Who in deed are they to take note of the foreign tongues in their Babel, of the foreign sounds
squirming
OUT from their Babel?
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Cummings is a very great writer, I tell you he follows H.
James, and Thoreau, and Whitman.
I tell you he is the most intelligent man in America.
If that is an earful, TAKE it. I don't know what is to become of our educated intelligentsia, or whatever. An American, fullblooded American, writes a book in every way as BIG as the Apes of God or Ulysses. It gets some attention, it does not get nearly enough. You make
? a contribution to the world literature of tomorrow, and you pay very little attention to what happens right thaar under your noses.
I told you once before that this book [ Cummings' inspection of Russia makes a trilogy of big books, along with those of Joyce and of Wyndham Lewis, with Ulysses and Lewis's APES, Apes of God by ole Wyndham Lewis, also like Mr. Cummings a painter. That fact has its bearin'.
Both of 'em used to USING their eyes. Use of the eye assists human beings in making direct observations. I am not up to comparin' their painting, I know very little of Mr. Cumming's painting, save I saw one bit that had UGH! I am talkin' now of his writing. And in comparin' EIMI, or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to pronounce it, with the other two volumes, I say, or mebbe repeat that Joyce was writin' in retrospect. Ulysses dishes up the capitalist situation, the HELL made in great cities by the usury system. That is a limit. Not a very new point of view about anything.
Well I dunno as Ole Wyndham's Apes had a very new point of view either. Rowlandson, Fielding, Hogarth, all might have seen that boil on old England's neck from similar standpoint. Irish, English, and America, Joyce had no philosophy. Gasps from his chapel parishioners, Joyce had some ruck end of theology and a VERY conventional outlook. Lewis had philosophic views.
I nacherly never agreed with either of' 'em about much of anything. I agree with my compatriot or ex-compatriot, Mr. Cummings, a very great deal. But not wholly. I back up damn near anything Mr. Cummings has said or will say. I have to think back after having reread him, I have to think back and wonder, now just what was it that I wanted to ask him, where was it I wanted him to go on a bit further.
? Lewis' limit in that particular hefty volume, inhered in his subject, he was doing the carbuncle on Johnnie Bull's neck. Cummings, followin' ole Hen. James, was doing all Russia, and doing it in the Jamesian sense, that he was constantly comparing that nation, or state of existence with the American state of existence, with a peripheric view of countries adjacent.
Oh, yes, e. estlin was a carryin' on from his forebears, both James and Thoreau, and I repeat it, [from] Whitman. That just unfinish, on certain pages, that weak spot, or what seems a weak spot to the European. Mebbe three or four paragraphs that I as professor would probably cross out of his manuscript, or would have crossed out, and said, here bo', you rewrite this, 432 or 431 pages. I should have been much more severe on Flaubert. How is the book greater than Joyce's volume, or than Lewis's Apes? If we must use this terminology or why do I like it better, if I do like it better. Or say why does it come easier to me, I am hoistin' up over questions of technique, Cummings' neologism, his punctuation. Well I am American. I perceive his technique, which Jefferson, Tom Jefferson, would have justified; which is justified by the measure Jefferson applied to neologism. Namely, new words justified when NECESSARY to express a new meaning. A great deal of Joyce was NOT new, and a great deal was needless, was in the do main of experiment, colors being mixed on a palette. Lewis needed his emphasis, often as EMPHASIS, not merely as meaning save insofar as emphasis is part of meaning, which is not always.
Cummings I believe needed EVERY single split word to say what he was saying. In no other way could he have registered Russia, 1931, and it was a very great registration. Also you might now take it as psychic and warnin'. Ulysses was not a warning. It was a certificate of demise. The Apes of God, was, and HOW a warning, unheeded. There is still time for the U. S. A. to read Mr. Cummings before worse things happen, I mean happen TO YOU.
? Now in part Mr. Cummings teaches a doctrine which is very ably condensed (dichten, condensare; to write poetry is to CONDENSE), Mr. Cummings teaches a truth which a contemporary German author has stated quite clearly, as follows:
What we are used to call public opinion is based only in very small part on per sonal experience or indeed on the experience of particular persons or indeed on the knowledge of individual voters, but for the most part on a collective representation (collective picture) which brings about in a strangely obstinate and insistent way a so called process of clarification of the problems.
Now the USE of a great writer to his RACE is due precisely to his having PERSONAL direct perception, and puttin' in down on paper. Don't matter what he thinks [he] is doin', his USE to race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
Mebbe by an' by afterwards that word photo, that diagram, that TRUE diagram can serve to enlighten his people. Don't forget they are HIS people as they will never be the people of any member of Congress.
And Mr. Cummings went, unbelievably, he might now say, went down into hell, alias Soviet Russia. And you are now allied to Soviet Russia.
A thing estlin cummings certainly never thought of when he was writin' his ami or eimi which, as byproduct, the American people, you American folks MIGHT now use for your OWN gettin' enlightened. I'm tellin' you. Apart from the joy of readin' a great American book, IF you read it slowly, it might be of practical use.
I once had a kike friend who had a theory about poetry, namely, that no one ever read ALL the words on a page. It didn't, that theory didn't lead him to making his poetry quite satisfactory, but as theory it may also serve to enlighten you.
? Now Mr. Cummings writes PROSE, whereof every word tells its story. And I myself made an error first time I tried to read him. Tried to read him too fast, got impatient. No use approachin' him that way. Got to read slow. More on one page than on two pages of most other authors, so you get as much in three minutes readin' him slow, as you do to readin' Josh Passos faster, or readin' Wilder at ten pages a minute. You CAN skip in some authors, you cannot in Cummings skip one word on page ten without maybe losin' the bearin' of what he is saying elsewhere. Go at him slowly.
Second point is his parenthesis, are his parentheses. Well old Henry James worried his European readers to death by his parentheses. They are an American habit, they mean something to us and for us as Americans. They mean something more than the one track mind. But they do NOT imply deviation or lack of direction. They are a desperate attempt, no not an attempt, a DEVICE, to avoid leaving out something NEEDED, some part of the statement needed to set down, to register the direction, and meaning.
