Greek cities very small;
Aristotle
bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Joe said he was aware that "a number of capitalist governments are controlled by big banks," notwithstanding the existence of "democratic" parliaments.
Not bad for a Georgian assassin. And possibly several decades ahead of the American public and professoriat. Not a single power in which the Cabinet can be formed in opposition to the will of the big financial magnates. I wonder: is that why they took Joe for a ride ?
"It is sufficient to exert financial pressure to cause Cabinet Ministers to fall from their posts as if they were stunned. "
Joey was talkin' of European cabinets; not of the so very different American DEMocracy (as they call it) etc. where, unless there is absolute surety that financial pressure won't be used, the blighters seldom or never get in. Joe SAID that the control of government by money-bags is inconceivable and absolutely excluded in the U. S. S. R. How different from the home life of our own DEMOCRACY (as they call it), etc. and how different from anything any British politician has ever encountered, and how different from any state of things that Churchill's group would desire.
"Narrow circle" said Joe of individuals connected in one way or another with the large banks and because of that they strive to conceal the part they play in this from the people.
? What a PERFECT ally for Churchill, Morgenthau, Lehman, and the present Anglo-Jewish regimes ! Well, the starry eyed Mr. Tugwell, and the cautious Mr. Chase and Jim Maurer and Brophy took it all down hook, line and sinker. Seven hour day and the rest of it. It was a stirring occasion. The only thing is that the idealist's ideals have got going so much faster and gone so much further. The Axis side of the present hard feelings.
Here the TRADE UNIONS, with their syndic. organization, and their recognized legal status whereby they propose, formulate, and GET what they want in Italy is really of so much MORE interest for any member of ANY trade union, or for any leader of labor who cares a hang about the welfare of the led that one only hopes the American trade unionist will someday read Por, or at least read something about Italian organizational measures.
The Stalin interview is a tough piece of reading, very hard to take hold of. That was probably the secret of his hold--plenty of people who KNOW Russia have been puzzled by the gap between their effective propaganda and their local failure in solving human problems. I believe the human material they had to work on explains part of the latter. I mean why they did NOT make a paradise, but mostly a sweat shop-- machines before men--men as material. But the other side, the devilish efficiency of their propaganda, is worth study.
And it seems to be a variant on the old political wheeze of sticking to general statements that each auditor interprets to mean what HE would mean IF he said it.
And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's faithful companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr. N. M. Butler. On June 3, 1941, year current, as delivered at the commencement of Columbia University, when Ole Nick was awaitin' another Waterloo, and as is common with his kind, he wasn't puttin' it in
? the first person singular. Nick wanted Americans to go fight for the British exploiters; so he said "THE WORLD" etc. In this case THE WORLD (meaning Nick and his pay masters). The World he sez, awaits another Waterloo. And on the fifth page it turns out he meant a defeat of Hitler! ! Which might be called "metonomy" or takin' a part for the "whole," and not the better whole either.
Now the WORLD, as any college president ought to know, before the trustees pay him his fat annual salary, is spherical in form, and is composed of MORE than one continent, and not wholly and totally enraptured with the big usury central.
However let Nick Butler speak for himself, as he has never failed to do in all his oleaginous lifetime.
Several pages of the old scamp's palaver contain statements by which no right thinking man would be offended. The slabs of print, the page undivided by paragraph divisions, tends to lull the reader or auditor into security.
Mr. Butler even disapproves (mildly, of course) of the "controlling desire for gain," alias our old enemy the profit motive. Of course he keeps off the specific MEANS of gain, exercised by his owners. He then pays a delicate compliment to Lord Holy Fox, without committing himself, in fact nothing could be more downy.
The FIRST Lord Halifax, unaided by his charming and formidable Lady, said there were three hundred years ago many things that riches cannot buy. Therefore the American boys should bleed for the present Lord Holy Fox. Now Ole Nick don't go as far back as all that, he stops back in the 17th Century; before Robert Cecil was so vigorous in defense of the British OPIUM interests in Shanghai.
Victory for a moral ideal is not enough, according to Nicholas, because the "gain-seeking interest has control of so vast a proportion of
? mankind. " That is true enough, but it ain't reduced the moral ideal to ABSOLUTE impotence. This is what was worrying Butler; but he hadn't got down to bed rock. He said there was a time, back apparently when Mark Hanna was running the United State of America, when the moral ideal was to all appearances gainin' ground.
Of course if by that he means that some empires were GAINING territory, he might have said so, only he didn't. Ole Nicholas puts the rise of the triumph, real or apparent, the IDEAL, from the McKinley to the Wealsohn administration.
Note of HOpe and progress.
In 1910, the American Congress was unanimous for the moral principle (so long as no questions were asked about the privileges of the usury central). Nic complains that the moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations.
Which shows the state of DEEP ignorance in the WORLD; as distinct from Nicholas Butler's circle or pot.
And lookin' at dates, he must have been blurrin' this blurb the same week that a Chinaman, not of Wang Ching Wei's party, but of Chiang Kai-shek's party, and FAITHFUL to Chiang, saying what Hitler's justice in scuttling international affairs was such that the Chinese of the ANTI- JAP, anti-Wang party might accept Hitler's arbitrage.
