Question
is: Ain't you fallen down about FAR ENOUGH?
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
"
My generation was brought up ham ignorant of economics. History was taught with OMISSIONS of the most vital facts. Every page our generation read was over shadowed by usury. Not only was the press false, but every current idea had been warped by generations of antecedent perversion.
The ACID TEST of public men today is plain and simple. MISTRUST any man, no matter how high in office who tries to get you AWAY from the questions:
WHAT is money?
Who makes it?
How is it issued?
Why can't the WHOLE people buy what the WHOLE people produces?
Start on that at once, and throw out any man who won't give you a straight answer. You can not cure Wisconsin in Pekin. I mean, start where you are. Don't let anyone wriggle out of LOCAL honesty, by talking internationally. Investigate the Carnegie Peace Foundation. When you find out why they avoid the study of the economic causes of war, you'll be part way toward preventing another.
? Printed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1935, LONG before Hitler was so influential in world affairs.
You can lead a Rocking Horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.
And young America's problem is what was young England's problem. And the answers were KNOWN; the answers COULD have been broadcast, the answers could have been printed in daily papers, they could have been taught in the schools, they could have been used as the basis for action. I mean political action. And WHAT prevented it?
Waaal, go ask yourselves what prevented it ? Ask yourselves why these things were NOT widely printed ? Why the real thought of the American founders was hidden, stuffed into corners ? Why every man in England who foresaw disaster, and who saw HOW England could have avoided it IF . . . Why these men were NOT heeded. Why they were hugger-muggered out of the way, or reduced, shall we say often by FEAR, into silence.
Not all were afraid, some were prudent. Where are they ? Some of 'em got out in front. Now where are they ? Where are the back seaters, the men who knew, but saw no way to ACT on their knowledge ? The men who assembled tiny minorities ? Waaal, where are they ? And when will the people learn wisdom?
OZeus.
O Chan Ti, how long is the time lag?
#18 (March 22, 1942) U. K. (B20) BUT HOW?
? I unhooked my radio the other night and the word REVOLUTION came floatin' over the ambient air. Very English voice, usin' the word RE VO LU TION.
And I thought, yaaas, very nice but HOW' ? How CAN they revolute.
Conjure up to my mind the pale grey light in Kensington Gardens, and the gulls floatin' over the round pond, and the so very quiet demeanor of the nicely dressed females that used to float up the broadwalk, along about 1910. How CAN THEY revolute?
Yaas, I hear Bela Kun was over in England, he was a revolution, bloody murder and all the trimmings. But does Kensington revolute?
I am so old I can remember the end of the nineteenth century, that is the century before this one that is gettin' on to be nigh half gone. How impressed the American visitors were by the beef-eaters in the Tower, and the teacups at Windsor and Stratford-on-Avon, with the coats of arms glazed into the chimney, and the quiet lawn in the park, and a time when the Route du Roi wasn't so rotten. The Row, not of course that I knew the riders, save occasionally Mr. Cunninghame Graham, a fine figure on horse back, and ole Colonel Jackson, suggestin' I should dine at his club, he wantin' to see the expressions on the faces of his contemporaries when faced with the vorticist movement. Well, all that must be fairly well bygone.
The question is how do folks revolute ? The Rooshians do it with fire and sword, and very unpleasant tortures. Very unEnglish, as England used to be in my memory. How DO you revolute?
Can you revolute without contacts, without collaboration, without COMMUNICATION ? I think not.
Yaas, there is Cripps. He didn't use to be there so much. In fact my sole memory of Stafford is secondhand, old Nelly Weaver saying "A
? DREADFUL man! " Seems like she had a cousin, that was manager, or editor, or managing editor of a paper called Pig and Piffle, I mean by its own staff in private. And it sold for a lot less than it cost, I mean it cost, let us say, ten pence a copy to print, and sold retail for a six pence, and turned over ten or twenty thousand a year in net profits.
Anyhow, Nelly's cousin died, and left his sons in Cripps' charge, Cripps being trustee or guardian, so my memory of Stafford boils down to Miss Nelly a sayin'
"A DREADFUL man! Heaven KNOWS what he is teaching the boys! "
Waaal, if heaven didn't know then, mebbe heaven will find out during the next few week's course of hostilities.
I mean internal hostilities. I don't know that England learns from abroad. I dunno that the fall of Madras, or Calcutta will teach you folks anything, cause Hong Kong, Singapore and the Island Indies don't seem to have started you. But mebbe a few INTERNAL hostilities ? Heaven knows!
Back in Queen Elizabeth's time, farmin' out their estates to some usurer, gettin' out of their feudal duties, Cobbett and Hobhouse--all sorts of velleities toward reform; confined to a few special segments. Lord, can you call 'em segments. They were mostly kind hearted fellows, thought to be CRANKS by the public.
Can you have ANY collaboration if you don't MEET ? How can you meet in a CITY, unless you are financed?
Yaas, you can, or COULD meet on a street corner, or in by Mubble Arch, so long as you didn't do anything SERIOUS.
Ole Kun, Cohen, Be? la was serious. People in Budapest found out he was serious. Mebbe Sir Stafford is SERIOUS. The bolo agents in
? England were serious, when I was last there, the top numbers in the Communist Party were all paid by Moscow, which as you know is sometimes paid by New York or London.
It WAS known to your intelligence service, all their numbers were listed, all of 'em engaged in industrial espionage. I am not tellin' anything to you that some of your own rulers don't KNOW.
And now we hear of the SCORCHED EARTH policy. Git ready for an invasion. Cit ready to destroy all that is left you. Bum down your houses.
Waaal, WHO is a going to live in those ruins?
An invading army, if it ever gits into London, would, one would suppose, pick its own quarters; and a man that had burnt down his own bedroom would be left to sleep in the ashes.
Margey Daw, see saw, and the rest of it.