Well, Cummings said a whole mouthful; he said a bookful. Was out above the glooms of Ulysses, and the factor of Lewis top hole in London. There is in Cummings what the Chinese say with an ideogram. Ideogram that I have translated as candid. I don't much hold with Mr. Legge's translation of that sign, though it means what he says in the context wherefrom he was translatin' it. He translated it: devoid of principles, passage in Confucius about lawyer making speeches in court with NO reference to rights, fairness of justice, just spoutin' their rhetoric in the hope of a decision. The ideogram is worth more than is to be said in that context. It is made up of two signs, + [and] negative; sign for heart, sign for AZURE: meanin' a man who has no open sky in his heart. [In the positive] meanin' azure hearted, or candid. Here comes in Thoreau, here comes in Silver Lake in Mr. Cummings' composition. BUT herewith stays also Mr. Cummings' text, like that German statement about direct sight or perception. [FCC transcript: That sign
? heart and azure man with his sky in heart is a sign for Amencans. I hope you won't lose it. As to the direct vision, that is the painter's genius, it is the genius of Cummings. Few men could have gone into Russia and not be beaten by ideology.
Now what do you know of Russia? If you are studious, you know what you read in-- --and the-- --for example, and-- --you have learned from, etc. , but since then what record? There is one record available in both American and English readers today, namely, that made by E. E. Cummings. It may be too late for you really to use it, but you want to live also to morrow, perhaps not. At any rate, if you want to live, even today, you better read it. You better learn what Roosevelt and Atlee and Cripps are importing into America, into England, and what has already been dumped into America, with the horse of a-- --shock troops, bubolic plague in the-- --. Whether America, whether the American heritage was an invasion, what invasions in person in the-- -- Bolshevised immigrants. What racial invasion, what invasions of American ideology? Not only from Russia, there are Dr. Freud's imported stinks, not a Slavic invasion, or not a Slavic invasion only
-- --. And the azure hearts of America threaten, and how, oh, yes, threaten the New England heritage (present).
I emphasized this book among other things because you have so few books available, and what you have are in part unhandy. You won't read John Adams' ten volumes, they aren't handy. You have not read Brooks Adams, you could read him. ]
Some of you have a vague suspicion as to what controls your press and your radio. Few have any concept of what runs your university endow ments. Most of 'em generous, most of 'em honest in intention, partly from vanity, from sense of magnificence, from desire to hand some of it back. The magnanimity is in most cases unquestioned, but the OVERHEAD and the effects of overhead were not thought of.
? Even the Academy of Social and Political Science circulatin' Jew propaganda: probably in utter unconsciousness of what they are up to. The ACCEPTANCE, supine, groveling, half witted, in sense of half conscious, or wholly unconscious, of the SUPPRESSIONS. The idea that the boss is dumb, that a radio company is CONTROLLED by a filthy sub-Zukor. A whole generation, or two gents accepting that sort of suppression, while listening to blah about democracy, freedom, baloney.
You don't YET know what Hitler has written, let alone what Mussolini has written. You WON'T read the works of the men who MADE the American nation. You don't read Hollis' Two Nations. Well damn you, read Cummings if you won't read Brooks Adams, or better read both of 'em and try to find out what has been done to you. What is being done to you, conducive to material, spiritual, and intellectual RUIN.
#41 (May 24, 1942) U. K. (B47) BRAIN TRUST
On a bright Sunday morning, recently, after listening to the London Brain Trust, I turned the button to Rome and was regaled by the statement "Abbiamo trasmesso un programma di musica varia," meaning we have transmitted a program of mixed music. Than which no comment conscious or unconscious could have been more apt.
Yes, I now listen to your Brain Trust's polyphonic obligatin' abd[? ] you have there your British best: and it does you good, I mean it, to some extent, redeems England's prestige and makes up for other B. B. C. trans missions as, for example, the crass imbecilities emitted about Japan by some [uninformed] unformed Pittecanthropus.
The Brain Trust indeed now skirts gingerly on the edge of several of almost my questions: BUT does not face them and CONtinues, possibly involuntary falsifications of diverse issues.
? I have spoken before of Mr. Bridson's very able skit or whatever you call it, radio dialog dramedy or whatever on free speech.
Well the point for all Europe is that Free Speech is merely a concom mitant of crime, injustice, infamy, or worse, if it be used as a mere diversion, a mere camouflage and mere flapping of a cloth to GET THE auditors MIND off the FACTS; [it] is NOT a passport to the world's universal esteem.
It is a fine old, that is, it is IN ITSELF a fine thing UNDER some circum stances. It is fine to protest against wrong and injustice. BUT NOT if that protest is used merely or mainly to cover some greater evil, some greater injustice.
Now England has a guilty conscience. You may as well face THAT issue. Mr. Bridson wisely admitted a number of England's past crimes. He did NOT quite face England's present crimes and evasions.
The attempts against the American colonies, the press campaign against Lincoln, the list of England's past crimes is a long one. BUT Britain, France, Spain still fail to MENTION what was possibly the MAIN cause of the American Revolution, namely, the suppression of Pennsylvania colony paper money (and to almost a Gesellite system), in 1750.
Suppressed in 1750. Usury you keep off of; the interest problem, problem of WHEN is it just to receive annual payment on invested capital is NOT yet in the brain trust's repertoire. I think . it was a certain Ingram who pussyfooted all round it.
I am beginning to have a certain respect for the Brain Trust. At least England is still the INTELLECTUAL capital of the anti-Axis forces, even if England's power and Jewry have shifted their center. The U. S. is still being a colony mentally.
? BUT England's CRIME on the intellectual plane is OPEN and flagrant. You have not admitted and do not admit, and among people presumably as EDUCATED as some of the brain trust members (despite the funny grammar used in their conversations at sudden moment) among such representatives of England, top drawer intellects, it is flagrant and shameful--such non admission is.
Now the Brain Trust ought to know that Europe has committed in the past several feats of PEDAGOGY and is STILL [teaching England. Despite all your guns, cannons and bombardment of] French civilians, England is STILL learning from Europe willy-nilly, and mostly nilly. BUT practically ALL the new measures [of which] you boast are TAKEN from Fascism. You have cursed, sworn, lied, etc. about fascism and now in moments of trial you BOAST, and the few things you say with a clear voice and conviction are all on this line. You take over one Fascist measure after another and then pretend that your quarrel with Europe is only with regimes, not with the total population of Europe. You are intellectually dishonest in your refusal to recognize the great gifts which Rome for centuries and which Germany since the days of Holbein has given to England and you turn on the bloody Russian savagery to smash the whole of European civilization and you get out the pig-ended Maisky to boast of how much is to be included in the smashing.