Mr. Butler then seems to fall into incoherence. He talks of a PLEDGE as something to be kept; what price, England, Churchill, and Roosevelt ? He objects to having the savings of generations swept away; he asks what has become of the influence of and guidance of the great religions; Christian, Mosel, HEBREW, and Buddhist, and begorrah, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving out St. Ambrose and St. Antonio da Firenze, and graciously waivin' a hand to the captains of the mind, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German. And of course
? Abraham Lincoln, not quoting old Abe on the currency issue. And then barbarous brutality, without mention of Esthonia, Finland, or places occupied by the-- --Bustin of churches and museums. Wot price Louvain and Cyrenaica ? And all this "However dark the skies," etc. ends up with a historic parallel; the WORLD waitin' for a new Vaterloo; because Napolean BonypartY went into Russia, and if Hitler ain't licked in Europe, it will come in Asia or Africa. Well that is a bad slip, because Knox and Stimson, etc. are retching for to rape Africa. But at any rate you git a picture of Nicholas, and METONOMY or takin' a part for the HOLE. A figger of Rhetorik sez Sam Johnson, whereby one word is put for another.
Now if Butler, the old goof, wants me to give him a clean bill of health, he can use the enormous power conferred on him by his position, to get Columbia University to issue a series of volumes containing the GIST of the beliefs and knowledge of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln. NOT leaving out every phrase and paragraph which I, and men like me, consider vital to the understanding of American history.
#4 (November 6, 1941) U. S. (56)
THIS WAR ON YOUTH--ON A GENERATION
A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me. I don't mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears. Thus I have learned that Professor I. A. Richards, one of England's few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.
And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on. Wallace Stevens, J. G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.
? And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British. And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin' on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin' poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel. [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics. I don't quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.
Well, that's a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers. We need more communication between the five continents.
And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda. Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.
And that brings me to the question of AGE. Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ? That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.
Back in the other war W. B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.
And in one way or another--lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation--pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won't be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect. It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers. The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.
? Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda. Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear. Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.
HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ? Details of Roosenstein's "freedom of the seas," NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.
If Chile don't, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.
STARVE 'em out. Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?
Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another. Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax. First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.
RATIONING!
In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance. Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year. Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.
The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia. Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore. From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents. AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile
? and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.
Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ? Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937. In 1937 there was NO necessity of War. Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable. There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war. Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.
Don't say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution. That is a fairly conservative statement. He has NEVER been neutral. But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ? What is their business ? What is their civic record ? What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?
Have any of 'em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ? Which is basic in all economics.
Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.
The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.
If you start a ten years war ? Yes, IF you start a ten years war. None of these old swine will be there at the end of it. It won't be their world, it may be your ruin.
As to RUIN. What about Petrograd ? No military purpose in its destruction.
? Laval saved Paris. Churchill would have had 'em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France. What causes that ? Criminality ? Imbecility ? Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind's eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.
Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.
Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill. Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.
Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution. Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right. The remedy did NOT work. AND the revolution was betrayed. Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed. It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.
A lot of 'em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses. The fools got control. Now YOU are NOT communists. The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead. The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage. The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.
You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever. You don't even look at what is done by your governments. Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy. Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business. Very few analyze that want or carry their
? thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.
Our system was O. K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc. The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn't stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.
First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity
Amateur move.
COHABITATION with other men. POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city.
Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed. Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.
AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth. I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers
What causes that ? Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it
Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw
? revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair. We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas. For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms. We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.
We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it Why do we NOT ?
Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?
For whom ?
It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.
#5 (December 7, 1941) U. S. & U. K. (A66) THOSE PARENTHESES
Europe callin', Pound speakin'. Ezry Pound speakin'. And I think I am perhaps still speakin' a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it. They say an Englishman's head's made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.
Of course I don't know what GOOD I am doin', I mean what IMME DIATE good. But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.
? Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15). Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England. I am content to say state of mind.
I can't say my remarks were heeded. I thought I had got 'em simple enough. Words short and simple enough. In fact some people complained that several of 'em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).
Now I hold NO Catholic has ever been or ever will be puzzled by what I said in those Cantos. I have, however, never asked for sympathy when misunderstood. I go on trying to make my meanin' clear and then clearer. And in the LONG run people who listen to me (very few do, but members of that small and SElect minority) do know more in the long run, than those who listen to Mr. H. G. chubby Wells and the liberal stooges.
What I am gitting at is, a friend said to me the other day that he was glad I had the politics I have got, but that HE didn't understand how I, as a North American, United Stateser could have it.
Well that looks simple to me. Things OFTEN DO look simple to me. On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin' from the twig downward, you get into a muddle.
My politics seem to me SIMPLE. My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended. I don't cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin' from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis.
I wish Brother Hoover had spilled his facts about the stinking and rotten Treaty of Versailles while he was still in the White House. But I am glad
? he has done so now. Tho' he could also confess his OWN errors and aid even now to acceleratin' the United States of America welfare.
Anyhow, I have, in principle, NO objection to the U. S. absorbin' Canada and the whole NORTH American continent.
The rot of the British Empire is from inside, and if the whole of that syphilitic organization, headed by Montagu Skinner Norman, makes war on Canada, or Alberta, I see no reason for Canada not making war on the Jews in London. Whether they are born Jews, or have taken to Jewry by predilection.