Do you think the people who tell you to burn down your houses and get ready for bombing raids for North Ireland, droppin' leaflets saying they only do it to help you ? Do you think that these people LOVE you?
Have you got any data about the Ukraine ? I am movin' toward this proposition. I assume that some of you did NOT want Mr. Churchill. He was not a pig in a poke. He may have been a Baldwin piglet, but he certainly was not CONcealed from the purchaser.
Take Carolyn Bellairs, for example, Carolyn Bellairs did NOT want Mr. Churchill. I dunno whether he, Bellairs, has yet joined Domvile in Jail. We do NOT git detailed news of your family squabbles. But I assume the Navy and the Army did contain at least a nucleus of men, with enough sense NOT to want Churchill.
? I assume that there was a tiny, and languid minority who did NOT acquiesce DEElightedly in a war, which was KNOWN to be going to have such consequences as the whole world now sees it havin'.
Revolution di PALAIS ? Is that it ? Do you think you can balayer the palais ? Do you think you can have a nice little revolution, in the colors of Mr. Watt's Hope Soap and Charity?
AH yes, but the MONEY. I am castin' about in my mind for some way you could CLEAN your own sewers.
Oh, but you say, we don't WANT to clean the sewers, we just want to dust out the draaaawin' room.
I comprehend you. But is that just what you can do?
I was for years all for a nice sensible bit of reform but Mr. Rothschild, and Mr. Sieff, and the rest of the British powers, Mond, Kataan, Sas soon, and the rest of 'em weren't very keen to nice reforms discussed in their papers.
They put in such blokes as Eden. They put OUT anybody who said anything sensible. Nice old gentlemen, who would edge up to the truth, talkin' about remonitization of silver, or some VERY mild infraction of the gold-bugs monopoly. They, the nice old members of the respectable knighthood, or elderly colonels, who remembered the end of the other war, they would get sent out to Karachi, to keep 'em from impeding the traffic (traffic in gold, and in loans at high interest) or at low interest, sometimes not more than 30 or 40% on the real money handled.
CAN YOU MEET one another ? Your air isn't free. Open organizations have been "put inside. " No chance of marching 'round swinging green banners; presenting petitions to the King, about Coventry. Nothing but SECRET organization. Ever hear of the Fenians?
? Or revolution in the PALACE ? Well, where do we go from here ? Art revolution ? Need three or four men even to make an ART movement function.
Can't do it in politics without at least some sort of COMMON ground, common agreement.
You do NOT believe in the total abolition of property--meaning of private ownership of your homes, and fir fields. Lord, who has any FIELDS left ? I dunno. Say your house and suburban garden. What about homesteads ? The air is NOT yours. The press is NOT yours. Communications by private automobile are said to be gettin' scarcer. In London you do not MEET, no man knows any other, at least not to any extent.
How can you defend your homesteads from Cripps ? Homesteads ? Your bed chamber, your kitchenette, and your telephone, all of 'em rented. God help you. You better start SOMETIME.
Ezra Pound speakin'.
Yaaas, SOME time, while Sir Stafford is goin' big out in India, agreein' on the TOTAL abolution of private property, him and the Aga Kahn, and the gaekwar of Baroda. Pardon me, the Tovarish of Baroda.
#19 (March 23, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B22) BUT HOW ? SECOND ITEM
It was not the present speaker, but an Englishman, I believe an absolutely loyal Englishman, a sort of Royalist, not Mr. Eliot, but at any rate a King's man, and so far as I recall a man who had no Fascist or Nazi sympathies, who on May 11th, 1939 uttered the statement I am about to repeat to you. Get the date, May eleventh, 1939.
? There is NO mystery whatsoever about the disappearance of Mr. Litvinov from the political scene. The Soviet Foreign Minister vacated his office because he failed to deliver "the goods" demanded by the masters of Wall Street and Moscow. New methods to secure these "goods" will now assuredly be given a trial.
What are these "goods? " Nothing other than Great Britain, captive and in chains. Great Britain stripped of her empire, above all Great Britain, ruined financially by the collapse of the Pound Sterling and the system called "barter trading" which is based upon that money.
There, gentle Briton, you have it. Your own heroes have told you. And your own true men you have heard NOT. You have not heard your own true speakers. You have lain down and died in the gutter because you would not hear your OWN friends; your own loyal speakers.
Now as I keep on tellin' you, my friends and/or acquaintances in England, were not of any one group. There were a few of 'em Fascists; but the most of 'em were IDIOTICALLY anti-fascist. They were most of 'em plum stupid about the Italian regime. I am not offerin' you the ideas of a sect, I am as the strength is vouchsafed to me trying to remind you or tell you of a few home truths, that you COULD have learned not only from me, but from dozens of Englishmen.
Seems like it must have been more like HUNDREDS of Englishmen, trying to tell you for the past twenty-two years.
Now WHY did you not listen ? Well, if that implies retrospect, bring it down to the true British question: W'ere do we g'ae frm ERE ? I ask you.
I ask you still more HOW do you [go] from here. I can't see that any other white race in Europe is going to be very anxious about Anglo Saxon survival belong to what is usually regarded as a branch of that
? race. Racially, English went to America along sometime after 1600, 1632-38, along up till 1700.
I think you lose by not thinking about this problem as RACIAL.
Yes, I know I went at it from the economic part of the picture. Brought up on American principles; no prejudice against any man for race, creed, or color.
Waaal, the chemist is not supposed to have prejudice against any particular chemical; in the laboratory some stink and some do not. Some explode and some do not--chemist's business--chemist in American sense, not the man in the drug store; say the chemical experimenter or chemical engineer is supposed to look at different chemical elements with a fair eye and mind.
So I don't reckon to go along my road as with prejudice. I have tried to see the thing straight.
