When a little
American
horse- sense finally appeared, the "forces" were peeved.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
" Most of my criticism has been written for a nucleus of writers and I have to considerable extent known their beliefs or known when I was infuriating them by attacking particular literary im- becilities.
I know the Japanese reader must be friendly or he wouldn't be finding me in print at all, but I haven't the least idea when I may tread on his toes or when I am likely to bore him to death by repeating what he has already read six times.
Back in 1917 or thereabouts 1 received and replied to a Dadaist greeting from Switzerland. Then Picabia printed magazines in New York. Then in Paris, about 1922, he printed a unique issue of PiJhaou-Thibaou, saying good-bye to Dada. By 1923 all the Surrealists were lined up in The Little Review, so that neither these movements nor their particular terminologies can now have for me any great news value.
From 1912 for a decade I did my best to tell the ignorant Britons and Yankees that there had been some very good French poetry, and that English poetry, so far as the technique went, had mostly stopped along about the state of Gautier's Aibertus, and never caught up with his Emaux et Camees.
I doubt if anybody gave the frogs more conscientious free advertising than your present correspondent. And, with that past, I claimed, and still claim, a right to be judged impartial in saying that at a given date poetry in English (largely by American writers) began to be "more interesting" or to have, at any rate, an interest which contemporary French poetry had not. This is not to say that Eliot is a better writer than Cocteau.
I might, however, get round to claiming that Cocteau is an exception and a survival. And on the other hand, to be just, I shall also claim, or admit, that Cocteau shows awareness to certain contemporary pressures, extend- ing in his mental range from moods contemporary with Barbey d'Aurevilly to moods contemporary with Mr. Cummings. In his Antigone he is quite aware of economics, though he doesn't use up many words on the topic.
You are all, doubtless, tired to death of "red" poetry, and Marxist dogma laid out in bad verse. We have had socially conscious poetry or near-beer or crass propaganda, etc. , etc. , and no one has better dis- tinguished between it and the real thing than has Kitasono Katue. Neverthe- less in 1933 I managed, despite the hostility of the British fool and the diffidence of my publishers, to get the Active Anthology printed. Opening
6
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it now, after seven years, I can still take satisfaction in having got 49 pages of Basil Bunting printed where only the book-worm can efface him.
Mr. Cummings has said, "You can't sell the moon to the moon. " I believe the above mentioned anthology contains more poets who are aware of money, as a problem, than any other anthology ever has, though the better the poet (in Europe] the more certain you can be to surprise the old fogies and Aunt Sallies of my generation by dragging up passages definitely concerned with the ethics and tragedy of money.
Ovid, Propertius, Dante, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare, and notably Byron, are all perfectly good browsing ground for the economist, for the student of money as distinct from the bloke who has got a floating kidney from psychology or sociology.
Dante swats Philippe le Bel for debasing the currency, Shakespeare turns his phrase onto usury not in the Merchant of Venice alone. Catullus alludes to his purse and puns on a mortgage. Hood cursed gold and Lanier, trade. Nothing of this kind, so far as I have [seen], occurs in Fenollosa's notes on Japanese poetry.
Nevertheless, for what it is worth, since 1928 in English, the better the poet, the more certain you are to find him considering the age-old infamy of the money monopoly, of monopoly, of attempts to starve mankind in general, by the trick of trapping and withholding the power to buy.
In Bunting's case this sort of sensibility has broken into some of the strongest verse of our time. Perhaps the poems are too long for quotation in full, so I give a few strophes of the "Morpethshire Farmer. " Bunting sees him on the railway platform, driven from his land and compelled to emigrate into Canada.
Must ye bide, my good stone house To keep a townsman dry?
To hear the flurry of the grouse
But not the lowing of the kye* Where are ye, my seven score sheep Feeding on other braes!
My brand has faded from your fleece Another has its place.
Canada's a bare land
For the North wind and the snow, Northumberland's a bare land
For men have made it so.
Sheep and cattle are poor men's food.
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Grouse is sport for the rich,
Heather grows where the sweet grass might grow For the cost of clearing the ditch.
A liner lying in the Clyde
Will take me to Quebec.
My sons'll see the land I am leaving
As barren as her deck.
note: * Dialect for cattle.
No one since Burns has used the old simple meters with such force. Bunting is aware not only of the tragedy and the infamy back of the tragedy but of the mode in which it works.
His range is not limited to the "old style," as can be seen from the ultra modern "They say Etna" ending in the idiom of newspaper headlines:
MAN IS NOT AN END-PRODUCT MAGGOT ASSERTS
Bunting has learned to write a most elegant hand in Persian in process of translating Firdusi, and among his longer poems is a condensation of "Chomei at Toyama. " A man's adventures are not necessarily part of his writing, though the figure of the poet may gain popularity from them. In this respect Bunting is all that the romantic can desire. He has been jailed in three countries for never having done any harm. Once in Paris, because two corners back of Mt. Parnasse cemetery that confused him at two o'clock in the morning are so exactly alike, complete with cafe and awning, that 1 mistook the one for the other in broad daylight when trying to gather evidence of his character. And as the concierge of the wrong one said: "It is very lucky that his key did not fit the door on the second floor, because the gentleman in that room is very nervous and always has a revolver under his pillow. "
Bunting is, so far as I know, the only pacifist who did six months after the last war was over. As a Quaker he would not even say that he would fight if there was a war for him to fight in. He has an unfailing flair for excited areas. Years ago he left Italy in search of peace and arrived in the Canary Islands where a special little revolution broke out even before Spain at large was enkindled. Last May he had, I heard, left America for his native England. Some people's luck is like that.
I suspect him of being the best English-born poet of our time, though J. P. Angoldisrunningaclosesecond. Fromwhichyouwillfindmyelderly taste differing from the London tea party fashions.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 169
When I want the gist of what is being done in England in the mind and the arts, I wait for the next copy of Ron Duncan's Townsman.
I take it that reformers' papers, such as Action, the Social Creditor, and the British Union Quarterly are outside the scope of this correspondence, but I believe that the more active young writers in England are reading them. All this is a long way, or a long time, from the day a Russian philosophical student with undigested Germany in his insides, said to me (about a. d. 1910) "Boundt, haff you gno Bolioigal easshuntz? " (Anglice: Have you no political passions? ) I hadn't.