What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin' ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles, with a new two dozen Danzigs. Namely the United States bein' left with war baby bases in Aberdeen, Singapore, Dakar, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean! All draggin' the tail of their coat, and making dead mathematically sure of another war for Dupont, Vickers, Mond, Melchett, Beit, Ellermann in ten or fifteen years after the present one (present war). And to that end Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lehman are working, day and night, not to mention the Warburgs. And precisely on the subject of Warburgs, I wish Herb Hoover would say MORE about the stink of Versailles.
God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don't want to see more evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface. And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one.
And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin' the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris. And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion. Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even a Jewish medal. Why the heck the Chinese and laps don't
? combine and drive that dirt out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient.
And in any case I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism. We are gittin' on for the centenary of the opium war, that never did any good to the lads of Lancashire or of Sussex, and that brought no prosperity in Dorset or Gloucester.
Hardy's England, aye, aye sir, where is it ? Did Rothschild save it ? He did not. Did the Goldsmid save it ? He did not. Does Churchill endeavor to save it ? He does NOT. I repeat the rot and stink of England, and the danger to her empire is inside, and has been: from the time of Cobbett.
And NO number of Rabbis and bank touts in Wall Street and in Washington can do one damn thing for England, save let her alone. And a damn pity they didn't start doin' sooner. That is a pity for England.
And a peace with American war bases all over the whole of the planet would be no more a real peace than Versailles was. And as to all visible signs Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew's hands than Wilson was in 1919. I am against havin' him mixin' into ANY post-war matters whatever. This objectin' being academic.
An' I think it would be well for ALL men, from China to Capetown to SEE as soon as possible what Franklin is up to. Let him keep his paws on the North American continent. Even if it means DIMinished gun sales for all his pals, and for all gold-bugs.
Eight years ago he was sayin' "nothin to fear but fear. " Well what has become of THAT Roosevelt ? What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis ? He got his face into a paper called Life, eight or ten photographs. Jim Farley would have been less
? nuisance in the White House than snob Delano, who objected to Farley NOT on moral or ethical grounds, but PURELY as snobism; didn't want a mere henchman to succeed him.
And as to American labor. When will American labor start lookin' into the currency question ? "Question," of course there ought not to be any INTERROGATIVE element in it. Even a hod carrier OUGHT to be able to learn why interest payin' debt is NOT so good a basis for money as is productive labor.
But will they ? Will the American hod carrier and skilled engineer (includin' Mr. Hoover) ever git round to the currency issue ? (I call it issue, not question. )
And will the American big employer or financier, except Baruch, ever start studyin' the solution of HIS problem, which is a corporate solution, in the sense of that word now current in Europe ?
A CORPORATE problem, or issue, which does NOT mean starving the workman, or breakin' him up by scab mobs.
Lord knows I don't SEE how America can have fascism without years of previous trainin'. Looks to me, even now as if the currency problem was the place to start savin' America. As I have been sayin' for some time back, call it ten years or call it twenty. At this moment it looks like as if John Lewis would take just as long to git round about feedin' my books to his troops, as it would take the Harvard faculty to git Mr. William G. Morse's permission to use 'em in Harvard (Economics Department).
Both sides will have to come to it.
#6 (January 29, 1942) U. S. (A1) ON RESUMING
? On Arbour Day, Pearl Arbour Day, at 12 o'clock noon I retired from the capital of the old Roman Empire to Rapallo to seek wisdom from the ancients.
I wanted to figure things out. I had a perfectly good alibi, if I wanted to play things safe. I was and am officially occupied with a new translation of the Ta S'eu of Confucius. I have in Rapallo the text of Confucius, and of Mencius, the text of the world's finest anthology, namely that which Confucius compiled from earlier authors, and I have in reach the text of a book which bears on its front page the title Li Ki (which the head of the Chinese Department in our Congressional Library tells me proper minded Chi Sinologues now think is pronounced Lee Gee). And I have six volumes of the late Dr. Morrison's Dictionary, not the most up to date dictionary of Chinese Ideograms, but nevertheless good enough.
That is, I have WORK thaaar for some years, if I don't die before I git to the middle.
The Odes are to me very difficult. They are of extreme beauty. Thousands of poets have looked at those odes and despaired. There are points at which some simple ideogram (that is, Chinese picture word) is so used as to be eternal, insofar as our human sense of eternity can reach. There is one of the sunrise that I despair of ever getting translated.
There was to face this, the SITUATION. That is to say the United States had been for months ILLEGALLY at war, through what I considered to be the criminal acts of a President whose mental condition was NOT, as far as I could see, all that could or should be desired of a man in so responsible a position or office.
He had, so far as evidence available to me showed, broken his promises to the electorate; he had to my mind violated his oath of office. He had to my mind violated the oath of allegiance to the United States
? Constitution which even the ordinary American citizen is expected to take every time he gets a new passport.
It was obviously a mere question of hours, between that day and hour, and the time when the United States of America would be legally at war with the Axis.
I spent a month tryin' to figure things out, well did I, perhaps I concluded sooner. At any rate I had a month clear to make up my mind about some things. I had Confucius and Mencius, both of whom had been up against similar problems. Both of whom had seen empires fallin'. Both of whom had seen deeper into the causes of human confusion than most men even think of lookin'.