Your very name Trust meaning in current terms Monopoly is an unconscious assertion of imbecility and pretentious. You probably think you have the monopoly and you most certainly haven't. You are so purse-proud and, what is worse, head-proud that you see no intellect outside the circle of your own interests. And you will pay for it. You will pay for your high horsey presumption as there is justice or as in the physical world there is a law of reaction in relation to action. You have overweaned.
? Free speech, as I have said, is NO universal passport. Not if it follows free lying, and skillfully directed lying and mean innuendo. Your anti- German propaganda is mostly mean innuendo. Italy has had so much of that from you that this rather strengthens the Axis bonds. Too many nations have had the same treatment from England not to recognize the symptoms. Laval is getting it now and that might convert several former sufferers who otherwise would not have felt any sympathy for him.
As to the meanness of some of the Jewish voices from London, speaking in foreign tongues, I don't 'spose the Brain Trust notices THAT.
Who in deed are they to take note of the foreign tongues in their Babel, of the foreign sounds squirming OUT from their Babel? Gnossi seauton, slight con fusion, perhaps between goosing and gnossing. Yaas, I know, I occasionally put over a mean one. In the war of nerves I am right out on the point, I am takin' it.
You, maybe, can bust me. Keep on a tryin'. Perfect peace, down in Canterbuggy cathedral? BUT YOU are learning from Italy. I don't think you have yet started on Germany, I mean learning from Germany. And as to Japan, that I suppose will be relegated to the School of Oriental Languages in East London, or wherever Ole Sir Dennison put it. "1 inquired of the ostrich. Why did you swallow that wrist watch," etc. ? Alleged portrait of England. A great man for foolin' was Dennison.
Your Brain Trust runs up all 'round the world, even learns geographic facts about Texas, get water from mountain springs, and the rest of it. Some of 'em must know that there is a place called the ORIENT. Now apparently takin' care of itself. That's not my subject, not for the moment. Now needed is to get you English to understand that there IS, yes IS, a place called Europe, a continent, and that you OWE something to European civilization, vastly more than you owe to the Warburgs and other holders of Anglo-Israels' I. O. U. 's. And that debt you have NO present intention to recognize. In fact, you have called in the bloody
? baboons from the Urals to beat up, and if possible to kill off your creditor.
AND the creditor is OBJECTING and has a bloody good RIGHT to object; and no amount of freely spoken objections on your part, freely opened Into, and most skillfully and on 20 wavelengths thunderously emitted in all the known languages of five continents, are going to break down the BASIC case against England. May break up England, she may break up herself. But there remains the basic injustice, and the whole series of lies used to cover it, used to distract world attention from the basic JUST claims of your opponents.
I won't even say enemies. I have seen very little real enmity. I have seen determination toward justice.
The illusion of British gentleness was strong. The prestige of Glad stone's humanitarianism was so great that many Europeans still rub their eyes and say: can this EVIL be England? And that amazement you have tried to exploit, with your persisting lies about the feelings of Europe.
No one attacked your free speech. You set up a Jew government ir Germany and the Germans HAD to get rid of it, or die. You behaved with crass injustice to Italy and the Italians woke up and reacted, until I hear from my best tempered friend on a tennis court--might have been while your ex-emperor was playin' golf on the other side of the bushes, but I reckon it was a month or so later--gli inglesi sono porci. Pigs: the English are porci PIGS, or the dog in the manger.
I take it the Duce has seen some rough stuff in his time, but I think ONE thing in his later life has surprised him, and that was the sheer selfishness and meanness of England.
I am not speakin' officially, I haven't had anything to go by save my own intuition, and whatever evidence is open to anyone. NOT one syllable has come out of England during the past two years or three
? years, to show that England has one iota of consciousness that human beings can be other than English, that there are human beings in Europe, endowed by nature with rights equal to those of sentient human beings. What has the TRUST or monopoly of your brains got to answer to that indictment? For God's sake, LOOK at the parallels.
As to Anglo Jewry, that is YOUR problem. But as to parallels, as to PERSISTENCE in the same kinds of criminal action, AFTER, for decades, almost centuries, AFTER your Wilkeses and Burkes and Bradlaws have free- speaking PROTESTED against this or that infamy, what is your Brain Trust's answer?
One man, or hero, protests, England does evil. She loosens the red savages against her own kinsmen. She loosens Russia on Finland and Rumania. And if she proposes now, as she did in the 18th century, to crush a high civilization by an incursion of savages. The leopard stays spotty. England helped to protract the Civil War in America till the South was crushed and the U. S. NEVER recovered: except on the plane of material products.
The U. S. NEVER got back to the level of economic justice she had, kept on fighting for UP till the Civil War. The documents were mislaid or hidden. It is only recently we have begun to get at the facts, facts of the great betrayal, the sell out to London Jewry. -
And if you think you are paying [for] your sin, LOOK to it, for the contrapasso, the kharma, is now in function. As the U. S. was sold to your Jews, you are now in the process of being auctioned, heirs of the same busi ness houses, or of the same USURY system. Offices now in New York.
Will the Brain Trust look into this history? Will they observe that Americans will some day come to see what England has now tried on Italy and on Germany? And to UNDERSTAND it by precedents in
? England's treatment of them, treatment of the American colonies, and of the U. S. divided by the war of secession, and by the DEBT period that followed that brotherly slaughter?
Possibly the Brain Trust does not mean to exist ONLY in the dimension of the evasions? Mr. Bridson, being younger, possibly errs merely from lack of full information. Your out-in-front man offered you tears and blood. That's O. K. if you like it. But why expect Europe, and two thirds of Asia to think you have a brain monopoly if that is all you can offer it or in deed offer yourselves?
Free speech is NOT full compensation for government by hidden and IRRESPONSIBLE forces, interested mainly or solely in squeeze, in tip and run, WITH the profits. I know that isn't the Brain Trust's main aim. They are interested in conversation. And gettin' the cream off the surface in one way or another. But what about JUSTICE? What about usury, interest, speculation in the breed of the people, monopoly not only of grey matter, as announced in a half serious headline?
Seems like the ONLY free speech on CERTAIN topics has been left to ME on this Radio, thanks to a civil tradition, thanks to an age old tradition; two parts, Cicero against Verres and the Renaissance. Mebbe the Brain Trust is forgettin' its Latin? Mebbe it never had enough Latin? In Burke's time M. P. s used to quote Latin. Some of the Brain Trust's members speak almost Yiddish. And when not, the substance, Judaic substance is thinly veiled. Oh, very clever your B. B. C. stage acts, with the local accents, I git that. My typewriter, and Jim's typewriter, and few Irish and American typewriters, against VAST resources, I see that. But what about Justice: and money interest?