Birth control, bad national health, neoMalthusian preachin', scarcity economics, all workin' Britain's downfall.
Question is: Ain't you fallen down about FAR ENOUGH?
Can't you stop somewhere at least near the TOP of the dung heap, with out having the whole midden flop over on top of ye?
And HOW are you going to do it ? That is what I ask: HOW are you going to do it?
You certainly are NOT going to do it by abolition of all ARYAN ownership, and the mortgaging of all England to a half hundred Kikes in New York. That is NOT going to give you a new British order.
CAN you understand, can any of you understand, that a few of you must club together, and at least try to find out what you BELIEVE?
? You do NOT believe in the abolition of ownership ? You do NOT believe that you should be ruled from abroad by Kuhn, Loeb, and Warburg, of the dregs of the ex-ghettoes of Europe, now planted on the neck of the American people.
Have you any hold on the country ? Let us say on the Land?
I see it is increasingly difficult for any two men to meet outside London. Who meets INSIDE London ? Do they still disagree about EVERYTHING ? Do three social credit parties instantly arise wherever two social creditors gather together?
Is there ANY common bond, apart from hysteria induced by your jews- papers? Or the common interests of men who hire their "seats. "
I mean SEATS in the Commons. Difference between those seats and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange is that in New York the men BUY their seats, and in Westminster the members rent 'em. The New York Stock Exchange system has an advantage; it may even be more democratic. I never heard democracy discussed in this connection.
But a man BUYS his seat on Change, openly and the price is known, I believe in most cases.
Whereas a member of Parliament is a renter, he is said to pay in an in definite sum per year, to DEFRAY.
Defray is, I think, the word used, defray party expenses. Contribute to the funds of the party.
That is democracy. Is it ? It has never been the American IDEAL of representative government.
I have murmured on the ambient air, now and then a few soft words about my own splay footed country. Real representation when the place
? was more or less agricultural. Method of geographic division O. K. when many people were engaged in growing the crops of one sort or another, and the seaboard in tradin', and fishin'.
Rough sections still kept in the United States but no one havin' any say now, but the banks and the Warburgs. People who FEED the lot always voted down by the RULERS. Naive blokes, populist, subject to caricature. All lead up to GUILD organization.
Which does NOT appeal to abject NON-producers. Does not appeal to exploiters, that is the rub. Early socialists were boneheaded; didn't dig down into problem of money.
I dunno how far you now KNOW what the same men took twenty years tellin' you, and that your press took those same twenty years keepin' from you.
Even supposin' you do NOW begin to see something, how are you going to GIT OUT of your present trilemma ? If SOME Englishmen could see where England's course was leading back before this war started more of them ought by now to be seeing it, seeing that Singapore is no longer called by that name. What was the Sassoonery is now Shonanko. How do you save your homes ? Revolution behind the scenes in the palace ? A group of officers of the Army ? Or guild formation ? Movement coming up from the mines or the land?
You can NOT eat minerals, and then HEROES ? The reformers all used to take it so easy. The new bright world was to be arranged over the tea cups. Why DIDN'T you settle it over the tea cups ? DID any one care for England enough to rattle the teaspoons, or risk cracking a saucer ? AND now your politicians talk of CONDUCT of the war. Don't you realize that the only men with brains enough to conduct a war are the men who foresaw what the war would be; the men who tried to keep you OUT of it, and who would now try to CONDUCT you out if it ? You
? have NOT made it a war of honor. You could have made a hopeless stand, a forlorn despair of an expedition into Poland, and been defeated with honor. Of course it would not have been right at bottom, because the guarantee to Poland was faked. It was not to or FOR Poland. But even so, you could have made a gesture and been defeated with honor.
Can you not see that the outrage of the bombardment of Paris is but one of a series of attempts to make real peace impossible, and to prepare for the war after this one ? Needless hate--sewing the SEEDS of hate for to morrow. Does it mean nothing to you that in this war you have inflicted more and worse wounds on your Allies than on the people you said were your enemies ? Can these things go on forever without some glimmer of light reaching the British mind, to show the real causes of the conflict-- the real forces IN conflict ? Usury against peasantry, usury against farmland, usury against every man who does a day's work, physical or with his mind.
Ah, against consciousless exploitation, against monopoly, against bank deals and swindles. Against EVERY race in Europe that takes the responsibility for being a nation and administering openly, as a government in the eyes of the people.
Against the crawling slime of a secret rule, a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE rule, that takes NO responsibility for the welfare of races, and nations, but eats like a cancer into the heart and soul of all nations. Even that where of its central staff is composed.
#20 (March 26, 1942) U. S. (B23) McARTHUR
It is a privilege to fight against gentlemen. And the European radio station seems to me to have been as ready to show respect to General McArthur, as they are, and RIGHTLY are, to show absolute and utter contempt and loathing for the war profiteers, and the gang of
? unmitigated newts, and vermin who have thrown the world into war in the hope of establishing a gold and money lending monopoly, and blotting out the good life in five continents. They have done this from their lust for secret and irresponsible power.
And the place to fight these syphilis bugs is NOT on the frontiers, but in the centre of your own nations.
This more than bubonic plague passes over all frontiers as Dante already perceived. It rots the heart, and the soul of the nations. It is silent, ceaseless in its action. And the PLACE to resist it is for every man LOCALLY--the means to resist it are LOCAL.
And by that fact they are hard to bring into coherence. The embezzler, working behind false laws, can mobilize quickly; the farmer, worker and peasant can not.
The embezzler sets up his papers, dailies and weeklies. That curse of God Willkie was puffed up by the Weeklies. The plague does not stop with the dailies. It sets up publishing houses, it grinds down all private liberty--economic--I mean, fewer and fewer men or groups have the MONEY to run a paper. Every cranny is infested. Every college campus has a book store. LOOK to these bookstores. Look to the LAST vestiges of approximate freedom of the press, even the scholastic press, that gets out small editions. Communicate, Communicate, and CO MUN ICATE.