Then there was my old dad in bed with a broken hip; Lord knows who is going to mend it or whether it will mend. So--I read him a few pages of Aristotle in the Loeb Classical Library, English version, to take his mind off it. Also to keep my own work in progress.
Because for some time I have had in mind the need of comparing the terminology of Chinese and Greek philosphy, and also comparing that with the terminology of mediaevil Catholic theology.
No. For a man cut off from all his NORMAL contacts with the non- European world, I can't say I was destitute--mentally--there was plenty lyin' there for me to be busy about, if I had wanted to "contract OUT. " If I had wanted to go into a funk hole, I had a nice sizeable funk hole. About as good as an endowed professorship in one of our otiose or veiled, shall we say veiled universities, or even Oxford or Cambridge. Plenty of muckers down there settin' pretty, and drawin' 5000 dollars or ten thousand a year for not tellin'. I reckon it is Mencius who thought that "the true sage seeks not repose. "
? It is not a claustral motto. I began figurin' out that a COMPLETE severance of communication between the calm and sentient men is not to be desired.
I have before now pointed out that England was CUT off from the current of European thought during and BY the Napoleonic Wars, and that she never got ketched up again, not during all the damned nasty and 19th century. Always laggin' behind. Perhaps she allus WAS laggin' behind. I have pointed out the difference of up-to-dateness between Voltaire and Mr. Samuel Johnson.
At any rate it is NO GOOD.
The United States has been MISinformed. The United States has been led down the garden path, and may be down under the daisies. All thru shuttin' out news.
There is no end to the amount of shuttin' out news that the sons of Blood who started this war, and wanted this war, and monkeyed round to git a war started and monkeyed round to keep the war goin', and spreadin'. There is NO end to the shuttin' out and perversions of news that these blighters ain't up to, and that they haven't, and aren't still trying to com pass. Whatever happens it is NOT going to do the United States any good to be as cut off from all news, and all NEWS of CONTEMPORARY thought like the damn fools and utterly decadent Britons have got themselves cut off from.
As you can HEAR from the British Blurb Corporation any Monday and Tuesday evening, and any Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening that you choose to listen in to their phenomenal hogwash.
That's where they've got to. And for their bein' there neither I nor any man I shake hands with, is to blame in any way whatsoever. Every
? English friend I got in the world, has done his damnest to keep England from makin' such a thunderin' and abysmal ass of herself.
As for my American friends, Senator Borah is dead, not that I knew him much save by letter; but I can still feel his hand on my shoulder as just before he was getting into an elevator in the Senate building, and I can still hear him sayin':
"Well, I'm sure I don't know what a man like you would find to DO here. "
That was a few days sooner, mebbe the first time I met him. Neither he, nor William J. Bryan lived to hear Senator Wallace tellin' the world there would be no peace till the nations of the world knocked under and bowed down to the GOLD standard. Bowed down like drunken and abject fools and said, let gold rule humanity, let all human exchange of goods be bottle necked and ask permission from a few bloodthirsty kikes who OWN gold. Bow down and say monopoly is God over all men; and this from a man, said to be, or to HAVE BEEN, interested in farmers, and farmer's welfare. This after all the lies from the London gold ring, this after 20 years of evasion, this in fact after 20 years' attempt to conceal from the English people that they were being asked to go out and DIE for gold, for the monopoly of the owners and brokers; owners of gold mines, brokers, and owners of gold.
Back in December I had never expected such a confession from anyone as high in office.
Yaaas, I knew that was what the war was about: gold, usury and monopoly. I had said as much when I was last in America. I had then said: IF a war is pushed onto us. So now we have got pushed out of Guam, and Wake, and I suppose out of the Philippines, and a 30 years war is in process ? Is it ? Is a 30 years war what the American citizen thinks will do most good to the United States of America ?
? Or has someone been MiSinformed ? and IF so, who misinformed him ? Accordin' to the reports of the American press now available to the aver age European, someone in charge of American destiny miscalculated somethin' or other.
An "inquiry" is in progress, at least as they print here. It bein' my private belief that I could have avoided a war with Japan, if anybody had had the unlikely idea of sending me out there, with any sort of official powers.
The Japanese have a past. Of course when I talk to 'em now, they are apt to remind me that they have ALSO a presertt.
They have not mentioned the future in our conversations.
The last American journalist I saw, and that was the night before Arbour Day, told me the Japs would never etc. , etc.
A nation evolves by process of history. Japan to me consists in part of what I learned from a sort of half trunk full of the late Ernest Fenollosa's papers. Anybody who has read the plays entitled Kumasaka and Kagekiyo, would have AVOIDED the sort of bilge printed in Time and the American press, and the sort of fetid imbecility I heard a few nights ago from the British Broadcasting Company.
There are certain depths of ignorance that can be fatal to a man or a nation. When these are conjoined with malice and baseness of spirit, it seems almost useless to mention them.
A BBC commentator somewhere about January 8 was telling his presumably music hall audience that the Japs were jackals, and that they had just recently, I think he said, within living men's lifetime, emerged from barbarism. I don't know what patriotic end you think, or he thinks, or the British authorities think (if that is the verb), is served by such fetid ignorance.