And now my old friend Doc Williams (Wm. Carlos) can hardly tolerate my existence because I am not a bolshevik, and I find it hard to excuse Wyndham Lewis' last volume from sheer difference with the opinions expressed. And Mr. Joyce is no longer with us, in the sense those words would have conveyed in 1917, and Johnnie Hargrave calls Mr. Eliot's Christianity, "A lot of dead cod about a dead god. " All of which goes to show that the Tower of Ivory "has gone West. " At any rate temporarily, both for us old duffers of the 1910's and for the youngsters.
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter Why There Is a War in Europe
Kumasaka's ghost returns from a fine sense of honor. When the men who made wars led them in person, risking their own person in battle, the point of honor remained, but after two centuries or more of mercantilism, we must seek other motives. To this end I would placard every school room with three lines from the Hazard circular of 1862.
"the great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of war, must be used to control the volume of money. to accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis. "
The present war in Europe has, in one sense, been going on for a hundred and ninety years. In another sense it was wholly unnecessary. It may date from the day when Paterson held out the bait for shareholders of the proposed bank "of England" in the words: "The bank hath profit of the interest on all the moneys that it creates out of nothing. " The war dates certainly from England's interference with American colonial paper money in 1751.
In 1723, the Pennsylvania Assembly had authorized the issue of 15,000
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pounds in paper bills, to be loaned on security of land or silver. As the Pennsylvania system developed, such issues were redeemable in a given time at so much per year. A farmer could get money up to half the value of his land, but had to pay it back in 10 years or in 16, after which he could have a new loan.
David Hume errs in saying "the land itself is coined. " What was "coined" was not the land but the triple components--land, farmer's capac- ity to work and his likelihood of doing so, and a ready market. That is, the colonists needed the product of the soil. The paper money was a useful ticket or handy means of reckoning and recording how much work had been done or how much grain (or whatever] grown and delivered to market, hence of recording how produce ought ethically to be handed over to whomever held the ticket.
This did not suit the game of the London monopolists. But, until W. A. Overholser issued his 61 page brochure, the histories neglected this item. London's attempt to reassert money monopoly led to the first American revolution (1776).
American history for the following 90 years should be considered as a series of revolutions and set-backs. John Adams conceived a sane republi- can (or statal) system. America freed herself from the British Crown; the loose confederation of colonies was (a second revolution) cemented under a sane constitution. The revolution was betrayed by the financial corrup- tion of members of Congress in Washington's time. These swine bought up depreciated certificates of pay due to the soldiers of the revolution, and then passed national laws forcing the Government to pay them the full face value of this paper (out of the pockets of the people).
Banking and funding systems were set up, whereon John Adams wrote in his old age:
"Every bank of discount is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals' gain.
And if I say this in my will the American people would pronounce I died crazy. " (Citation from my Canto 71).
Jefferson warned us that "If the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation and then by defla- tion, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up home- less on the continent that their fathers conquered. "
Jackson and Van Buren led the people against the monopolists. Jackson delivered the nation from debt. That is, the people beat the banks between
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1830 and 1840. Record of this decade has, or had, almost entirely dis- appeared from American text books.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the nation was betrayed by a ganglia of Sherman, Ikleheimer, etc. , working with foreign (mainly English and Jewish) financiers.
The so-called democratic (or statal system] intended by the founders of the republic was killed. Very few people noticed its death. Jefferson's prophecy was largely but imperceptibly fulfilled. The American people are only now lifting one torpid eyelid. Schemes for the nomadic life had already gone into effect, people wandering about landless sleeping in motor-trailers.
This was brought about by a system in which the Government bor- rowed the nation's credit and paid interest on it to private concerns. Ikleheimer's circular calculated there would be from 28 to 33 per cent profit. The usury in some banking systems amounts to 60% and so fecund was the new continent that the traffic stood it; with cycles of crash and crisis, which were, nevertheless, followed by recoveries and partial re- coveries.
We hear little, and you at a distance certainly hear less of these internal rumblings. When the swindle becomes international. Rota's condemnation of half a century ago covers the situation; he said:
"The mercantilist system placed the happiness of nations in the quan- tity of money they possess. And it consisted in a clever strategy for stealing the greatest possible amount of money from other nations. "
Italy, having benefitted by Rota's Storia delle hanche may have pre- ceded other nations in realizing the force of this sentence. At any rate she was, in our time, the first Occidental nation to believe that among the first rights of a man, or a country, is the right to keep out of debt.
This point of view both pained and shocked the international usurers.
The tension became unbearable in 1938 when Dr. Schacht openly stated (during Hitler's visit to Rome) that "money which is not issued against exchangeable goods is mere printed paper. "
The German word is "Verbrauchsgiiter. " Gold is exchangeable when people suffer from superstition. It is not edible. You cannot wear it save as ornament. Very few treatises on economics begin with a definition of money. Curious, but you may verify it by long sojourn in any national library.
Now, on whatever substance money is printed, it gives or is assumed to give its possessor the right to take (in exchange for it) a determined quantity
? 172 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
and quality of any sort of goods offered for sale in market.
At a certain point the money swindle and the gold habit merge. And a nation that gives too much of its grain or silk or wool to people who dig up gold, or who manage a money issue, is likely to find itself in want. Some lands are fountains of metal (if aided by engineers), other nations are mere
tanks. France was a full tank.
Last spring in Washington I said and printed the statement: "War
against Germany in our time, would be war against an honest concept of money. "
One of the elder members of Congress replied: "Well, most of the gold in the world is in the United States, in the British Empire and in Russia, and I reckon that any attempt to diminish the power of them that have it, will meet with fairly serious resistance. "
I might put this in another form: Any nation which surrenders the control of its purchasing power to any other nation or any group or agency outside its own control, will fall into slavery.