#42 (May 28, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B50) AS A BEGINNING
? If there is anyone capable of serious thought anywhere in range of this broadcast, let him at least try to think what I mean by the following statements.
Let him start trying to STUDY the two revolutions, the Fascist and Nazi revolutions. God knows if Hitler is telling his people that THEY should study the Italian fascist revolution.
YOU need a thousand more times to study it, and to study the resurrection of Hitler's REICH. How can anyone worth the name of a man in England or in America face these two great movements in the half baked, or not even HALF baked ignorance into which his newspapers have led him or dumped him?
Something has OCCURRED in old Europe. Even the cloistered apes of Oxford or the inventors of stink gas in Harvard ought by now to have heard that, at least that, something has happened IN EUROPE, and you do not know what has happened.
You do not know what has HAPPENED. And the first thing to DO about it is to pull OUT of this war--a war that you never ought to have flopped into. Every hour that you go on with it is an hour lost to you and your children.
And every sane act you commit is committed in HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler. Every reform, every lurch toward the just price, toward the control of the market is an act of HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler.
THEY are your leaders, however much you are conducted by Roosevelt or sold up by Churchill. You FOLLOW Hitler and Mussolini in EVERY CONSTRUCTIVE act of your governments. Damn you, you follow Moseley, go back and read over his programs.
As to the pity, etc. of it. You insisted on having your war. You would not budge out of your constipations, you would not listen to your own
? savants, by which, by the word savants, I mean the Englishmen who KNEW something, AT least, about something, and who told you HOW to keep out of the slaughter, how to cure your own plague spots and diseases.
And you WOULD not, by Jheezus, you would not. England interests me far more in this moment, in this year, than America. England was further on mentally than America; is possibly still the intellectual capital of America. The sword and the purse leave the island: but the brain is still faintly pulsating in England. There are more men STILL in the island than in the United States who are capable of serious correlations.
I could name ten Englishmen for every American who knows ANYthing about anything valid in economics or history. There were at least little movements, nuclei, meetings.
America had not awakened to her dangers. She was pitifully UNAWARE of her history. Especially that of her past 80 years. Christ knows what sort of chaos the United States is in for. Christ knows how long it will take her to untangle.
And God knows when England will know her own saviours or would-be saviours. As distinct from her wreckers and provocative agents. Your jails have never before been so full of political prisoners guilty of nothing save their own beliefs and convictions. But not since the days of Noll Cromwell, and never have English voices in exile so agonized over your errors. Voices indubitable for their sincerity and conviction of the truth of their messages. They are not all of 'em Irish. There has been nothing like it since Englishmen drank to the King over the water, silently passing the toast and the wine glass over their water glass. And with less valid reason.
? Are you incapable of noticing anything? Do the phenomena of today's history absolutely and utterly fail to make any dent in your blubber or whatever else you have pulled over your eyes, heads, and ears?
Have you no eyes, no history and no memories? No eyes, no knowledge or memory of your own history, and no memory of events that have happened before you?
Do you know only watery pools where were the cellars of London, only the material ruins, having NO knowledge of causes, of deeper causes, of why these things have come on you, of what you have done, or in most cases omitted, and which have caused these things to come on you, and have you no wish to know WHY this has happened?
You have at least a chance of organization in England. You have at least there three native races: Welsh, Scotch, and English, not wholly rotted and on which you could build up something. You have at least a common tongue, which you could unite on.
BUT you will NEVER qualify for a part in the New Era till you, that is, some group of your leaders, are capable of comparing the TWO revolutions, fascist and nazi, and of understanding why ONE thing IS here in Italy, and a KINDRED, but not identical thing IS in North Europe.
And why you are caroming, and crabbing backwards, crabbing sideways. Time, geography, history, that is, the age old conditioning of a place and a people, affected by TRUTH, by natural forces, made by Human WILL directed on forces. These forces are not your forces: this will is not your will, but they and it are in part analogous. You can, or could learn something from events: from phenomena. But you will not learn from mere smoke screens, from mere lies, from B. B. C. and Fleet Street propaganda, that is sgonfiato, deflated weekly almost daily by known events and phenomena.
? TWO great races have learned something you haven't, learned some'at YOU haven't yet learned. Responsibility of the person is part of it. And part of it is a return to age old common sense concerning the homestead, concerning the HOMESTEAD.
There is no decree of heaven that the man who plants things in the earth shall forever be diddled by usurers. There is no decree that a system which puts men on the land to increase the land's product shall give way forever to a system of usury, of exploitation.
For as long as I can remember America has vaunted dollar diplomacy, she made no bones about dollar diplomacy, commercial penetration as a means of extending her domination 40 years ago. It was thought a rather bright dodge. (We Americans don't always invent our own novelties: we quite often think something is new when it isn't. ) But at any rate we made no bones about dollar diplomacy at the turn of the century.
Is there any divine prohibition to all other races stating that they should not recognize such penetration as an extension of American domination? There is not.
You do NOT believe in Communism. You do at bottom believe in the homestead, at least in theory, each of you thinking up, or most of you thinking up some reason why it shouldn't apply to you in particular.
Nevertheless the world's best in both hemispheres has come out of the homestead, by whatever name it is called in whatever language. That is the basis.
There was in the United States the romance, as it was called, of the merchant princes. No one has very carefully recorded the less humane details. The so-called social question was not given modern publicity. And possibly no one now listening is aware that anyone ever said or thought that to run one's commerce, to run a firm's or an individual's or a family's trade, shipping, etc. on borrowed money was "unmercantile. "
? Such a statement any time in the last 80 years would have seemed at least eccentric to 99. 9 percent of all possible auditors if not down right loony.
I think there was not in mens' minds much distinction between mercantile, the word mercantile, and the word mercantilist as applied to a so-called mercantilist system. Which means that the difference between TRADE and Usury was not very clear in the Western mind after the year, say, 1527. Do be patient. I know the air isn't the habitual place for bedrock, but I might get one auditor in ten thousand who was willin' to follow an argument. Even a hard one.
I assure you the problem of JUSTICE is not superficial. The problem of interest on money is NOT superficial. Europe once spent a thousand years gettin' an answer. I mean the RIGHT answer.
Namely DIVIDE your crops AFTER the harvest. Usura and partaggio. Two things, different, need to be divided inside your heads. A corrosive charge that finally undermines ANY nation. Undermines it at home, drives it into unsound foreign relations, drives it OUT of land gone to waste (needlessly left to rot, to erode), drives it into indecent incursions into less civilized countries, or smaller or weaker countries. Always eating away at the life inside the nation.