Not bad for a Georgian assassin. And possibly several decades ahead of the American public and professoriat. Not a single power in which the Cabinet can be formed in opposition to the will of the big financial magnates. I wonder: is that why they took Joe for a ride ?
"It is sufficient to exert financial pressure to cause Cabinet Ministers to fall from their posts as if they were stunned. "
Joey was talkin' of European cabinets; not of the so very different American DEMocracy (as they call it) etc. where, unless there is absolute surety that financial pressure won't be used, the blighters seldom or never get in. Joe SAID that the control of government by money-bags is inconceivable and absolutely excluded in the U. S. S. R. How different from the home life of our own DEMOCRACY (as they call it), etc. and how different from anything any British politician has ever encountered, and how different from any state of things that Churchill's group would desire.
"Narrow circle" said Joe of individuals connected in one way or another with the large banks and because of that they strive to conceal the part they play in this from the people.
? What a PERFECT ally for Churchill, Morgenthau, Lehman, and the present Anglo-Jewish regimes ! Well, the starry eyed Mr. Tugwell, and the cautious Mr. Chase and Jim Maurer and Brophy took it all down hook, line and sinker. Seven hour day and the rest of it. It was a stirring occasion. The only thing is that the idealist's ideals have got going so much faster and gone so much further. The Axis side of the present hard feelings.
Here the TRADE UNIONS, with their syndic. organization, and their recognized legal status whereby they propose, formulate, and GET what they want in Italy is really of so much MORE interest for any member of ANY trade union, or for any leader of labor who cares a hang about the welfare of the led that one only hopes the American trade unionist will someday read Por, or at least read something about Italian organizational measures.
The Stalin interview is a tough piece of reading, very hard to take hold of. That was probably the secret of his hold--plenty of people who KNOW Russia have been puzzled by the gap between their effective propaganda and their local failure in solving human problems. I believe the human material they had to work on explains part of the latter. I mean why they did NOT make a paradise, but mostly a sweat shop-- machines before men--men as material. But the other side, the devilish efficiency of their propaganda, is worth study.
And it seems to be a variant on the old political wheeze of sticking to general statements that each auditor interprets to mean what HE would mean IF he said it.
And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's faithful companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr. N. M. Butler. On June 3, 1941, year current, as delivered at the commencement of Columbia University, when Ole Nick was awaitin' another Waterloo, and as is common with his kind, he wasn't puttin' it in
? the first person singular. Nick wanted Americans to go fight for the British exploiters; so he said "THE WORLD" etc. In this case THE WORLD (meaning Nick and his pay masters). The World he sez, awaits another Waterloo. And on the fifth page it turns out he meant a defeat of Hitler! ! Which might be called "metonomy" or takin' a part for the "whole," and not the better whole either.
Now the WORLD, as any college president ought to know, before the trustees pay him his fat annual salary, is spherical in form, and is composed of MORE than one continent, and not wholly and totally enraptured with the big usury central.
However let Nick Butler speak for himself, as he has never failed to do in all his oleaginous lifetime.
Several pages of the old scamp's palaver contain statements by which no right thinking man would be offended. The slabs of print, the page undivided by paragraph divisions, tends to lull the reader or auditor into security.
Mr. Butler even disapproves (mildly, of course) of the "controlling desire for gain," alias our old enemy the profit motive. Of course he keeps off the specific MEANS of gain, exercised by his owners. He then pays a delicate compliment to Lord Holy Fox, without committing himself, in fact nothing could be more downy.
The FIRST Lord Halifax, unaided by his charming and formidable Lady, said there were three hundred years ago many things that riches cannot buy. Therefore the American boys should bleed for the present Lord Holy Fox. Now Ole Nick don't go as far back as all that, he stops back in the 17th Century; before Robert Cecil was so vigorous in defense of the British OPIUM interests in Shanghai.
Victory for a moral ideal is not enough, according to Nicholas, because the "gain-seeking interest has control of so vast a proportion of
? mankind. " That is true enough, but it ain't reduced the moral ideal to ABSOLUTE impotence. This is what was worrying Butler; but he hadn't got down to bed rock. He said there was a time, back apparently when Mark Hanna was running the United State of America, when the moral ideal was to all appearances gainin' ground.
Of course if by that he means that some empires were GAINING territory, he might have said so, only he didn't. Ole Nicholas puts the rise of the triumph, real or apparent, the IDEAL, from the McKinley to the Wealsohn administration.
Note of HOpe and progress.
In 1910, the American Congress was unanimous for the moral principle (so long as no questions were asked about the privileges of the usury central). Nic complains that the moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations.
Which shows the state of DEEP ignorance in the WORLD; as distinct from Nicholas Butler's circle or pot.
And lookin' at dates, he must have been blurrin' this blurb the same week that a Chinaman, not of Wang Ching Wei's party, but of Chiang Kai-shek's party, and FAITHFUL to Chiang, saying what Hitler's justice in scuttling international affairs was such that the Chinese of the ANTI- JAP, anti-Wang party might accept Hitler's arbitrage.