Decent Americans protest against our selling you munitions and at the same time lending money to China so as to make sure you will have a use for thosemunitions. ThemenwhomI mostrespectinEuropeseebehindthe present European slaughter an attempt to break down both Germany and the Allies and reduce the whole people of Europe to a servitude under a money control. The more extended the conflict, the longer it lasts, the greater the debt that will be created and the greater the burden of interest that would be due to the lenders of money, the "creators of credit. "
8 Letter from Rapallo: In War Appear Responsibilities
With the Hitler interview of June 14, the continental war aims are once more made clear in their essential fairness and, for a victorious army, their mildness. Had our universities not betrayed us over an 80 year period, the phrase "freedom of the seas" might still arouse an intelligent glow in the American thorax. There once was a man named John Adams. There once was an American system whereof at least a minority of Americans had an inkling. We were betrayed, sold up the river, hog-swoggled in 1863 by J. Sherman, Ikleheimer and Ikleheimer's London correspondents, but the public has not yet found it out. The bonds were issued as banking basis. Someday we (in the plural) will wake up, but whether our guts have still the tensile strength to take action remains to be shown.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 1 73
In the meantime there is a question of responsibility both for wars at large and for this war. Herr Hitler has been exceedingly mild in his remarks on British politicians. When I was in America in June 1939, it was known that Churchill and his gigolos meant to "get into the government" (of England) and start a war. Technically they didn't "get in" until the war had been started, but the intention was there and indelible. They have already had part of their war. Count Potocki can bear witness to what I told him at lunch in May, 1939. I am glad to have a few statements in print and dated. France and England were rotten. Not being a military expert I forebore to make prophecies. All I could say was that I could see nothing to prevent another Sudan.
Most of Europe has spoken. A number of English patriots have been jailed for believing that their country should not go to war until prepared. Several Englishmen had demurred at the embezzlement of mandated ter- ritories, which embezzlement was part of the Lazard-Churchill (and should we say Kuhn-Loeb? ) program.
At any rate a Monroe Doctrine can and should be bilateral. When Monroe followed Adams and Jefferson in the belief that we should keep out of Europe, he emphasized what was then the less obvious side of the problem. Fatty degeneration of American politics and of American politi- cal exposition has been unchecked for too long. It is time we dug up the creed of the American founders. It is time we knocked the dust off a few perfectly valid ideas (call 'em ideals if Wilson hasn't permanently de- classed that term).
Roosevelt has done nothing to maintain the freedom of the seas. With 140 million Americans behind him, he couldn't defend the American post-bag. He has spent ten billions on needless gold, at the cost of the American people. Four billions out of that ten has gone in what appear to me to be excess profits to the sellers of gold, all of which is added onto our American taxes or written up as mortgage of America to an anonymous set of uncleanliness. A little of the once-vaunted American acumen would suffice to start asking: who got it?
I advocate at least that much acumen.
Vanity and provincialism! Millionaire play-boys in key embassies! When it comes to being ridiculous, can you beat busy Bullitt telling Mandel (alias Rothschild), Reynaud, a bunch of Jews, Annamites, Senegalese and freemasons that they are of the blood of Jeanne d'Arc? {Vide his harangue delivered a few days before Paris fell. )
Newspapers run on borrowed money have contributed to this state of vagueness. Take it that Churchill is senile and that his colleagues are, as
1 7
SECTION IV: ESSAYS
A
? Reynaud and Mandel, shop-fronts for Lazard, Neuflize, Honneger, Roth- schild, Sieff, Beit, Goldsmid, Mocatta etc. , you have not yet the full list of persons responsible. Meaning responsible for the million dead in Poland, Flanders, Norway, etc. All of which slaughter is due to provincialism, to hoggishness, greed and to a love of monopoly which was not exclusively European.
Nothing effective was done or tried in America to stave off this conflict. All the official pressure was used in the wrong direction. Whether Amer- icans have yet examined the Polish dossier, I cannot from this distance make out, but the facts are written and implied on thousands of pages of news-print. "Forces" in America puffed up or helped to puff up the Poles. They backed the gold-swine and the bank-swine. There were surprises and they failed to conceal their astonishment.
When a little American horse- sense finally appeared, the "forces" were peeved. We are not yet out of the woods. There are still Anglomaniacs and usuro-maniacs in America who
like us to stick our hands into the fire. For England?
No! most certainly not for England. England has been worm-eaten since
1700. Her vitals were being gnawed over a century ago when Cobbett wanted to cure her. There is a whole literature of velleities, of attempts at English reform. Eight months ago I was thought loony for saying that France probably suffered less from the invasion of 1870 than had the English during the past 20 years from perfectly stinking misgovernment.
What have we in our recent American record that might serve to enlighten them? During the last year a marginal reform has been put into operation. Wallace, the goat of Roosevelt's administration, has got in the point of a gimlet. A trifling amount of money, called "stamps" and limited in its application, has been issued against easily available goods. But, in the wake of Lloyd George, this concession has been used as an implement of degradation. The people have been given back a little of their own purchas- ing power on condition they consent to be paupers and ask the bureaucracy for it.
You have to go back to the most rancid melodrama for a parallel. The wicked guardian, having robbed the orphan of her fortune, tells her it is her duty to be thankful for stale bread and a cot in the attic.
Lost in the Congressional Record for January 23, 1940 are these pas- sages:
"Whereas there has developed in the method of conducting the fi- nances of the U. S. the custom . . . of borrowing financial credit . . . thus increasing public indebtedness. "
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 1 75
"Whereas the credit thus lent to the government is in reality based on . "
the real credit of the people, which belongs to them.
But until the reader has patience to read at least the few phrases of J.
AdamsthatI havebeenabletoquoteinmyCantos,I knowofnobriefwayof showing him how long sanity hasexisted in America (among a few people] and how thoroughly it has failed to percolate into the general conscious- ness. The people have finally fumbled at a general muzzy notion that at least some wars are economic. In the spring of 1939 one American editor had the nerve to print my statement that:
"War against Germany in our time would be war against an honest concept of money. "
Shortly before his death Robert Mond (brother of the late Alfred, Lord Melchett) sat on a sofa in Rome, which sofa is known to me, and said with hith well known lithf: "Napoleon wath a good man. It took uth 20 years to cwuth him. It will not take uth 20 years to cwuth Mutholini. (Took us 20 years to crush Napoleon, will not take us 20 to crush Mussolini. ) And the economic war hath commenthed. " This is a fact. Statement of it does not involve antisemitism. It in no way implicates the 300 just Jews known to me, or three million unknown. But it does prove a state of consciousness in one member of known set of English financiers.