A plot was outlined years ago to blot out classical scholarship, to blot out the historic sense. It went about on soft paws, making no noise, it was DEADLY.
It worked while the nations slept. A contempt for the Latin authors. The idea Greek was useless. The concentration on innocuous authors. Erotic poems and NOT the state of life as shown in the Athenian law courts.
? The aesthetic angle, that the whole of my generation grew up in, all LOOKING harmless, so HARMLESS.
America was killed by the kid-glove generation, looked simple. Henry James describes these innocuous flops: on the beach at Newport, none of 'em meant any harm, after the Civil War the American people was tired. I'll say they were tired.
With reason. Killed each other off to make room for the vermin.
After Cato's death there was no Republic, says some old Roman historian. Perhaps after Lincoln's death there was no United States Republic. Bowers, the TRAGIC ERA, go read it. Johnson couldn't hold out against the infection. Civil War dragged on. WITH INTENTION. Halleck, why was he general ? Or at least why in command ? Waaal, that is old scandal. Can't fight Antietam now. Can't go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now. Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and banners, to KEEP the nation's mind OFF the causes--off the REAL causes. Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City.
My ole great uncle had a wooden leg,
went stumpin' 'round after Gettysburg.
Ole uncle dot and carry one,
and every gun was a golden egg, for the Bankers in New York. For the bankers in New York, OHoooooo.
No wonder old uncle Hiram wrote poems about P [J. Pierpont] Morgan, that as a kid of nine I didn't understand. NO wonder the profit of 15 thousand on a lot of condemned rifles, looked like pretty poor stuff to men who had lost legs and eyes for the union.
? After them came the kid glovers. Too refined to touch politics. THAT was an error. But you can't very much blame 'em. Tired of five years war, of bad food, and army blankets. Also the weak'uns left, Henry James, Henry Adams, John, John Quincy, then Charles Francis in London. That part of Henry Adams "Education" is still EDUCATORY. Read it. Charles Francis Adams workin' against Lord Russell, as cold a son of a fish as ever got into Parliament.
Then he came home, Charles Francis, and didn't make a fight for the presidency. Possibly it would have been useless and then Brooks Adams trying to set down the real reasons.
Where is BOSTON ? Damn it, is the Kike and Kahal radio station all that is left of Boston?
Is New England a midden ? The war you ought to be fightin' is NOT five thousand miles OUTSIDE Boston. Or five thousand miles outside New York, or even outside San Francisco. It is INTERNAL.
And if you let 'em bilk you with the idea. that they will PROGRESS AFTER the war is over, and a few million of you under the daisies, you will be being worse FOOLS than the Hindoos.
This war, internal war, can go on QUITE as well, SIMULTANEOUS with General McArthur gettin' killed in a hopeless fight against Aguinaldo's successors, as it can after the war is over: if it ever is over.
BEING at peace for twenty years AFTER Versailles did NOT conduce to a victory of the American people over the shysters. WHY should the twenty years after THIS war be any more favorable to setting up an honest government and killing off the Morgenthau and Warburg Satrapy: and having a United States of America State or REPUBLIC ? What earthly argument is there against cleaning up and cleaning out the embezzlers DURING the present conflict ? How can you DO it ? Damn
? it, you can start by cleaning up your own minds. You can clear out the crap that you JOURNAL ISTS KNOW is crap: when they write it.
You can then clear out the crap that journalists BELIEVE along with their fake news, along what the advertisers LET the OWNERS (so called), let the editors PUBLISH. There is a second layer of crap that newspapermen believe to be real. BUT it is not grounded on a real knowledge of ANYTHING.
They have NOT gone into the documents. They have not read the real history. They chase one butterfly after another.
NOW the facts are NOT wholly hidden. There are fifty authors whom you could read, Brooks Adams, among 'em. You could read the works of the men who fought for the making of the Republic, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, hidden or kept in shadow by punk propaganda.
You could get down to the usury swindles, lit up by Demosthenes. Will you wake up to the fact that the gradual elimination of the classics had a purpose, a damn dirty purpose ? Get boiled down to a few harmless authors, say to Tibullus and Virgil, taste for the unreal in poetry, and the student's eye got off the reality.
Look at John Adams' paideuma. Look at what a man in those days, with no million dollar library, could learn while living on American farm land. Boston having about 15 thousand inhabitants.
No, it is the habit of "not being interested in takin' things as seriously as"-- --That refers to a young American college graduate tellin' me his friends and acquaintances weren't interested in taking things as seriously as I do.
Waal, it would have been just a bit better for 'em and, as Mr. Patchen remarks in the headin' of one of his poems "I don't want to alarm you, but we are most of us going to be shot. " Also a fellow named Caidwell, I
? think it was, went to the Spanish red war. These fellows got around to taking it serious.
What are you fighting for ? Fighting for the starvation of Europe ? Fighting to spread famine in Asia ? Fighting for vain boast proved false ? Fighting for the Sassoonery ? Are you fighting for the National Heritage ? For the heritage of wisdom, the heritage of Washington, and of Monroe, of John Adams and Lincoln?
I'll say you are not.
You are fighting AGAINST what all these men stood for. And it will take
more brains than I got, to get you out of it prettily.
Ezra Pound speakin' from Europe for the American heritage.
#21 (March 30, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B24) THE PATTERN
When are the American and English people going to take note of the pattern, the pattern in which wars are made, not one war, but wars, in the plural?
Whether you go back to the start of THIS war in 1696. 1696, when the virus of death, the invisible silent virus, more deadly than syphilis, was shot into the English people. Bank of England, makin' money from VACUUM, and levying interest tax in respect to it.
Waaal, you can't all be students of history. Look to what you can remember, if you are over 40.