Mr. Butler then seems to fall into incoherence. He talks of a PLEDGE as something to be kept; what price, England, Churchill, and Roosevelt ? He objects to having the savings of generations swept away; he asks what has become of the influence of and guidance of the great religions; Christian, Mosel, HEBREW, and Buddhist, and begorrah, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving out St. Ambrose and St. Antonio da Firenze, and graciously waivin' a hand to the captains of the mind, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German. And of course
? Abraham Lincoln, not quoting old Abe on the currency issue. And then barbarous brutality, without mention of Esthonia, Finland, or places occupied by the-- --Bustin of churches and museums. Wot price Louvain and Cyrenaica ? And all this "However dark the skies," etc. ends up with a historic parallel; the WORLD waitin' for a new Vaterloo; because Napolean BonypartY went into Russia, and if Hitler ain't licked in Europe, it will come in Asia or Africa. Well that is a bad slip, because Knox and Stimson, etc. are retching for to rape Africa. But at any rate you git a picture of Nicholas, and METONOMY or takin' a part for the HOLE. A figger of Rhetorik sez Sam Johnson, whereby one word is put for another.
Now if Butler, the old goof, wants me to give him a clean bill of health, he can use the enormous power conferred on him by his position, to get Columbia University to issue a series of volumes containing the GIST of the beliefs and knowledge of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln. NOT leaving out every phrase and paragraph which I, and men like me, consider vital to the understanding of American history.
#4 (November 6, 1941) U. S. (56)
THIS WAR ON YOUTH--ON A GENERATION
A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me. I don't mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears. Thus I have learned that Professor I. A. Richards, one of England's few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.
And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on. Wallace Stevens, J. G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.
? And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British. And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin' on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin' poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel. [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics. I don't quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.
Well, that's a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers. We need more communication between the five continents.
And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda. Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.
And that brings me to the question of AGE. Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ? That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.
Back in the other war W. B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.
And in one way or another--lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation--pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won't be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect. It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers. The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.
? Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda. Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear. Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.
HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ? Details of Roosenstein's "freedom of the seas," NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.
If Chile don't, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.
STARVE 'em out. Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?
Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another. Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax. First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.
RATIONING!
In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance. Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year. Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.
The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia. Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore. From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents. AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile
? and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.
Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ? Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937. In 1937 there was NO necessity of War. Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable. There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war. Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.
Don't say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution. That is a fairly conservative statement. He has NEVER been neutral. But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ? What is their business ? What is their civic record ? What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?
Have any of 'em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ? Which is basic in all economics.
Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.
The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.
If you start a ten years war ? Yes, IF you start a ten years war. None of these old swine will be there at the end of it. It won't be their world, it may be your ruin.
As to RUIN. What about Petrograd ? No military purpose in its destruction.
? Laval saved Paris. Churchill would have had 'em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France. What causes that ? Criminality ? Imbecility ? Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind's eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.
Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.
Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill. Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.
Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution. Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right. The remedy did NOT work. AND the revolution was betrayed. Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed. It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.
A lot of 'em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses. The fools got control. Now YOU are NOT communists. The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead. The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage. The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.
You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever. You don't even look at what is done by your governments. Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy. Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business. Very few analyze that want or carry their
? thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.
Our system was O. K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc. The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn't stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.
First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity
Amateur move.
COHABITATION with other men. POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city.
Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed. Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.
AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth. I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers
What causes that ? Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it
Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw
? revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair. We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas. For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms. We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.
We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it Why do we NOT ?
Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?
For whom ?
It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.
#5 (December 7, 1941) U. S. & U. K. (A66) THOSE PARENTHESES
Europe callin', Pound speakin'. Ezry Pound speakin'. And I think I am perhaps still speakin' a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it. They say an Englishman's head's made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.
Of course I don't know what GOOD I am doin', I mean what IMME DIATE good. But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.
? Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15). Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England. I am content to say state of mind.
I can't say my remarks were heeded. I thought I had got 'em simple enough. Words short and simple enough. In fact some people complained that several of 'em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).
Now I hold NO Catholic has ever been or ever will be puzzled by what I said in those Cantos. I have, however, never asked for sympathy when misunderstood. I go on trying to make my meanin' clear and then clearer. And in the LONG run people who listen to me (very few do, but members of that small and SElect minority) do know more in the long run, than those who listen to Mr. H. G. chubby Wells and the liberal stooges.
What I am gitting at is, a friend said to me the other day that he was glad I had the politics I have got, but that HE didn't understand how I, as a North American, United Stateser could have it.
Well that looks simple to me. Things OFTEN DO look simple to me. On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin' from the twig downward, you get into a muddle.
My politics seem to me SIMPLE. My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended. I don't cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin' from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis.
I wish Brother Hoover had spilled his facts about the stinking and rotten Treaty of Versailles while he was still in the White House. But I am glad
? he has done so now. Tho' he could also confess his OWN errors and aid even now to acceleratin' the United States of America welfare.
Anyhow, I have, in principle, NO objection to the U. S. absorbin' Canada and the whole NORTH American continent.
The rot of the British Empire is from inside, and if the whole of that syphilitic organization, headed by Montagu Skinner Norman, makes war on Canada, or Alberta, I see no reason for Canada not making war on the Jews in London. Whether they are born Jews, or have taken to Jewry by predilection.