There are known dynasties in Bank of England directorships: Goschen, Kleinwort, Brandt, etc. The Anglo-French combination is sometimes for brevity's sake written "Lazard. " After this war had started the Bank of England directors met and doubled their salaries, as proof of purity, patriot- ism etc. ? One old lady shareholder protested, but her protest in no way moved Montagu Norman. The American reader on his part might however start looking for the American representatives of these "forces. " The rela- tion of home office to branch office seems to me of minor importance. In
1863 the main offices were in London. It is there in the record. John Sherman wrote to Ikleheimer, Morton, and Ikleheimer wrote on to Roth- schild in London. The "capitalists," as they are called in the Hazard report, did indeed see to it that a great debt was made by our civil war, and used to control the volume of our American currency.
Over 20 years ago C. H. Douglas asserted potential plenty. The Loeb report, one of the best achievements of the New Deal, proved it. Whereon the rage of international usury knew no bounds. They argued: "If plenty exists, we cannot control it. Therefore it must not exist. Curtail crops! Maintain monopoly! War is the greatest sabotage of all possible. "
But the Germans wouldn't play ball. Even now, instead of smashing all
. .
? 1 76 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
the French factories, they have to a great extent merely captured them. I beg you observe the record of loans for August 1939 from London to Poland, Greece, Turkey, Rumania. I ask you who has tried to extend the conflict.
I assert that from the start England was mucking round in Bulgaria, and only the genius of Mussolini and the good sense of King Boris prevented hell breaking loose in the Balkans.
Financiers make wars for the sake of creating great debts and for the sake of monopoly. They and their henchmen are advocates of destruction. They have manifestly advocated the destruction of Paris. If Paris were destroyed, suckers would borrow money and ask "credits" to rebuild it. Even "La Voix de la Paix," a French free anti-government radio voice was on June 15 displaying his ignorance of the nature of debt, money and credit.
9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I HAVE NEVER FATHOMED what a level-headed Japanese reader feels when he finds an Occidental slamming the said Occidental's government, or his president and the heads of departments.
It should be said by way of preface that a president is, in theory, a servant of the people, and that as long as he accepts office on that theory, his employers are licensed to grumble when he makes an ass of himself or talks nonsense. This may explain why "Woodie" Wilson so hated the American system and tried so hard to wreck it. It may explain why many of us consider Franklin Roosevelt a president and proved servant of Jewry rather than a respecter of American law and traditions.
What his pretended (and in fairness one must add his very probably intended) reforms have, in the main, amounted to is the spending of ten billion dollars of America's money for gold, paying 35 dollars an ounce for it instead of 20 dollars and 67 cents, thus putting four billion dollars of extra or unearned or unjust profits into the pockets of an anonymous lot of vendors of an almost useless and certainly unneeded metal. Hence, quite probably, the misery of the American farm population, and the mortgages on American farms.
Naturally the bleeders who sell gold are delighted with the administration. The American, who is American by race, birth, and long tradition, grits his teeth, turns tomato-red, curses, exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation and
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS \77
ends up (or at least my New England host last year ended up) by saying: "He is . . . is . . . etc. . . . a little Lord Fauntleroy. "
One of my adolescent memories is that of an ex-senator in Wall Street abusingTheodoreRoosevelt,butneverhaveI knovc^nAmericanhateof anyone equal to that I found in America last year directed against the executive. But I had no means of gauging hovi' v^idely this hatred was diffused. The Democrats whom I met seemed to dislike Mr. Roosevelt's politics, and especially his economics, even more than did the Republi- cans, but on the other hand he had friends.
WiththeAmericanmailnowcutdowntoairserviceI amnotgoingto pretend a knowledge of American feeling in July, 1940. In May, 1939, 1 had the pleasure of saying to the Polish Ambassador in Washington: "God help you if you trust England. " Several other remarks that I managed to get into print at that time, though they were not welcome, would now find a greater acceptance than they then did.
The German publication of documents has reinforced some of them. However, it may still be news in the Orient that already in June, 1939 it was known in Connecticut that Churchill, Eden and Co. meant to get into the government and start war.
I take it T\\e Japan Times expects news from me, and not prophecy, even if the news takes several weeks to reach Tokyo, and if I differentiate myself from certain types of journalist, let us say the Knickerbockers, D. Thomp- sons, Lippmanns, and Gunthers, by occasionally setting a contemporary act or fact in perspective with history. For example, the Berlin papers almost err when they describe the British firing on the French fleet as "without precedent. " In some senses the precedent is inexact. In 1812 the U. S. A. was not a recent ally of England. They were merely at peace with England. A British frigate got within close range {I think it was 50 yards) of an American frigate and opened fire.
"Democracy" is now currently defined in Europe as "a country gov- erned by Jews. " However, the British navy has never been Jewish. And indeed the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary translates the word sae-mann (which is now spelled seaman) simply as pirate.
? 1 78 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
No one will make head or tail of the "apparent contradictions" of democrat- ic governments until there is a handy manual of the press of England, France and the U. S. A. No profession is less written about than the profes- sion of journalism. When the Russian revolutionaries got into the Czarist archives, they published a lot of papers (The Raffalovitch Papers) with the title "L'abominabie venalite de Ja presse. " Raffalovitch finally decided that the French press wasn't worth buying, as no one believed it. The luminous line in the 500 pages of his correspondence is: "I recommend we give him ten thousand roubles, as is paid to the Times and the Telegraph" (of London). The Morning Post before its lamented demise printed a set of my communications, but demurred at quoting this suggestion of Monsieur Raffalovitch.
The Regime Fascista recently told us that in 1930 a certain Meyer advised Jews not to bother with newspapers. He said, "get into the news agencies," that is where papers get news. America was fed by these agen- cies, and has therefore been a long time in discovering Europe. I mean Europe since 1920. 1 doubt if Mr. Rip van Wendell Willkie has yet heard of the Europe now here. At any rate he hadn't heard about our Europe a year ago, when writing for that last and lowest of all periodicals, The AilanXic Monthly.