How was the last war started ?
My generation was brought up ham ignorant of economics. History was taught with OMISSIONS of the most vital facts. Every page our generation read was over shadowed by usury. Not only was the press false, but every current idea had been warped by generations of antecedent perversion.
The ACID TEST of public men today is plain and simple. MISTRUST any man, no matter how high in office who tries to get you AWAY from the questions:
WHAT is money?
Who makes it?
How is it issued?
Why can't the WHOLE people buy what the WHOLE people produces?
Start on that at once, and throw out any man who won't give you a straight answer. You can not cure Wisconsin in Pekin. I mean, start where you are. Don't let anyone wriggle out of LOCAL honesty, by talking internationally. Investigate the Carnegie Peace Foundation. When you find out why they avoid the study of the economic causes of war, you'll be part way toward preventing another.
? Printed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1935, LONG before Hitler was so influential in world affairs.
You can lead a Rocking Horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.
And young America's problem is what was young England's problem. And the answers were KNOWN; the answers COULD have been broadcast, the answers could have been printed in daily papers, they could have been taught in the schools, they could have been used as the basis for action. I mean political action. And WHAT prevented it?
Waaal, go ask yourselves what prevented it ? Ask yourselves why these things were NOT widely printed ? Why the real thought of the American founders was hidden, stuffed into corners ? Why every man in England who foresaw disaster, and who saw HOW England could have avoided it IF . . . Why these men were NOT heeded. Why they were hugger-muggered out of the way, or reduced, shall we say often by FEAR, into silence.
Not all were afraid, some were prudent. Where are they ? Some of 'em got out in front. Now where are they ? Where are the back seaters, the men who knew, but saw no way to ACT on their knowledge ? The men who assembled tiny minorities ? Waaal, where are they ? And when will the people learn wisdom?
OZeus.
O Chan Ti, how long is the time lag?
#18 (March 22, 1942) U. K. (B20) BUT HOW?
? I unhooked my radio the other night and the word REVOLUTION came floatin' over the ambient air. Very English voice, usin' the word RE VO LU TION.
And I thought, yaaas, very nice but HOW' ? How CAN they revolute.
Conjure up to my mind the pale grey light in Kensington Gardens, and the gulls floatin' over the round pond, and the so very quiet demeanor of the nicely dressed females that used to float up the broadwalk, along about 1910. How CAN THEY revolute?
Yaas, I hear Bela Kun was over in England, he was a revolution, bloody murder and all the trimmings. But does Kensington revolute?
I am so old I can remember the end of the nineteenth century, that is the century before this one that is gettin' on to be nigh half gone. How impressed the American visitors were by the beef-eaters in the Tower, and the teacups at Windsor and Stratford-on-Avon, with the coats of arms glazed into the chimney, and the quiet lawn in the park, and a time when the Route du Roi wasn't so rotten. The Row, not of course that I knew the riders, save occasionally Mr. Cunninghame Graham, a fine figure on horse back, and ole Colonel Jackson, suggestin' I should dine at his club, he wantin' to see the expressions on the faces of his contemporaries when faced with the vorticist movement. Well, all that must be fairly well bygone.
The question is how do folks revolute ? The Rooshians do it with fire and sword, and very unpleasant tortures. Very unEnglish, as England used to be in my memory. How DO you revolute?
Can you revolute without contacts, without collaboration, without COMMUNICATION ? I think not.
Yaas, there is Cripps. He didn't use to be there so much. In fact my sole memory of Stafford is secondhand, old Nelly Weaver saying "A
? DREADFUL man! " Seems like she had a cousin, that was manager, or editor, or managing editor of a paper called Pig and Piffle, I mean by its own staff in private. And it sold for a lot less than it cost, I mean it cost, let us say, ten pence a copy to print, and sold retail for a six pence, and turned over ten or twenty thousand a year in net profits.
Anyhow, Nelly's cousin died, and left his sons in Cripps' charge, Cripps being trustee or guardian, so my memory of Stafford boils down to Miss Nelly a sayin'
"A DREADFUL man! Heaven KNOWS what he is teaching the boys! "
Waaal, if heaven didn't know then, mebbe heaven will find out during the next few week's course of hostilities.
I mean internal hostilities. I don't know that England learns from abroad. I dunno that the fall of Madras, or Calcutta will teach you folks anything, cause Hong Kong, Singapore and the Island Indies don't seem to have started you. But mebbe a few INTERNAL hostilities ? Heaven knows!
Back in Queen Elizabeth's time, farmin' out their estates to some usurer, gettin' out of their feudal duties, Cobbett and Hobhouse--all sorts of velleities toward reform; confined to a few special segments. Lord, can you call 'em segments. They were mostly kind hearted fellows, thought to be CRANKS by the public.
Can you have ANY collaboration if you don't MEET ? How can you meet in a CITY, unless you are financed?
Yaas, you can, or COULD meet on a street corner, or in by Mubble Arch, so long as you didn't do anything SERIOUS.
Ole Kun, Cohen, Be? la was serious. People in Budapest found out he was serious. Mebbe Sir Stafford is SERIOUS. The bolo agents in
? England were serious, when I was last there, the top numbers in the Communist Party were all paid by Moscow, which as you know is sometimes paid by New York or London.
It WAS known to your intelligence service, all their numbers were listed, all of 'em engaged in industrial espionage. I am not tellin' anything to you that some of your own rulers don't KNOW.
And now we hear of the SCORCHED EARTH policy. Git ready for an invasion. Cit ready to destroy all that is left you. Bum down your houses.
Waaal, WHO is a going to live in those ruins?
An invading army, if it ever gits into London, would, one would suppose, pick its own quarters; and a man that had burnt down his own bedroom would be left to sleep in the ashes.
Margey Daw, see saw, and the rest of it.