What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin' ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles, with a new two dozen Danzigs. Namely the United States bein' left with war baby bases in Aberdeen, Singapore, Dakar, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean! All draggin' the tail of their coat, and making dead mathematically sure of another war for Dupont, Vickers, Mond, Melchett, Beit, Ellermann in ten or fifteen years after the present one (present war). And to that end Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lehman are working, day and night, not to mention the Warburgs. And precisely on the subject of Warburgs, I wish Herb Hoover would say MORE about the stink of Versailles.
God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don't want to see more evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface. And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one.
And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin' the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris. And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion. Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even a Jewish medal. Why the heck the Chinese and laps don't
? combine and drive that dirt out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient.
And in any case I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism. We are gittin' on for the centenary of the opium war, that never did any good to the lads of Lancashire or of Sussex, and that brought no prosperity in Dorset or Gloucester.
Hardy's England, aye, aye sir, where is it ? Did Rothschild save it ? He did not. Did the Goldsmid save it ? He did not. Does Churchill endeavor to save it ? He does NOT. I repeat the rot and stink of England, and the danger to her empire is inside, and has been: from the time of Cobbett.
And NO number of Rabbis and bank touts in Wall Street and in Washington can do one damn thing for England, save let her alone. And a damn pity they didn't start doin' sooner. That is a pity for England.
And a peace with American war bases all over the whole of the planet would be no more a real peace than Versailles was. And as to all visible signs Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew's hands than Wilson was in 1919. I am against havin' him mixin' into ANY post-war matters whatever. This objectin' being academic.
An' I think it would be well for ALL men, from China to Capetown to SEE as soon as possible what Franklin is up to. Let him keep his paws on the North American continent. Even if it means DIMinished gun sales for all his pals, and for all gold-bugs.
Eight years ago he was sayin' "nothin to fear but fear. " Well what has become of THAT Roosevelt ? What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis ? He got his face into a paper called Life, eight or ten photographs. Jim Farley would have been less
? nuisance in the White House than snob Delano, who objected to Farley NOT on moral or ethical grounds, but PURELY as snobism; didn't want a mere henchman to succeed him.
And as to American labor. When will American labor start lookin' into the currency question ? "Question," of course there ought not to be any INTERROGATIVE element in it. Even a hod carrier OUGHT to be able to learn why interest payin' debt is NOT so good a basis for money as is productive labor.
But will they ? Will the American hod carrier and skilled engineer (includin' Mr. Hoover) ever git round to the currency issue ? (I call it issue, not question. )
And will the American big employer or financier, except Baruch, ever start studyin' the solution of HIS problem, which is a corporate solution, in the sense of that word now current in Europe ?
A CORPORATE problem, or issue, which does NOT mean starving the workman, or breakin' him up by scab mobs.
Lord knows I don't SEE how America can have fascism without years of previous trainin'. Looks to me, even now as if the currency problem was the place to start savin' America. As I have been sayin' for some time back, call it ten years or call it twenty. At this moment it looks like as if John Lewis would take just as long to git round about feedin' my books to his troops, as it would take the Harvard faculty to git Mr. William G. Morse's permission to use 'em in Harvard (Economics Department).
Both sides will have to come to it.
#6 (January 29, 1942) U. S. (A1) ON RESUMING
? On Arbour Day, Pearl Arbour Day, at 12 o'clock noon I retired from the capital of the old Roman Empire to Rapallo to seek wisdom from the ancients.
I wanted to figure things out. I had a perfectly good alibi, if I wanted to play things safe. I was and am officially occupied with a new translation of the Ta S'eu of Confucius. I have in Rapallo the text of Confucius, and of Mencius, the text of the world's finest anthology, namely that which Confucius compiled from earlier authors, and I have in reach the text of a book which bears on its front page the title Li Ki (which the head of the Chinese Department in our Congressional Library tells me proper minded Chi Sinologues now think is pronounced Lee Gee). And I have six volumes of the late Dr. Morrison's Dictionary, not the most up to date dictionary of Chinese Ideograms, but nevertheless good enough.
That is, I have WORK thaaar for some years, if I don't die before I git to the middle.
The Odes are to me very difficult. They are of extreme beauty. Thousands of poets have looked at those odes and despaired. There are points at which some simple ideogram (that is, Chinese picture word) is so used as to be eternal, insofar as our human sense of eternity can reach. There is one of the sunrise that I despair of ever getting translated.
There was to face this, the SITUATION. That is to say the United States had been for months ILLEGALLY at war, through what I considered to be the criminal acts of a President whose mental condition was NOT, as far as I could see, all that could or should be desired of a man in so responsible a position or office.
He had, so far as evidence available to me showed, broken his promises to the electorate; he had to my mind violated his oath of office. He had to my mind violated the oath of allegiance to the United States
? Constitution which even the ordinary American citizen is expected to take every time he gets a new passport.
It was obviously a mere question of hours, between that day and hour, and the time when the United States of America would be legally at war with the Axis.
I spent a month tryin' to figure things out, well did I, perhaps I concluded sooner. At any rate I had a month clear to make up my mind about some things. I had Confucius and Mencius, both of whom had been up against similar problems. Both of whom had seen empires fallin'. Both of whom had seen deeper into the causes of human confusion than most men even think of lookin'.