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
***
It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary. I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr.
Back in 1917 or thereabouts 1 received and replied to a Dadaist greeting from Switzerland. Then Picabia printed magazines in New York. Then in Paris, about 1922, he printed a unique issue of PiJhaou-Thibaou, saying good-bye to Dada. By 1923 all the Surrealists were lined up in The Little Review, so that neither these movements nor their particular terminologies can now have for me any great news value.
From 1912 for a decade I did my best to tell the ignorant Britons and Yankees that there had been some very good French poetry, and that English poetry, so far as the technique went, had mostly stopped along about the state of Gautier's Aibertus, and never caught up with his Emaux et Camees.
I doubt if anybody gave the frogs more conscientious free advertising than your present correspondent. And, with that past, I claimed, and still claim, a right to be judged impartial in saying that at a given date poetry in English (largely by American writers) began to be "more interesting" or to have, at any rate, an interest which contemporary French poetry had not. This is not to say that Eliot is a better writer than Cocteau.
I might, however, get round to claiming that Cocteau is an exception and a survival. And on the other hand, to be just, I shall also claim, or admit, that Cocteau shows awareness to certain contemporary pressures, extend- ing in his mental range from moods contemporary with Barbey d'Aurevilly to moods contemporary with Mr. Cummings. In his Antigone he is quite aware of economics, though he doesn't use up many words on the topic.
You are all, doubtless, tired to death of "red" poetry, and Marxist dogma laid out in bad verse. We have had socially conscious poetry or near-beer or crass propaganda, etc. , etc. , and no one has better dis- tinguished between it and the real thing than has Kitasono Katue. Neverthe- less in 1933 I managed, despite the hostility of the British fool and the diffidence of my publishers, to get the Active Anthology printed. Opening
6
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it now, after seven years, I can still take satisfaction in having got 49 pages of Basil Bunting printed where only the book-worm can efface him.
Mr. Cummings has said, "You can't sell the moon to the moon. " I believe the above mentioned anthology contains more poets who are aware of money, as a problem, than any other anthology ever has, though the better the poet (in Europe] the more certain you can be to surprise the old fogies and Aunt Sallies of my generation by dragging up passages definitely concerned with the ethics and tragedy of money.
Ovid, Propertius, Dante, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare, and notably Byron, are all perfectly good browsing ground for the economist, for the student of money as distinct from the bloke who has got a floating kidney from psychology or sociology.
Dante swats Philippe le Bel for debasing the currency, Shakespeare turns his phrase onto usury not in the Merchant of Venice alone. Catullus alludes to his purse and puns on a mortgage. Hood cursed gold and Lanier, trade. Nothing of this kind, so far as I have [seen], occurs in Fenollosa's notes on Japanese poetry.
Nevertheless, for what it is worth, since 1928 in English, the better the poet, the more certain you are to find him considering the age-old infamy of the money monopoly, of monopoly, of attempts to starve mankind in general, by the trick of trapping and withholding the power to buy.
In Bunting's case this sort of sensibility has broken into some of the strongest verse of our time. Perhaps the poems are too long for quotation in full, so I give a few strophes of the "Morpethshire Farmer. " Bunting sees him on the railway platform, driven from his land and compelled to emigrate into Canada.
Must ye bide, my good stone house To keep a townsman dry?
To hear the flurry of the grouse
But not the lowing of the kye* Where are ye, my seven score sheep Feeding on other braes!
My brand has faded from your fleece Another has its place.
Canada's a bare land
For the North wind and the snow, Northumberland's a bare land
For men have made it so.
Sheep and cattle are poor men's food.
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Grouse is sport for the rich,
Heather grows where the sweet grass might grow For the cost of clearing the ditch.
A liner lying in the Clyde
Will take me to Quebec.
My sons'll see the land I am leaving
As barren as her deck.
note: * Dialect for cattle.
No one since Burns has used the old simple meters with such force. Bunting is aware not only of the tragedy and the infamy back of the tragedy but of the mode in which it works.
His range is not limited to the "old style," as can be seen from the ultra modern "They say Etna" ending in the idiom of newspaper headlines:
MAN IS NOT AN END-PRODUCT MAGGOT ASSERTS
Bunting has learned to write a most elegant hand in Persian in process of translating Firdusi, and among his longer poems is a condensation of "Chomei at Toyama. " A man's adventures are not necessarily part of his writing, though the figure of the poet may gain popularity from them. In this respect Bunting is all that the romantic can desire. He has been jailed in three countries for never having done any harm. Once in Paris, because two corners back of Mt. Parnasse cemetery that confused him at two o'clock in the morning are so exactly alike, complete with cafe and awning, that 1 mistook the one for the other in broad daylight when trying to gather evidence of his character. And as the concierge of the wrong one said: "It is very lucky that his key did not fit the door on the second floor, because the gentleman in that room is very nervous and always has a revolver under his pillow. "
Bunting is, so far as I know, the only pacifist who did six months after the last war was over. As a Quaker he would not even say that he would fight if there was a war for him to fight in. He has an unfailing flair for excited areas. Years ago he left Italy in search of peace and arrived in the Canary Islands where a special little revolution broke out even before Spain at large was enkindled. Last May he had, I heard, left America for his native England. Some people's luck is like that.
I suspect him of being the best English-born poet of our time, though J. P. Angoldisrunningaclosesecond. Fromwhichyouwillfindmyelderly taste differing from the London tea party fashions.
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When I want the gist of what is being done in England in the mind and the arts, I wait for the next copy of Ron Duncan's Townsman.
I take it that reformers' papers, such as Action, the Social Creditor, and the British Union Quarterly are outside the scope of this correspondence, but I believe that the more active young writers in England are reading them. All this is a long way, or a long time, from the day a Russian philosophical student with undigested Germany in his insides, said to me (about a. d. 1910) "Boundt, haff you gno Bolioigal easshuntz? " (Anglice: Have you no political passions? ) I hadn't.