If that is an earful, TAKE it. I don't know what is to become of our educated intelligentsia, or whatever. An American, fullblooded American, writes a book in every way as BIG as the Apes of God or Ulysses. It gets some attention, it does not get nearly enough. You make
? a contribution to the world literature of tomorrow, and you pay very little attention to what happens right thaar under your noses.
I told you once before that this book [ Cummings' inspection of Russia makes a trilogy of big books, along with those of Joyce and of Wyndham Lewis, with Ulysses and Lewis's APES, Apes of God by ole Wyndham Lewis, also like Mr. Cummings a painter. That fact has its bearin'.
Both of 'em used to USING their eyes. Use of the eye assists human beings in making direct observations. I am not up to comparin' their painting, I know very little of Mr. Cumming's painting, save I saw one bit that had UGH! I am talkin' now of his writing. And in comparin' EIMI, or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to pronounce it, with the other two volumes, I say, or mebbe repeat that Joyce was writin' in retrospect. Ulysses dishes up the capitalist situation, the HELL made in great cities by the usury system. That is a limit. Not a very new point of view about anything.
Well I dunno as Ole Wyndham's Apes had a very new point of view either. Rowlandson, Fielding, Hogarth, all might have seen that boil on old England's neck from similar standpoint. Irish, English, and America, Joyce had no philosophy. Gasps from his chapel parishioners, Joyce had some ruck end of theology and a VERY conventional outlook. Lewis had philosophic views.
I nacherly never agreed with either of' 'em about much of anything. I agree with my compatriot or ex-compatriot, Mr. Cummings, a very great deal. But not wholly. I back up damn near anything Mr. Cummings has said or will say. I have to think back after having reread him, I have to think back and wonder, now just what was it that I wanted to ask him, where was it I wanted him to go on a bit further.
? Lewis' limit in that particular hefty volume, inhered in his subject, he was doing the carbuncle on Johnnie Bull's neck. Cummings, followin' ole Hen. James, was doing all Russia, and doing it in the Jamesian sense, that he was constantly comparing that nation, or state of existence with the American state of existence, with a peripheric view of countries adjacent.
Oh, yes, e. estlin was a carryin' on from his forebears, both James and Thoreau, and I repeat it, [from] Whitman. That just unfinish, on certain pages, that weak spot, or what seems a weak spot to the European. Mebbe three or four paragraphs that I as professor would probably cross out of his manuscript, or would have crossed out, and said, here bo', you rewrite this, 432 or 431 pages. I should have been much more severe on Flaubert. How is the book greater than Joyce's volume, or than Lewis's Apes? If we must use this terminology or why do I like it better, if I do like it better. Or say why does it come easier to me, I am hoistin' up over questions of technique, Cummings' neologism, his punctuation. Well I am American. I perceive his technique, which Jefferson, Tom Jefferson, would have justified; which is justified by the measure Jefferson applied to neologism. Namely, new words justified when NECESSARY to express a new meaning. A great deal of Joyce was NOT new, and a great deal was needless, was in the do main of experiment, colors being mixed on a palette. Lewis needed his emphasis, often as EMPHASIS, not merely as meaning save insofar as emphasis is part of meaning, which is not always.
Cummings I believe needed EVERY single split word to say what he was saying. In no other way could he have registered Russia, 1931, and it was a very great registration. Also you might now take it as psychic and warnin'. Ulysses was not a warning. It was a certificate of demise. The Apes of God, was, and HOW a warning, unheeded. There is still time for the U. S. A. to read Mr. Cummings before worse things happen, I mean happen TO YOU.
? Now in part Mr. Cummings teaches a doctrine which is very ably condensed (dichten, condensare; to write poetry is to CONDENSE), Mr. Cummings teaches a truth which a contemporary German author has stated quite clearly, as follows:
What we are used to call public opinion is based only in very small part on per sonal experience or indeed on the experience of particular persons or indeed on the knowledge of individual voters, but for the most part on a collective representation (collective picture) which brings about in a strangely obstinate and insistent way a so called process of clarification of the problems.
Now the USE of a great writer to his RACE is due precisely to his having PERSONAL direct perception, and puttin' in down on paper. Don't matter what he thinks [he] is doin', his USE to race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
Mebbe by an' by afterwards that word photo, that diagram, that TRUE diagram can serve to enlighten his people. Don't forget they are HIS people as they will never be the people of any member of Congress.
And Mr. Cummings went, unbelievably, he might now say, went down into hell, alias Soviet Russia. And you are now allied to Soviet Russia.
A thing estlin cummings certainly never thought of when he was writin' his ami or eimi which, as byproduct, the American people, you American folks MIGHT now use for your OWN gettin' enlightened. I'm tellin' you. Apart from the joy of readin' a great American book, IF you read it slowly, it might be of practical use.
I once had a kike friend who had a theory about poetry, namely, that no one ever read ALL the words on a page. It didn't, that theory didn't lead him to making his poetry quite satisfactory, but as theory it may also serve to enlighten you.
? Now Mr. Cummings writes PROSE, whereof every word tells its story. And I myself made an error first time I tried to read him. Tried to read him too fast, got impatient. No use approachin' him that way. Got to read slow. More on one page than on two pages of most other authors, so you get as much in three minutes readin' him slow, as you do to readin' Josh Passos faster, or readin' Wilder at ten pages a minute. You CAN skip in some authors, you cannot in Cummings skip one word on page ten without maybe losin' the bearin' of what he is saying elsewhere. Go at him slowly.
Second point is his parenthesis, are his parentheses. Well old Henry James worried his European readers to death by his parentheses. They are an American habit, they mean something to us and for us as Americans. They mean something more than the one track mind. But they do NOT imply deviation or lack of direction. They are a desperate attempt, no not an attempt, a DEVICE, to avoid leaving out something NEEDED, some part of the statement needed to set down, to register the direction, and meaning.