Do you think the people who tell you to burn down your houses and get ready for bombing raids for North Ireland, droppin' leaflets saying they only do it to help you ? Do you think that these people LOVE you?
Have you got any data about the Ukraine ? I am movin' toward this proposition. I assume that some of you did NOT want Mr. Churchill. He was not a pig in a poke. He may have been a Baldwin piglet, but he certainly was not CONcealed from the purchaser.
Take Carolyn Bellairs, for example, Carolyn Bellairs did NOT want Mr. Churchill. I dunno whether he, Bellairs, has yet joined Domvile in Jail. We do NOT git detailed news of your family squabbles. But I assume the Navy and the Army did contain at least a nucleus of men, with enough sense NOT to want Churchill.
? I assume that there was a tiny, and languid minority who did NOT acquiesce DEElightedly in a war, which was KNOWN to be going to have such consequences as the whole world now sees it havin'.
Revolution di PALAIS ? Is that it ? Do you think you can balayer the palais ? Do you think you can have a nice little revolution, in the colors of Mr. Watt's Hope Soap and Charity?
AH yes, but the MONEY. I am castin' about in my mind for some way you could CLEAN your own sewers.
Oh, but you say, we don't WANT to clean the sewers, we just want to dust out the draaaawin' room.
I comprehend you. But is that just what you can do?
I was for years all for a nice sensible bit of reform but Mr. Rothschild, and Mr. Sieff, and the rest of the British powers, Mond, Kataan, Sas soon, and the rest of 'em weren't very keen to nice reforms discussed in their papers.
They put in such blokes as Eden. They put OUT anybody who said anything sensible. Nice old gentlemen, who would edge up to the truth, talkin' about remonitization of silver, or some VERY mild infraction of the gold-bugs monopoly. They, the nice old members of the respectable knighthood, or elderly colonels, who remembered the end of the other war, they would get sent out to Karachi, to keep 'em from impeding the traffic (traffic in gold, and in loans at high interest) or at low interest, sometimes not more than 30 or 40% on the real money handled.
CAN YOU MEET one another ? Your air isn't free. Open organizations have been "put inside. " No chance of marching 'round swinging green banners; presenting petitions to the King, about Coventry. Nothing but SECRET organization. Ever hear of the Fenians?
? Or revolution in the PALACE ? Well, where do we go from here ? Art revolution ? Need three or four men even to make an ART movement function.
Can't do it in politics without at least some sort of COMMON ground, common agreement.
You do NOT believe in the total abolition of property--meaning of private ownership of your homes, and fir fields. Lord, who has any FIELDS left ? I dunno. Say your house and suburban garden. What about homesteads ? The air is NOT yours. The press is NOT yours. Communications by private automobile are said to be gettin' scarcer. In London you do not MEET, no man knows any other, at least not to any extent.
How can you defend your homesteads from Cripps ? Homesteads ? Your bed chamber, your kitchenette, and your telephone, all of 'em rented. God help you. You better start SOMETIME.
Ezra Pound speakin'.
Yaaas, SOME time, while Sir Stafford is goin' big out in India, agreein' on the TOTAL abolution of private property, him and the Aga Kahn, and the gaekwar of Baroda. Pardon me, the Tovarish of Baroda.
#19 (March 23, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B22) BUT HOW ? SECOND ITEM
It was not the present speaker, but an Englishman, I believe an absolutely loyal Englishman, a sort of Royalist, not Mr. Eliot, but at any rate a King's man, and so far as I recall a man who had no Fascist or Nazi sympathies, who on May 11th, 1939 uttered the statement I am about to repeat to you. Get the date, May eleventh, 1939.
? There is NO mystery whatsoever about the disappearance of Mr. Litvinov from the political scene. The Soviet Foreign Minister vacated his office because he failed to deliver "the goods" demanded by the masters of Wall Street and Moscow. New methods to secure these "goods" will now assuredly be given a trial.
What are these "goods? " Nothing other than Great Britain, captive and in chains. Great Britain stripped of her empire, above all Great Britain, ruined financially by the collapse of the Pound Sterling and the system called "barter trading" which is based upon that money.
There, gentle Briton, you have it. Your own heroes have told you. And your own true men you have heard NOT. You have not heard your own true speakers. You have lain down and died in the gutter because you would not hear your OWN friends; your own loyal speakers.
Now as I keep on tellin' you, my friends and/or acquaintances in England, were not of any one group. There were a few of 'em Fascists; but the most of 'em were IDIOTICALLY anti-fascist. They were most of 'em plum stupid about the Italian regime. I am not offerin' you the ideas of a sect, I am as the strength is vouchsafed to me trying to remind you or tell you of a few home truths, that you COULD have learned not only from me, but from dozens of Englishmen.
Seems like it must have been more like HUNDREDS of Englishmen, trying to tell you for the past twenty-two years.
Now WHY did you not listen ? Well, if that implies retrospect, bring it down to the true British question: W'ere do we g'ae frm ERE ? I ask you.
I ask you still more HOW do you [go] from here. I can't see that any other white race in Europe is going to be very anxious about Anglo Saxon survival belong to what is usually regarded as a branch of that
? race. Racially, English went to America along sometime after 1600, 1632-38, along up till 1700.
I think you lose by not thinking about this problem as RACIAL.
Yes, I know I went at it from the economic part of the picture. Brought up on American principles; no prejudice against any man for race, creed, or color.
Waaal, the chemist is not supposed to have prejudice against any particular chemical; in the laboratory some stink and some do not. Some explode and some do not--chemist's business--chemist in American sense, not the man in the drug store; say the chemical experimenter or chemical engineer is supposed to look at different chemical elements with a fair eye and mind.
So I don't reckon to go along my road as with prejudice. I have tried to see the thing straight.
Birth control, bad national health, neoMalthusian preachin', scarcity economics, all workin' Britain's downfall.