And now my old friend Doc Williams (Wm. Carlos) can hardly tolerate my existence because I am not a bolshevik, and I find it hard to excuse Wyndham Lewis' last volume from sheer difference with the opinions expressed. And Mr. Joyce is no longer with us, in the sense those words would have conveyed in 1917, and Johnnie Hargrave calls Mr. Eliot's Christianity, "A lot of dead cod about a dead god. " All of which goes to show that the Tower of Ivory "has gone West. " At any rate temporarily, both for us old duffers of the 1910's and for the youngsters.
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter Why There Is a War in Europe
Kumasaka's ghost returns from a fine sense of honor. When the men who made wars led them in person, risking their own person in battle, the point of honor remained, but after two centuries or more of mercantilism, we must seek other motives. To this end I would placard every school room with three lines from the Hazard circular of 1862.
"the great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of war, must be used to control the volume of money. to accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis. "
The present war in Europe has, in one sense, been going on for a hundred and ninety years. In another sense it was wholly unnecessary. It may date from the day when Paterson held out the bait for shareholders of the proposed bank "of England" in the words: "The bank hath profit of the interest on all the moneys that it creates out of nothing. " The war dates certainly from England's interference with American colonial paper money in 1751.
In 1723, the Pennsylvania Assembly had authorized the issue of 15,000
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pounds in paper bills, to be loaned on security of land or silver. As the Pennsylvania system developed, such issues were redeemable in a given time at so much per year. A farmer could get money up to half the value of his land, but had to pay it back in 10 years or in 16, after which he could have a new loan.
David Hume errs in saying "the land itself is coined. " What was "coined" was not the land but the triple components--land, farmer's capac- ity to work and his likelihood of doing so, and a ready market. That is, the colonists needed the product of the soil. The paper money was a useful ticket or handy means of reckoning and recording how much work had been done or how much grain (or whatever] grown and delivered to market, hence of recording how produce ought ethically to be handed over to whomever held the ticket.
This did not suit the game of the London monopolists. But, until W. A. Overholser issued his 61 page brochure, the histories neglected this item. London's attempt to reassert money monopoly led to the first American revolution (1776).
American history for the following 90 years should be considered as a series of revolutions and set-backs. John Adams conceived a sane republi- can (or statal) system. America freed herself from the British Crown; the loose confederation of colonies was (a second revolution) cemented under a sane constitution. The revolution was betrayed by the financial corrup- tion of members of Congress in Washington's time. These swine bought up depreciated certificates of pay due to the soldiers of the revolution, and then passed national laws forcing the Government to pay them the full face value of this paper (out of the pockets of the people).
Banking and funding systems were set up, whereon John Adams wrote in his old age:
"Every bank of discount is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals' gain.
And if I say this in my will the American people would pronounce I died crazy. " (Citation from my Canto 71).
Jefferson warned us that "If the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation and then by defla- tion, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up home- less on the continent that their fathers conquered. "
Jackson and Van Buren led the people against the monopolists. Jackson delivered the nation from debt. That is, the people beat the banks between
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1830 and 1840. Record of this decade has, or had, almost entirely dis- appeared from American text books.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the nation was betrayed by a ganglia of Sherman, Ikleheimer, etc. , working with foreign (mainly English and Jewish) financiers.
The so-called democratic (or statal system] intended by the founders of the republic was killed. Very few people noticed its death. Jefferson's prophecy was largely but imperceptibly fulfilled. The American people are only now lifting one torpid eyelid. Schemes for the nomadic life had already gone into effect, people wandering about landless sleeping in motor-trailers.
This was brought about by a system in which the Government bor- rowed the nation's credit and paid interest on it to private concerns. Ikleheimer's circular calculated there would be from 28 to 33 per cent profit. The usury in some banking systems amounts to 60% and so fecund was the new continent that the traffic stood it; with cycles of crash and crisis, which were, nevertheless, followed by recoveries and partial re- coveries.
We hear little, and you at a distance certainly hear less of these internal rumblings. When the swindle becomes international. Rota's condemnation of half a century ago covers the situation; he said:
"The mercantilist system placed the happiness of nations in the quan- tity of money they possess. And it consisted in a clever strategy for stealing the greatest possible amount of money from other nations. "
Italy, having benefitted by Rota's Storia delle hanche may have pre- ceded other nations in realizing the force of this sentence. At any rate she was, in our time, the first Occidental nation to believe that among the first rights of a man, or a country, is the right to keep out of debt.
This point of view both pained and shocked the international usurers.
The tension became unbearable in 1938 when Dr. Schacht openly stated (during Hitler's visit to Rome) that "money which is not issued against exchangeable goods is mere printed paper. "
The German word is "Verbrauchsgiiter. " Gold is exchangeable when people suffer from superstition. It is not edible. You cannot wear it save as ornament. Very few treatises on economics begin with a definition of money. Curious, but you may verify it by long sojourn in any national library.
Now, on whatever substance money is printed, it gives or is assumed to give its possessor the right to take (in exchange for it) a determined quantity
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and quality of any sort of goods offered for sale in market.
At a certain point the money swindle and the gold habit merge. And a nation that gives too much of its grain or silk or wool to people who dig up gold, or who manage a money issue, is likely to find itself in want. Some lands are fountains of metal (if aided by engineers), other nations are mere
tanks. France was a full tank.
Last spring in Washington I said and printed the statement: "War
against Germany in our time, would be war against an honest concept of money. "
One of the elder members of Congress replied: "Well, most of the gold in the world is in the United States, in the British Empire and in Russia, and I reckon that any attempt to diminish the power of them that have it, will meet with fairly serious resistance. "
I might put this in another form: Any nation which surrenders the control of its purchasing power to any other nation or any group or agency outside its own control, will fall into slavery.