Well, Cummings said a whole mouthful; he said a bookful. Was out above the glooms of Ulysses, and the factor of Lewis top hole in London. There is in Cummings what the Chinese say with an ideogram. Ideogram that I have translated as candid. I don't much hold with Mr. Legge's translation of that sign, though it means what he says in the context wherefrom he was translatin' it. He translated it: devoid of principles, passage in Confucius about lawyer making speeches in court with NO reference to rights, fairness of justice, just spoutin' their rhetoric in the hope of a decision. The ideogram is worth more than is to be said in that context. It is made up of two signs, + [and] negative; sign for heart, sign for AZURE: meanin' a man who has no open sky in his heart. [In the positive] meanin' azure hearted, or candid. Here comes in Thoreau, here comes in Silver Lake in Mr. Cummings' composition. BUT herewith stays also Mr. Cummings' text, like that German statement about direct sight or perception. [FCC transcript: That sign
? heart and azure man with his sky in heart is a sign for Amencans. I hope you won't lose it. As to the direct vision, that is the painter's genius, it is the genius of Cummings. Few men could have gone into Russia and not be beaten by ideology.
Now what do you know of Russia? If you are studious, you know what you read in-- --and the-- --for example, and-- --you have learned from, etc. , but since then what record? There is one record available in both American and English readers today, namely, that made by E. E. Cummings. It may be too late for you really to use it, but you want to live also to morrow, perhaps not. At any rate, if you want to live, even today, you better read it. You better learn what Roosevelt and Atlee and Cripps are importing into America, into England, and what has already been dumped into America, with the horse of a-- --shock troops, bubolic plague in the-- --. Whether America, whether the American heritage was an invasion, what invasions in person in the-- -- Bolshevised immigrants. What racial invasion, what invasions of American ideology? Not only from Russia, there are Dr. Freud's imported stinks, not a Slavic invasion, or not a Slavic invasion only
-- --. And the azure hearts of America threaten, and how, oh, yes, threaten the New England heritage (present).
I emphasized this book among other things because you have so few books available, and what you have are in part unhandy. You won't read John Adams' ten volumes, they aren't handy. You have not read Brooks Adams, you could read him. ]
Some of you have a vague suspicion as to what controls your press and your radio. Few have any concept of what runs your university endow ments. Most of 'em generous, most of 'em honest in intention, partly from vanity, from sense of magnificence, from desire to hand some of it back. The magnanimity is in most cases unquestioned, but the OVERHEAD and the effects of overhead were not thought of.
? Even the Academy of Social and Political Science circulatin' Jew propaganda: probably in utter unconsciousness of what they are up to. The ACCEPTANCE, supine, groveling, half witted, in sense of half conscious, or wholly unconscious, of the SUPPRESSIONS. The idea that the boss is dumb, that a radio company is CONTROLLED by a filthy sub-Zukor. A whole generation, or two gents accepting that sort of suppression, while listening to blah about democracy, freedom, baloney.
You don't YET know what Hitler has written, let alone what Mussolini has written. You WON'T read the works of the men who MADE the American nation. You don't read Hollis' Two Nations. Well damn you, read Cummings if you won't read Brooks Adams, or better read both of 'em and try to find out what has been done to you. What is being done to you, conducive to material, spiritual, and intellectual RUIN.
#41 (May 24, 1942) U. K. (B47) BRAIN TRUST
On a bright Sunday morning, recently, after listening to the London Brain Trust, I turned the button to Rome and was regaled by the statement "Abbiamo trasmesso un programma di musica varia," meaning we have transmitted a program of mixed music. Than which no comment conscious or unconscious could have been more apt.
Yes, I now listen to your Brain Trust's polyphonic obligatin' abd[? ] you have there your British best: and it does you good, I mean it, to some extent, redeems England's prestige and makes up for other B. B. C. trans missions as, for example, the crass imbecilities emitted about Japan by some [uninformed] unformed Pittecanthropus.
The Brain Trust indeed now skirts gingerly on the edge of several of almost my questions: BUT does not face them and CONtinues, possibly involuntary falsifications of diverse issues.
? I have spoken before of Mr. Bridson's very able skit or whatever you call it, radio dialog dramedy or whatever on free speech.
Well the point for all Europe is that Free Speech is merely a concom mitant of crime, injustice, infamy, or worse, if it be used as a mere diversion, a mere camouflage and mere flapping of a cloth to GET THE auditors MIND off the FACTS; [it] is NOT a passport to the world's universal esteem.
It is a fine old, that is, it is IN ITSELF a fine thing UNDER some circum stances. It is fine to protest against wrong and injustice. BUT NOT if that protest is used merely or mainly to cover some greater evil, some greater injustice.
Now England has a guilty conscience. You may as well face THAT issue. Mr. Bridson wisely admitted a number of England's past crimes. He did NOT quite face England's present crimes and evasions.
The attempts against the American colonies, the press campaign against Lincoln, the list of England's past crimes is a long one. BUT Britain, France, Spain still fail to MENTION what was possibly the MAIN cause of the American Revolution, namely, the suppression of Pennsylvania colony paper money (and to almost a Gesellite system), in 1750.
Suppressed in 1750. Usury you keep off of; the interest problem, problem of WHEN is it just to receive annual payment on invested capital is NOT yet in the brain trust's repertoire. I think . it was a certain Ingram who pussyfooted all round it.
I am beginning to have a certain respect for the Brain Trust. At least England is still the INTELLECTUAL capital of the anti-Axis forces, even if England's power and Jewry have shifted their center. The U. S. is still being a colony mentally.
? BUT England's CRIME on the intellectual plane is OPEN and flagrant. You have not admitted and do not admit, and among people presumably as EDUCATED as some of the brain trust members (despite the funny grammar used in their conversations at sudden moment) among such representatives of England, top drawer intellects, it is flagrant and shameful--such non admission is.
Now the Brain Trust ought to know that Europe has committed in the past several feats of PEDAGOGY and is STILL [teaching England. Despite all your guns, cannons and bombardment of] French civilians, England is STILL learning from Europe willy-nilly, and mostly nilly. BUT practically ALL the new measures [of which] you boast are TAKEN from Fascism. You have cursed, sworn, lied, etc. about fascism and now in moments of trial you BOAST, and the few things you say with a clear voice and conviction are all on this line. You take over one Fascist measure after another and then pretend that your quarrel with Europe is only with regimes, not with the total population of Europe. You are intellectually dishonest in your refusal to recognize the great gifts which Rome for centuries and which Germany since the days of Holbein has given to England and you turn on the bloody Russian savagery to smash the whole of European civilization and you get out the pig-ended Maisky to boast of how much is to be included in the smashing.
Your very name Trust meaning in current terms Monopoly is an unconscious assertion of imbecility and pretentious. You probably think you have the monopoly and you most certainly haven't. You are so purse-proud and, what is worse, head-proud that you see no intellect outside the circle of your own interests. And you will pay for it. You will pay for your high horsey presumption as there is justice or as in the physical world there is a law of reaction in relation to action. You have overweaned.