Question is: Ain't you fallen down about FAR ENOUGH?
Can't you stop somewhere at least near the TOP of the dung heap, with out having the whole midden flop over on top of ye?
And HOW are you going to do it ? That is what I ask: HOW are you going to do it?
You certainly are NOT going to do it by abolition of all ARYAN ownership, and the mortgaging of all England to a half hundred Kikes in New York. That is NOT going to give you a new British order.
CAN you understand, can any of you understand, that a few of you must club together, and at least try to find out what you BELIEVE?
? You do NOT believe in the abolition of ownership ? You do NOT believe that you should be ruled from abroad by Kuhn, Loeb, and Warburg, of the dregs of the ex-ghettoes of Europe, now planted on the neck of the American people.
Have you any hold on the country ? Let us say on the Land?
I see it is increasingly difficult for any two men to meet outside London. Who meets INSIDE London ? Do they still disagree about EVERYTHING ? Do three social credit parties instantly arise wherever two social creditors gather together?
Is there ANY common bond, apart from hysteria induced by your jews- papers? Or the common interests of men who hire their "seats. "
I mean SEATS in the Commons. Difference between those seats and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange is that in New York the men BUY their seats, and in Westminster the members rent 'em. The New York Stock Exchange system has an advantage; it may even be more democratic. I never heard democracy discussed in this connection.
But a man BUYS his seat on Change, openly and the price is known, I believe in most cases.
Whereas a member of Parliament is a renter, he is said to pay in an in definite sum per year, to DEFRAY.
Defray is, I think, the word used, defray party expenses. Contribute to the funds of the party.
That is democracy. Is it ? It has never been the American IDEAL of representative government.
I have murmured on the ambient air, now and then a few soft words about my own splay footed country. Real representation when the place
? was more or less agricultural. Method of geographic division O. K. when many people were engaged in growing the crops of one sort or another, and the seaboard in tradin', and fishin'.
Rough sections still kept in the United States but no one havin' any say now, but the banks and the Warburgs. People who FEED the lot always voted down by the RULERS. Naive blokes, populist, subject to caricature. All lead up to GUILD organization.
Which does NOT appeal to abject NON-producers. Does not appeal to exploiters, that is the rub. Early socialists were boneheaded; didn't dig down into problem of money.
I dunno how far you now KNOW what the same men took twenty years tellin' you, and that your press took those same twenty years keepin' from you.
Even supposin' you do NOW begin to see something, how are you going to GIT OUT of your present trilemma ? If SOME Englishmen could see where England's course was leading back before this war started more of them ought by now to be seeing it, seeing that Singapore is no longer called by that name. What was the Sassoonery is now Shonanko. How do you save your homes ? Revolution behind the scenes in the palace ? A group of officers of the Army ? Or guild formation ? Movement coming up from the mines or the land?
You can NOT eat minerals, and then HEROES ? The reformers all used to take it so easy. The new bright world was to be arranged over the tea cups. Why DIDN'T you settle it over the tea cups ? DID any one care for England enough to rattle the teaspoons, or risk cracking a saucer ? AND now your politicians talk of CONDUCT of the war. Don't you realize that the only men with brains enough to conduct a war are the men who foresaw what the war would be; the men who tried to keep you OUT of it, and who would now try to CONDUCT you out if it ? You
? have NOT made it a war of honor. You could have made a hopeless stand, a forlorn despair of an expedition into Poland, and been defeated with honor. Of course it would not have been right at bottom, because the guarantee to Poland was faked. It was not to or FOR Poland. But even so, you could have made a gesture and been defeated with honor.
Can you not see that the outrage of the bombardment of Paris is but one of a series of attempts to make real peace impossible, and to prepare for the war after this one ? Needless hate--sewing the SEEDS of hate for to morrow. Does it mean nothing to you that in this war you have inflicted more and worse wounds on your Allies than on the people you said were your enemies ? Can these things go on forever without some glimmer of light reaching the British mind, to show the real causes of the conflict-- the real forces IN conflict ? Usury against peasantry, usury against farmland, usury against every man who does a day's work, physical or with his mind.
Ah, against consciousless exploitation, against monopoly, against bank deals and swindles. Against EVERY race in Europe that takes the responsibility for being a nation and administering openly, as a government in the eyes of the people.
Against the crawling slime of a secret rule, a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE rule, that takes NO responsibility for the welfare of races, and nations, but eats like a cancer into the heart and soul of all nations. Even that where of its central staff is composed.
#20 (March 26, 1942) U. S. (B23) McARTHUR
It is a privilege to fight against gentlemen. And the European radio station seems to me to have been as ready to show respect to General McArthur, as they are, and RIGHTLY are, to show absolute and utter contempt and loathing for the war profiteers, and the gang of
? unmitigated newts, and vermin who have thrown the world into war in the hope of establishing a gold and money lending monopoly, and blotting out the good life in five continents. They have done this from their lust for secret and irresponsible power.
And the place to fight these syphilis bugs is NOT on the frontiers, but in the centre of your own nations.
This more than bubonic plague passes over all frontiers as Dante already perceived. It rots the heart, and the soul of the nations. It is silent, ceaseless in its action. And the PLACE to resist it is for every man LOCALLY--the means to resist it are LOCAL.
And by that fact they are hard to bring into coherence. The embezzler, working behind false laws, can mobilize quickly; the farmer, worker and peasant can not.
The embezzler sets up his papers, dailies and weeklies. That curse of God Willkie was puffed up by the Weeklies. The plague does not stop with the dailies. It sets up publishing houses, it grinds down all private liberty--economic--I mean, fewer and fewer men or groups have the MONEY to run a paper. Every cranny is infested. Every college campus has a book store. LOOK to these bookstores. Look to the LAST vestiges of approximate freedom of the press, even the scholastic press, that gets out small editions. Communicate, Communicate, and CO MUN ICATE.