Decent Americans protest against our selling you munitions and at the same time lending money to China so as to make sure you will have a use for thosemunitions. ThemenwhomI mostrespectinEuropeseebehindthe present European slaughter an attempt to break down both Germany and the Allies and reduce the whole people of Europe to a servitude under a money control. The more extended the conflict, the longer it lasts, the greater the debt that will be created and the greater the burden of interest that would be due to the lenders of money, the "creators of credit. "
8 Letter from Rapallo: In War Appear Responsibilities
With the Hitler interview of June 14, the continental war aims are once more made clear in their essential fairness and, for a victorious army, their mildness. Had our universities not betrayed us over an 80 year period, the phrase "freedom of the seas" might still arouse an intelligent glow in the American thorax. There once was a man named John Adams. There once was an American system whereof at least a minority of Americans had an inkling. We were betrayed, sold up the river, hog-swoggled in 1863 by J. Sherman, Ikleheimer and Ikleheimer's London correspondents, but the public has not yet found it out. The bonds were issued as banking basis. Someday we (in the plural) will wake up, but whether our guts have still the tensile strength to take action remains to be shown.
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In the meantime there is a question of responsibility both for wars at large and for this war. Herr Hitler has been exceedingly mild in his remarks on British politicians. When I was in America in June 1939, it was known that Churchill and his gigolos meant to "get into the government" (of England) and start a war. Technically they didn't "get in" until the war had been started, but the intention was there and indelible. They have already had part of their war. Count Potocki can bear witness to what I told him at lunch in May, 1939. I am glad to have a few statements in print and dated. France and England were rotten. Not being a military expert I forebore to make prophecies. All I could say was that I could see nothing to prevent another Sudan.
Most of Europe has spoken. A number of English patriots have been jailed for believing that their country should not go to war until prepared. Several Englishmen had demurred at the embezzlement of mandated ter- ritories, which embezzlement was part of the Lazard-Churchill (and should we say Kuhn-Loeb? ) program.
At any rate a Monroe Doctrine can and should be bilateral. When Monroe followed Adams and Jefferson in the belief that we should keep out of Europe, he emphasized what was then the less obvious side of the problem. Fatty degeneration of American politics and of American politi- cal exposition has been unchecked for too long. It is time we dug up the creed of the American founders. It is time we knocked the dust off a few perfectly valid ideas (call 'em ideals if Wilson hasn't permanently de- classed that term).
Roosevelt has done nothing to maintain the freedom of the seas. With 140 million Americans behind him, he couldn't defend the American post-bag. He has spent ten billions on needless gold, at the cost of the American people. Four billions out of that ten has gone in what appear to me to be excess profits to the sellers of gold, all of which is added onto our American taxes or written up as mortgage of America to an anonymous set of uncleanliness. A little of the once-vaunted American acumen would suffice to start asking: who got it?
I advocate at least that much acumen.
Vanity and provincialism! Millionaire play-boys in key embassies! When it comes to being ridiculous, can you beat busy Bullitt telling Mandel (alias Rothschild), Reynaud, a bunch of Jews, Annamites, Senegalese and freemasons that they are of the blood of Jeanne d'Arc? {Vide his harangue delivered a few days before Paris fell. )
Newspapers run on borrowed money have contributed to this state of vagueness. Take it that Churchill is senile and that his colleagues are, as
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A
? Reynaud and Mandel, shop-fronts for Lazard, Neuflize, Honneger, Roth- schild, Sieff, Beit, Goldsmid, Mocatta etc. , you have not yet the full list of persons responsible. Meaning responsible for the million dead in Poland, Flanders, Norway, etc. All of which slaughter is due to provincialism, to hoggishness, greed and to a love of monopoly which was not exclusively European.
Nothing effective was done or tried in America to stave off this conflict. All the official pressure was used in the wrong direction. Whether Amer- icans have yet examined the Polish dossier, I cannot from this distance make out, but the facts are written and implied on thousands of pages of news-print. "Forces" in America puffed up or helped to puff up the Poles. They backed the gold-swine and the bank-swine. There were surprises and they failed to conceal their astonishment.
When a little American horse- sense finally appeared, the "forces" were peeved. We are not yet out of the woods. There are still Anglomaniacs and usuro-maniacs in America who
like us to stick our hands into the fire. For England?
No! most certainly not for England. England has been worm-eaten since
1700. Her vitals were being gnawed over a century ago when Cobbett wanted to cure her. There is a whole literature of velleities, of attempts at English reform. Eight months ago I was thought loony for saying that France probably suffered less from the invasion of 1870 than had the English during the past 20 years from perfectly stinking misgovernment.
What have we in our recent American record that might serve to enlighten them? During the last year a marginal reform has been put into operation. Wallace, the goat of Roosevelt's administration, has got in the point of a gimlet. A trifling amount of money, called "stamps" and limited in its application, has been issued against easily available goods. But, in the wake of Lloyd George, this concession has been used as an implement of degradation. The people have been given back a little of their own purchas- ing power on condition they consent to be paupers and ask the bureaucracy for it.
You have to go back to the most rancid melodrama for a parallel. The wicked guardian, having robbed the orphan of her fortune, tells her it is her duty to be thankful for stale bread and a cot in the attic.
Lost in the Congressional Record for January 23, 1940 are these pas- sages:
"Whereas there has developed in the method of conducting the fi- nances of the U. S. the custom . . . of borrowing financial credit . . . thus increasing public indebtedness. "
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"Whereas the credit thus lent to the government is in reality based on . "
the real credit of the people, which belongs to them.
But until the reader has patience to read at least the few phrases of J.
AdamsthatI havebeenabletoquoteinmyCantos,I knowofnobriefwayof showing him how long sanity hasexisted in America (among a few people] and how thoroughly it has failed to percolate into the general conscious- ness. The people have finally fumbled at a general muzzy notion that at least some wars are economic. In the spring of 1939 one American editor had the nerve to print my statement that:
"War against Germany in our time would be war against an honest concept of money. "
Shortly before his death Robert Mond (brother of the late Alfred, Lord Melchett) sat on a sofa in Rome, which sofa is known to me, and said with hith well known lithf: "Napoleon wath a good man. It took uth 20 years to cwuth him. It will not take uth 20 years to cwuth Mutholini. (Took us 20 years to crush Napoleon, will not take us 20 to crush Mussolini. ) And the economic war hath commenthed. " This is a fact. Statement of it does not involve antisemitism. It in no way implicates the 300 just Jews known to me, or three million unknown. But it does prove a state of consciousness in one member of known set of English financiers.