? Free speech, as I have said, is NO universal passport. Not if it follows free lying, and skillfully directed lying and mean innuendo. Your anti- German propaganda is mostly mean innuendo. Italy has had so much of that from you that this rather strengthens the Axis bonds. Too many nations have had the same treatment from England not to recognize the symptoms. Laval is getting it now and that might convert several former sufferers who otherwise would not have felt any sympathy for him.
As to the meanness of some of the Jewish voices from London, speaking in foreign tongues, I don't 'spose the Brain Trust notices THAT.
Who in deed are they to take note of the foreign tongues in their Babel, of the foreign sounds squirming OUT from their Babel? Gnossi seauton, slight con fusion, perhaps between goosing and gnossing. Yaas, I know, I occasionally put over a mean one. In the war of nerves I am right out on the point, I am takin' it.
You, maybe, can bust me. Keep on a tryin'. Perfect peace, down in Canterbuggy cathedral? BUT YOU are learning from Italy. I don't think you have yet started on Germany, I mean learning from Germany. And as to Japan, that I suppose will be relegated to the School of Oriental Languages in East London, or wherever Ole Sir Dennison put it. "1 inquired of the ostrich. Why did you swallow that wrist watch," etc. ? Alleged portrait of England. A great man for foolin' was Dennison.
Your Brain Trust runs up all 'round the world, even learns geographic facts about Texas, get water from mountain springs, and the rest of it. Some of 'em must know that there is a place called the ORIENT. Now apparently takin' care of itself. That's not my subject, not for the moment. Now needed is to get you English to understand that there IS, yes IS, a place called Europe, a continent, and that you OWE something to European civilization, vastly more than you owe to the Warburgs and other holders of Anglo-Israels' I. O. U. 's. And that debt you have NO present intention to recognize. In fact, you have called in the bloody
? baboons from the Urals to beat up, and if possible to kill off your creditor.
AND the creditor is OBJECTING and has a bloody good RIGHT to object; and no amount of freely spoken objections on your part, freely opened Into, and most skillfully and on 20 wavelengths thunderously emitted in all the known languages of five continents, are going to break down the BASIC case against England. May break up England, she may break up herself. But there remains the basic injustice, and the whole series of lies used to cover it, used to distract world attention from the basic JUST claims of your opponents.
I won't even say enemies. I have seen very little real enmity. I have seen determination toward justice.
The illusion of British gentleness was strong. The prestige of Glad stone's humanitarianism was so great that many Europeans still rub their eyes and say: can this EVIL be England? And that amazement you have tried to exploit, with your persisting lies about the feelings of Europe.
No one attacked your free speech. You set up a Jew government ir Germany and the Germans HAD to get rid of it, or die. You behaved with crass injustice to Italy and the Italians woke up and reacted, until I hear from my best tempered friend on a tennis court--might have been while your ex-emperor was playin' golf on the other side of the bushes, but I reckon it was a month or so later--gli inglesi sono porci. Pigs: the English are porci PIGS, or the dog in the manger.
I take it the Duce has seen some rough stuff in his time, but I think ONE thing in his later life has surprised him, and that was the sheer selfishness and meanness of England.
I am not speakin' officially, I haven't had anything to go by save my own intuition, and whatever evidence is open to anyone. NOT one syllable has come out of England during the past two years or three
? years, to show that England has one iota of consciousness that human beings can be other than English, that there are human beings in Europe, endowed by nature with rights equal to those of sentient human beings. What has the TRUST or monopoly of your brains got to answer to that indictment? For God's sake, LOOK at the parallels.
As to Anglo Jewry, that is YOUR problem. But as to parallels, as to PERSISTENCE in the same kinds of criminal action, AFTER, for decades, almost centuries, AFTER your Wilkeses and Burkes and Bradlaws have free- speaking PROTESTED against this or that infamy, what is your Brain Trust's answer?
One man, or hero, protests, England does evil. She loosens the red savages against her own kinsmen. She loosens Russia on Finland and Rumania. And if she proposes now, as she did in the 18th century, to crush a high civilization by an incursion of savages. The leopard stays spotty. England helped to protract the Civil War in America till the South was crushed and the U. S. NEVER recovered: except on the plane of material products.
The U. S. NEVER got back to the level of economic justice she had, kept on fighting for UP till the Civil War. The documents were mislaid or hidden. It is only recently we have begun to get at the facts, facts of the great betrayal, the sell out to London Jewry. -
And if you think you are paying [for] your sin, LOOK to it, for the contrapasso, the kharma, is now in function. As the U. S. was sold to your Jews, you are now in the process of being auctioned, heirs of the same busi ness houses, or of the same USURY system. Offices now in New York.
Will the Brain Trust look into this history? Will they observe that Americans will some day come to see what England has now tried on Italy and on Germany? And to UNDERSTAND it by precedents in
? England's treatment of them, treatment of the American colonies, and of the U. S. divided by the war of secession, and by the DEBT period that followed that brotherly slaughter?
Possibly the Brain Trust does not mean to exist ONLY in the dimension of the evasions? Mr. Bridson, being younger, possibly errs merely from lack of full information. Your out-in-front man offered you tears and blood. That's O. K. if you like it. But why expect Europe, and two thirds of Asia to think you have a brain monopoly if that is all you can offer it or in deed offer yourselves?
Free speech is NOT full compensation for government by hidden and IRRESPONSIBLE forces, interested mainly or solely in squeeze, in tip and run, WITH the profits. I know that isn't the Brain Trust's main aim. They are interested in conversation. And gettin' the cream off the surface in one way or another. But what about JUSTICE? What about usury, interest, speculation in the breed of the people, monopoly not only of grey matter, as announced in a half serious headline?
Seems like the ONLY free speech on CERTAIN topics has been left to ME on this Radio, thanks to a civil tradition, thanks to an age old tradition; two parts, Cicero against Verres and the Renaissance. Mebbe the Brain Trust is forgettin' its Latin? Mebbe it never had enough Latin? In Burke's time M. P. s used to quote Latin. Some of the Brain Trust's members speak almost Yiddish. And when not, the substance, Judaic substance is thinly veiled. Oh, very clever your B. B. C. stage acts, with the local accents, I git that. My typewriter, and Jim's typewriter, and few Irish and American typewriters, against VAST resources, I see that. But what about Justice: and money interest?
#42 (May 28, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B50) AS A BEGINNING
? If there is anyone capable of serious thought anywhere in range of this broadcast, let him at least try to think what I mean by the following statements.
