti-Axis alliances. Russia is NOT Britain’s ally but her enemy, America is NOT Britain’s ally but her enemy.
Chiang Kike Chek is the prize buyer of gold bricks, and where did Soong git his money ? Mrs. Chiang Kike is always flittin’ and floatin’ in Semite entourages. If Charlie Soong warn’t staked out by kikedom, you come here and tell papa. I can’t prove this assertion, but I await any disproof, and I don’t expect it to be forthcomin’.
The phrase, cut off the NOSE to spite the face, may seem invidious and SUGgestive. “Wasn’t she a silly slut, to sell her bed and lie in dirt?” Yaas, SHE was, Margery Daw or Columbia, Solomon’s jewel. You have cut your nose off to the extent of three summer vacations in Europe. You have cut your nose off to the extent of what you haven’t had in those three years in the way of cultural contacts and the amenities. Whatever is happening in the way of BASHING abundance INSIDE the United State of America you know better than I do, and I am not going to tell you about Cincinnati. I have heard British fools talk about Italy which they had not visited. I have seen men get het up about what happens in other countries, meaning what is SAID to happen in other countries. And what they have read in the noozwypers, and I am not going to participate in that form of foolery.
YOU TELL ME about what is going on in the United States of America and I’ll tell you what I see here in Italy. That will be fair exchange and no kikery.
I do NOT admire your making war on Finland, Iceland and Venezuela, on the pretense that you don’t like Hitler’s municipal government.
Or that you steal from other countries because they are incapable of governing themselves, or because their governors are incapable of stealing from them. Neither, I think, do you.
EIGHTY years peace for England would have been useful to England. Thirty years peace for the United State of America would have been useful to YOU. It would have meant a whole generation.
I don’t know how long the Pacific would have maintained its status quo, but I am right, downright certain that I could have done BETTER in dealin’ with Japan than any of Mr. Roosevelt’s lowbrow assistants, among whom I know of none who was fit for the Japanese mission.
England was bilked, and that was NOT done without United States assistance. Well, I don’t admire the men who assisted. And neither, I think, do YOU.
As to what you can do to get out of it, that is another story. Haven’t you got any folks at home who can tell you ? After all my mission in life had been rather special. Maybe that was my error, but one can’t be in ten places at once. I believe, like bed rock, I believe, that if the American people had been consulted in 1938–39 and 40 and 41 NINETY percent of the American people would have been content to have the American government stick to its best traditions, to stay OUT of international shindies, and to USE the United States prestige. (We HAD some prestige in those days.) And the American people would have wanted used to get a SANE, peaceful arrangement of the problems of Europe. And a clean government in Washington would have aimed at that target. When, before Gawd, are we going to get a clean government ? It is time for the American people to start gettin’ ready to think about that.
Whether Frankie is a gook or a kike, I don’t think the American people LIKE him. I don’t think they wanted him back in the White House. And the election figures don’t prove it. They may possibly prove the DEFECTS of the American electoral system and the power of bribery and corruption. And then again they may not. The only excuse of most voters was “you don’t vote against Santa Claus.” Look what Santa has brought you now. Waaal ole Franklin Kris Kingle, Sant Nicalaus, ain’t got any live children back out of the pork barrel. If that is too mixed a metaphor, let me remind you of the old French chanson, about St. Nicholas. Frankie looks to me more like gettin’ the live young INTO the salt pork barrel than rescuing the little dears out of it.
As for the English, nine of ’em out of ten do NOT believe they ought to be fighting the Germans. And that goes a long way to explain why a lot of them don’t seem anxious to do it. They don’t like their empire being ruined. They don’t want their island invaded.
But nine of ’em out of TEN do NOT believe they ought to be fighting the Germans. That is, down there under their skulls, down under their thick bully hides they DO NOT think they ought to be fightin’ the Germans. They DO not believe in Bolshevik methods, or in the Bolshevik propaganda. None of it is spontaneous in England, and a lot of British KNOW the Bolos are HIRED.
Some of ’em, not the nicest among ’em, think, oh yes, they OUGHT to fight Italy cause Italy is small on the map, and the small ought to be jumped on. That is British tradition. But they do NOT think they ought to be fighting the Germans, and they do NOT want to see geography books with England’s empire reduced to probable figures: but they do NOT think they ought to be fighting the Germans.
Well, think it over.
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