There are known dynasties in Bank of England directorships: Goschen, Kleinwort, Brandt, etc. The Anglo-French combination is sometimes for brevity's sake written "Lazard. " After this war had started the Bank of England directors met and doubled their salaries, as proof of purity, patriot- ism etc. ? One old lady shareholder protested, but her protest in no way moved Montagu Norman. The American reader on his part might however start looking for the American representatives of these "forces. " The rela- tion of home office to branch office seems to me of minor importance. In
1863 the main offices were in London. It is there in the record. John Sherman wrote to Ikleheimer, Morton, and Ikleheimer wrote on to Roth- schild in London. The "capitalists," as they are called in the Hazard report, did indeed see to it that a great debt was made by our civil war, and used to control the volume of our American currency.
Over 20 years ago C. H. Douglas asserted potential plenty. The Loeb report, one of the best achievements of the New Deal, proved it. Whereon the rage of international usury knew no bounds. They argued: "If plenty exists, we cannot control it. Therefore it must not exist. Curtail crops! Maintain monopoly! War is the greatest sabotage of all possible. "
But the Germans wouldn't play ball. Even now, instead of smashing all
. .
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the French factories, they have to a great extent merely captured them. I beg you observe the record of loans for August 1939 from London to Poland, Greece, Turkey, Rumania. I ask you who has tried to extend the conflict.
I assert that from the start England was mucking round in Bulgaria, and only the genius of Mussolini and the good sense of King Boris prevented hell breaking loose in the Balkans.
Financiers make wars for the sake of creating great debts and for the sake of monopoly. They and their henchmen are advocates of destruction. They have manifestly advocated the destruction of Paris. If Paris were destroyed, suckers would borrow money and ask "credits" to rebuild it. Even "La Voix de la Paix," a French free anti-government radio voice was on June 15 displaying his ignorance of the nature of debt, money and credit.
9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I HAVE NEVER FATHOMED what a level-headed Japanese reader feels when he finds an Occidental slamming the said Occidental's government, or his president and the heads of departments.
It should be said by way of preface that a president is, in theory, a servant of the people, and that as long as he accepts office on that theory, his employers are licensed to grumble when he makes an ass of himself or talks nonsense. This may explain why "Woodie" Wilson so hated the American system and tried so hard to wreck it. It may explain why many of us consider Franklin Roosevelt a president and proved servant of Jewry rather than a respecter of American law and traditions.
What his pretended (and in fairness one must add his very probably intended) reforms have, in the main, amounted to is the spending of ten billion dollars of America's money for gold, paying 35 dollars an ounce for it instead of 20 dollars and 67 cents, thus putting four billion dollars of extra or unearned or unjust profits into the pockets of an anonymous lot of vendors of an almost useless and certainly unneeded metal. Hence, quite probably, the misery of the American farm population, and the mortgages on American farms.
Naturally the bleeders who sell gold are delighted with the administration. The American, who is American by race, birth, and long tradition, grits his teeth, turns tomato-red, curses, exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation and
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS \77
ends up (or at least my New England host last year ended up) by saying: "He is . . . is . . . etc. . . . a little Lord Fauntleroy. "
One of my adolescent memories is that of an ex-senator in Wall Street abusingTheodoreRoosevelt,butneverhaveI knovc^nAmericanhateof anyone equal to that I found in America last year directed against the executive. But I had no means of gauging hovi' v^idely this hatred was diffused. The Democrats whom I met seemed to dislike Mr. Roosevelt's politics, and especially his economics, even more than did the Republi- cans, but on the other hand he had friends.
WiththeAmericanmailnowcutdowntoairserviceI amnotgoingto pretend a knowledge of American feeling in July, 1940. In May, 1939, 1 had the pleasure of saying to the Polish Ambassador in Washington: "God help you if you trust England. " Several other remarks that I managed to get into print at that time, though they were not welcome, would now find a greater acceptance than they then did.
The German publication of documents has reinforced some of them. However, it may still be news in the Orient that already in June, 1939 it was known in Connecticut that Churchill, Eden and Co. meant to get into the government and start war.
I take it T\\e Japan Times expects news from me, and not prophecy, even if the news takes several weeks to reach Tokyo, and if I differentiate myself from certain types of journalist, let us say the Knickerbockers, D. Thomp- sons, Lippmanns, and Gunthers, by occasionally setting a contemporary act or fact in perspective with history. For example, the Berlin papers almost err when they describe the British firing on the French fleet as "without precedent. " In some senses the precedent is inexact. In 1812 the U. S. A. was not a recent ally of England. They were merely at peace with England. A British frigate got within close range {I think it was 50 yards) of an American frigate and opened fire.
"Democracy" is now currently defined in Europe as "a country gov- erned by Jews. " However, the British navy has never been Jewish. And indeed the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary translates the word sae-mann (which is now spelled seaman) simply as pirate.
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No one will make head or tail of the "apparent contradictions" of democrat- ic governments until there is a handy manual of the press of England, France and the U. S. A. No profession is less written about than the profes- sion of journalism. When the Russian revolutionaries got into the Czarist archives, they published a lot of papers (The Raffalovitch Papers) with the title "L'abominabie venalite de Ja presse. " Raffalovitch finally decided that the French press wasn't worth buying, as no one believed it. The luminous line in the 500 pages of his correspondence is: "I recommend we give him ten thousand roubles, as is paid to the Times and the Telegraph" (of London). The Morning Post before its lamented demise printed a set of my communications, but demurred at quoting this suggestion of Monsieur Raffalovitch.
The Regime Fascista recently told us that in 1930 a certain Meyer advised Jews not to bother with newspapers. He said, "get into the news agencies," that is where papers get news. America was fed by these agen- cies, and has therefore been a long time in discovering Europe. I mean Europe since 1920. 1 doubt if Mr. Rip van Wendell Willkie has yet heard of the Europe now here. At any rate he hadn't heard about our Europe a year ago, when writing for that last and lowest of all periodicals, The AilanXic Monthly.
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
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It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary. I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr.