Let him start trying to STUDY the two revolutions, the Fascist and Nazi revolutions. God knows if Hitler is telling his people that THEY should study the Italian fascist revolution.
YOU need a thousand more times to study it, and to study the resurrection of Hitler's REICH. How can anyone worth the name of a man in England or in America face these two great movements in the half baked, or not even HALF baked ignorance into which his newspapers have led him or dumped him?
Something has OCCURRED in old Europe. Even the cloistered apes of Oxford or the inventors of stink gas in Harvard ought by now to have heard that, at least that, something has happened IN EUROPE, and you do not know what has happened.
You do not know what has HAPPENED. And the first thing to DO about it is to pull OUT of this war--a war that you never ought to have flopped into. Every hour that you go on with it is an hour lost to you and your children.
And every sane act you commit is committed in HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler. Every reform, every lurch toward the just price, toward the control of the market is an act of HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler.
THEY are your leaders, however much you are conducted by Roosevelt or sold up by Churchill. You FOLLOW Hitler and Mussolini in EVERY CONSTRUCTIVE act of your governments. Damn you, you follow Moseley, go back and read over his programs.
As to the pity, etc. of it. You insisted on having your war. You would not budge out of your constipations, you would not listen to your own
? savants, by which, by the word savants, I mean the Englishmen who KNEW something, AT least, about something, and who told you HOW to keep out of the slaughter, how to cure your own plague spots and diseases.
And you WOULD not, by Jheezus, you would not. England interests me far more in this moment, in this year, than America. England was further on mentally than America; is possibly still the intellectual capital of America. The sword and the purse leave the island: but the brain is still faintly pulsating in England. There are more men STILL in the island than in the United States who are capable of serious correlations.
I could name ten Englishmen for every American who knows ANYthing about anything valid in economics or history. There were at least little movements, nuclei, meetings.
America had not awakened to her dangers. She was pitifully UNAWARE of her history. Especially that of her past 80 years. Christ knows what sort of chaos the United States is in for. Christ knows how long it will take her to untangle.
And God knows when England will know her own saviours or would-be saviours. As distinct from her wreckers and provocative agents. Your jails have never before been so full of political prisoners guilty of nothing save their own beliefs and convictions. But not since the days of Noll Cromwell, and never have English voices in exile so agonized over your errors. Voices indubitable for their sincerity and conviction of the truth of their messages. They are not all of 'em Irish. There has been nothing like it since Englishmen drank to the King over the water, silently passing the toast and the wine glass over their water glass. And with less valid reason.
? Are you incapable of noticing anything? Do the phenomena of today's history absolutely and utterly fail to make any dent in your blubber or whatever else you have pulled over your eyes, heads, and ears?
Have you no eyes, no history and no memories? No eyes, no knowledge or memory of your own history, and no memory of events that have happened before you?
Do you know only watery pools where were the cellars of London, only the material ruins, having NO knowledge of causes, of deeper causes, of why these things have come on you, of what you have done, or in most cases omitted, and which have caused these things to come on you, and have you no wish to know WHY this has happened?
You have at least a chance of organization in England. You have at least there three native races: Welsh, Scotch, and English, not wholly rotted and on which you could build up something. You have at least a common tongue, which you could unite on.
BUT you will NEVER qualify for a part in the New Era till you, that is, some group of your leaders, are capable of comparing the TWO revolutions, fascist and nazi, and of understanding why ONE thing IS here in Italy, and a KINDRED, but not identical thing IS in North Europe.
And why you are caroming, and crabbing backwards, crabbing sideways. Time, geography, history, that is, the age old conditioning of a place and a people, affected by TRUTH, by natural forces, made by Human WILL directed on forces. These forces are not your forces: this will is not your will, but they and it are in part analogous. You can, or could learn something from events: from phenomena. But you will not learn from mere smoke screens, from mere lies, from B. B. C. and Fleet Street propaganda, that is sgonfiato, deflated weekly almost daily by known events and phenomena.
? TWO great races have learned something you haven't, learned some'at YOU haven't yet learned. Responsibility of the person is part of it. And part of it is a return to age old common sense concerning the homestead, concerning the HOMESTEAD.
There is no decree of heaven that the man who plants things in the earth shall forever be diddled by usurers. There is no decree that a system which puts men on the land to increase the land's product shall give way forever to a system of usury, of exploitation.
For as long as I can remember America has vaunted dollar diplomacy, she made no bones about dollar diplomacy, commercial penetration as a means of extending her domination 40 years ago. It was thought a rather bright dodge. (We Americans don't always invent our own novelties: we quite often think something is new when it isn't. ) But at any rate we made no bones about dollar diplomacy at the turn of the century.
Is there any divine prohibition to all other races stating that they should not recognize such penetration as an extension of American domination? There is not.
You do NOT believe in Communism. You do at bottom believe in the homestead, at least in theory, each of you thinking up, or most of you thinking up some reason why it shouldn't apply to you in particular.
Nevertheless the world's best in both hemispheres has come out of the homestead, by whatever name it is called in whatever language. That is the basis.
There was in the United States the romance, as it was called, of the merchant princes. No one has very carefully recorded the less humane details. The so-called social question was not given modern publicity. And possibly no one now listening is aware that anyone ever said or thought that to run one's commerce, to run a firm's or an individual's or a family's trade, shipping, etc. on borrowed money was "unmercantile. "
? Such a statement any time in the last 80 years would have seemed at least eccentric to 99. 9 percent of all possible auditors if not down right loony.
I think there was not in mens' minds much distinction between mercantile, the word mercantile, and the word mercantilist as applied to a so-called mercantilist system. Which means that the difference between TRADE and Usury was not very clear in the Western mind after the year, say, 1527. Do be patient. I know the air isn't the habitual place for bedrock, but I might get one auditor in ten thousand who was willin' to follow an argument. Even a hard one.
I assure you the problem of JUSTICE is not superficial. The problem of interest on money is NOT superficial. Europe once spent a thousand years gettin' an answer. I mean the RIGHT answer.
Namely DIVIDE your crops AFTER the harvest. Usura and partaggio. Two things, different, need to be divided inside your heads. A corrosive charge that finally undermines ANY nation. Undermines it at home, drives it into unsound foreign relations, drives it OUT of land gone to waste (needlessly left to rot, to erode), drives it into indecent incursions into less civilized countries, or smaller or weaker countries. Always eating away at the life inside the nation.