A plot was outlined years ago to blot out classical scholarship, to blot out the historic sense. It went about on soft paws, making no noise, it was DEADLY.
It worked while the nations slept. A contempt for the Latin authors. The idea Greek was useless. The concentration on innocuous authors. Erotic poems and NOT the state of life as shown in the Athenian law courts.
? The aesthetic angle, that the whole of my generation grew up in, all LOOKING harmless, so HARMLESS.
America was killed by the kid-glove generation, looked simple. Henry James describes these innocuous flops: on the beach at Newport, none of 'em meant any harm, after the Civil War the American people was tired. I'll say they were tired.
With reason. Killed each other off to make room for the vermin.
After Cato's death there was no Republic, says some old Roman historian. Perhaps after Lincoln's death there was no United States Republic. Bowers, the TRAGIC ERA, go read it. Johnson couldn't hold out against the infection. Civil War dragged on. WITH INTENTION. Halleck, why was he general ? Or at least why in command ? Waaal, that is old scandal. Can't fight Antietam now. Can't go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now. Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and banners, to KEEP the nation's mind OFF the causes--off the REAL causes. Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City.
My ole great uncle had a wooden leg,
went stumpin' 'round after Gettysburg.
Ole uncle dot and carry one,
and every gun was a golden egg, for the Bankers in New York. For the bankers in New York, OHoooooo.
No wonder old uncle Hiram wrote poems about P [J. Pierpont] Morgan, that as a kid of nine I didn't understand. NO wonder the profit of 15 thousand on a lot of condemned rifles, looked like pretty poor stuff to men who had lost legs and eyes for the union.
? After them came the kid glovers. Too refined to touch politics. THAT was an error. But you can't very much blame 'em. Tired of five years war, of bad food, and army blankets. Also the weak'uns left, Henry James, Henry Adams, John, John Quincy, then Charles Francis in London. That part of Henry Adams "Education" is still EDUCATORY. Read it. Charles Francis Adams workin' against Lord Russell, as cold a son of a fish as ever got into Parliament.
Then he came home, Charles Francis, and didn't make a fight for the presidency. Possibly it would have been useless and then Brooks Adams trying to set down the real reasons.
Where is BOSTON ? Damn it, is the Kike and Kahal radio station all that is left of Boston?
Is New England a midden ? The war you ought to be fightin' is NOT five thousand miles OUTSIDE Boston. Or five thousand miles outside New York, or even outside San Francisco. It is INTERNAL.
And if you let 'em bilk you with the idea. that they will PROGRESS AFTER the war is over, and a few million of you under the daisies, you will be being worse FOOLS than the Hindoos.
This war, internal war, can go on QUITE as well, SIMULTANEOUS with General McArthur gettin' killed in a hopeless fight against Aguinaldo's successors, as it can after the war is over: if it ever is over.
BEING at peace for twenty years AFTER Versailles did NOT conduce to a victory of the American people over the shysters. WHY should the twenty years after THIS war be any more favorable to setting up an honest government and killing off the Morgenthau and Warburg Satrapy: and having a United States of America State or REPUBLIC ? What earthly argument is there against cleaning up and cleaning out the embezzlers DURING the present conflict ? How can you DO it ? Damn
? it, you can start by cleaning up your own minds. You can clear out the crap that you JOURNAL ISTS KNOW is crap: when they write it.
You can then clear out the crap that journalists BELIEVE along with their fake news, along what the advertisers LET the OWNERS (so called), let the editors PUBLISH. There is a second layer of crap that newspapermen believe to be real. BUT it is not grounded on a real knowledge of ANYTHING.
They have NOT gone into the documents. They have not read the real history. They chase one butterfly after another.
NOW the facts are NOT wholly hidden. There are fifty authors whom you could read, Brooks Adams, among 'em. You could read the works of the men who fought for the making of the Republic, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, hidden or kept in shadow by punk propaganda.
You could get down to the usury swindles, lit up by Demosthenes. Will you wake up to the fact that the gradual elimination of the classics had a purpose, a damn dirty purpose ? Get boiled down to a few harmless authors, say to Tibullus and Virgil, taste for the unreal in poetry, and the student's eye got off the reality.
Look at John Adams' paideuma. Look at what a man in those days, with no million dollar library, could learn while living on American farm land. Boston having about 15 thousand inhabitants.
No, it is the habit of "not being interested in takin' things as seriously as"-- --That refers to a young American college graduate tellin' me his friends and acquaintances weren't interested in taking things as seriously as I do.
Waal, it would have been just a bit better for 'em and, as Mr. Patchen remarks in the headin' of one of his poems "I don't want to alarm you, but we are most of us going to be shot. " Also a fellow named Caidwell, I
? think it was, went to the Spanish red war. These fellows got around to taking it serious.
What are you fighting for ? Fighting for the starvation of Europe ? Fighting to spread famine in Asia ? Fighting for vain boast proved false ? Fighting for the Sassoonery ? Are you fighting for the National Heritage ? For the heritage of wisdom, the heritage of Washington, and of Monroe, of John Adams and Lincoln?
I'll say you are not.
You are fighting AGAINST what all these men stood for. And it will take
more brains than I got, to get you out of it prettily.
Ezra Pound speakin' from Europe for the American heritage.
#21 (March 30, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B24) THE PATTERN
When are the American and English people going to take note of the pattern, the pattern in which wars are made, not one war, but wars, in the plural?
Whether you go back to the start of THIS war in 1696. 1696, when the virus of death, the invisible silent virus, more deadly than syphilis, was shot into the English people. Bank of England, makin' money from VACUUM, and levying interest tax in respect to it.
Waaal, you can't all be students of history. Look to what you can remember, if you are over 40.
How was the last war started ?