Then there was my old dad in bed with a broken hip; Lord knows who is going to mend it or whether it will mend. So--I read him a few pages of Aristotle in the Loeb Classical Library, English version, to take his mind off it. Also to keep my own work in progress.
Because for some time I have had in mind the need of comparing the terminology of Chinese and Greek philosphy, and also comparing that with the terminology of mediaevil Catholic theology.
No. For a man cut off from all his NORMAL contacts with the non- European world, I can't say I was destitute--mentally--there was plenty lyin' there for me to be busy about, if I had wanted to "contract OUT. " If I had wanted to go into a funk hole, I had a nice sizeable funk hole. About as good as an endowed professorship in one of our otiose or veiled, shall we say veiled universities, or even Oxford or Cambridge. Plenty of muckers down there settin' pretty, and drawin' 5000 dollars or ten thousand a year for not tellin'. I reckon it is Mencius who thought that "the true sage seeks not repose. "
? It is not a claustral motto. I began figurin' out that a COMPLETE severance of communication between the calm and sentient men is not to be desired.
I have before now pointed out that England was CUT off from the current of European thought during and BY the Napoleonic Wars, and that she never got ketched up again, not during all the damned nasty and 19th century. Always laggin' behind. Perhaps she allus WAS laggin' behind. I have pointed out the difference of up-to-dateness between Voltaire and Mr. Samuel Johnson.
At any rate it is NO GOOD.
The United States has been MISinformed. The United States has been led down the garden path, and may be down under the daisies. All thru shuttin' out news.
There is no end to the amount of shuttin' out news that the sons of Blood who started this war, and wanted this war, and monkeyed round to git a war started and monkeyed round to keep the war goin', and spreadin'. There is NO end to the shuttin' out and perversions of news that these blighters ain't up to, and that they haven't, and aren't still trying to com pass. Whatever happens it is NOT going to do the United States any good to be as cut off from all news, and all NEWS of CONTEMPORARY thought like the damn fools and utterly decadent Britons have got themselves cut off from.
As you can HEAR from the British Blurb Corporation any Monday and Tuesday evening, and any Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening that you choose to listen in to their phenomenal hogwash.
That's where they've got to. And for their bein' there neither I nor any man I shake hands with, is to blame in any way whatsoever. Every
? English friend I got in the world, has done his damnest to keep England from makin' such a thunderin' and abysmal ass of herself.
As for my American friends, Senator Borah is dead, not that I knew him much save by letter; but I can still feel his hand on my shoulder as just before he was getting into an elevator in the Senate building, and I can still hear him sayin':
"Well, I'm sure I don't know what a man like you would find to DO here. "
That was a few days sooner, mebbe the first time I met him. Neither he, nor William J. Bryan lived to hear Senator Wallace tellin' the world there would be no peace till the nations of the world knocked under and bowed down to the GOLD standard. Bowed down like drunken and abject fools and said, let gold rule humanity, let all human exchange of goods be bottle necked and ask permission from a few bloodthirsty kikes who OWN gold. Bow down and say monopoly is God over all men; and this from a man, said to be, or to HAVE BEEN, interested in farmers, and farmer's welfare. This after all the lies from the London gold ring, this after 20 years of evasion, this in fact after 20 years' attempt to conceal from the English people that they were being asked to go out and DIE for gold, for the monopoly of the owners and brokers; owners of gold mines, brokers, and owners of gold.
Back in December I had never expected such a confession from anyone as high in office.
Yaaas, I knew that was what the war was about: gold, usury and monopoly. I had said as much when I was last in America. I had then said: IF a war is pushed onto us. So now we have got pushed out of Guam, and Wake, and I suppose out of the Philippines, and a 30 years war is in process ? Is it ? Is a 30 years war what the American citizen thinks will do most good to the United States of America ?
? Or has someone been MiSinformed ? and IF so, who misinformed him ? Accordin' to the reports of the American press now available to the aver age European, someone in charge of American destiny miscalculated somethin' or other.
An "inquiry" is in progress, at least as they print here. It bein' my private belief that I could have avoided a war with Japan, if anybody had had the unlikely idea of sending me out there, with any sort of official powers.
The Japanese have a past. Of course when I talk to 'em now, they are apt to remind me that they have ALSO a presertt.
They have not mentioned the future in our conversations.
The last American journalist I saw, and that was the night before Arbour Day, told me the Japs would never etc. , etc.
A nation evolves by process of history. Japan to me consists in part of what I learned from a sort of half trunk full of the late Ernest Fenollosa's papers. Anybody who has read the plays entitled Kumasaka and Kagekiyo, would have AVOIDED the sort of bilge printed in Time and the American press, and the sort of fetid imbecility I heard a few nights ago from the British Broadcasting Company.
There are certain depths of ignorance that can be fatal to a man or a nation. When these are conjoined with malice and baseness of spirit, it seems almost useless to mention them.
A BBC commentator somewhere about January 8 was telling his presumably music hall audience that the Japs were jackals, and that they had just recently, I think he said, within living men's lifetime, emerged from barbarism. I don't know what patriotic end you think, or he thinks, or the British authorities think (if that is the verb), is served by such fetid ignorance.
