Nothin'
practical
came of it, till Sig.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Would it not be, in any case, GEOpolitic?
After all, there is the shape of five continents to consider and the sea-space between the two hemispheres.
And one more factor: every German knows that he fights for Bismarck, for the work of Bismarck, every Italian knows that he fights for the work of Cavour, of Crispi, and Ricasoli.
But every American with a knowledge of his own history, possibly a MINORITY, but still a segment not wholly negligible, I repeat: every American with any sort of grasp of the glory of American history, knows that he is NOT in this war for the work of Adams and Jefferson, of Van Buren and Lincoln. Not yesterday that was written:
. . . try to drag us into their real or supposed coalitions.
? For my part thought that Americans had been embroiled in European wars long enough, easy to see that France and England will be constantly at manoeuvre to work us into their real or imaginary balances.
John Adams
Ezra Pound speaking.
The Americans are unqualified for intervention, they are DISqualified by reason for their intense, abysmal, unfathomable IGNORANCE of the state and past facts of Europe. Even my colleagues in the Academy of Social and Political Science have no competent perception of the DIFFERENCE, the basic difference between the American problem and that of Europe. And most of them have not made any adequate use of even such fragmentary fragments of knowledge as they possess.
#47 (June 15, 1942) U. S. (B58) VIOLENCE
I have been looking over a careful study of America by a careful writer, it is not an edition deluxe and the photo reproductions are not pretty. Some of them deal with gangsters, and gangsters' ends. There are also a few Negroes suspended from trees, without apparently due trial by law.
There are also photos of Mexican pyramids. The traveler was quite impartial, he recorded whatever he saw, or the parts that aroused his interest.
The book leads me to reflections on violence. American lynch law had its origins in the Jewish ruin of the American South. It is very hard to explain lynch law to Europeans.
The Ku Klux once had a reason. Today the survival of lynch law appears, at least from Europe, to be a sheer manifestation of
? COWARDICE. It is an expression of course of brutality. But the European sees nothing distinguished in a mob of a thousand men, chasing one man. It does not find lynch law heroic.
Neither does he find British treatment of Italian prisoners a convincing proof of British honesty or civility or of military capacity. All that will in time go into history.
What I am trying to work out in my head is WHY American violence always takes such a monotonous form. Perhaps Clemenceau found the answer in what he alleged to be the American incapacity for ideas.
You would think with all that anarchy and violence and contempt for everything, that political violence might be possible in America, yet it apparently is not.
I am asking, I don't know the answer, does anyone in the audience, in visible audience, know the answer? You lynch the Negro, you glory in the manhunt, but you are incapable of political violence. But the degraded Finkelstein, coward and accomplice of murderers, accomplice of the men responsible for the labor conditions on the Stalin canal, put such utter swine in an official position, and Americans at once become little Lord Fauntleroy.
The British poisoners have become sacred persons. The 5,000 members of a wholly corrupt secret government get diplomatic passports and all is suave and serene. Perhaps some of our college psychologists will explain it.
The American has the head, evidently of a chicken, he is incapable of political revery.
The existence of a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE government does not worry him. It has been there at least since 1863 and he takes it as a matter of course. It gets worse daily and hourly.
? All the means of intercommunication pass into the hands of the secret and largely Semitic control; and the American dreams of Thoreau and says, "who am I to interfere in such muchness? "
The Stalin Canal is a matter of psychological interest. The British treatment of Italian prisoners is a matter of pathological interest. But unfortunately I arrive at these points after the fact. The historian's job is not soothing. One would rather have used preventive measures. I, quite honestly, don't see what more I could have done to prevent this unholy shindy. I have tried, I think fairly, to diminish my personal ignorance. I have only two eyes, and not very good for readin'.
No one can accuse me of not trying to communicate what I knew, what I have known, during the past 20 years, often with tactless insistency, often when I might have gained official approval by not sayin' it quite so soon. History shows us certain recurrin' phenomena. Goin' back to Philippe le Beau or before that in Europe, going back to the days of King Wen, and before that.
I have done what I could to give some of these facts--what seemed to me significant facts--some publicity, as far as was in my means.
As to Churchill betrayin' England and the people of England, I don't know how far the boosy old hog knows what he is doing. I should lay a bet, and quite heavy, that Mr. Churchill was picked and put into the place he could do the most dirtiness exactly because he is an obstinate fool. A fool possessing almost unsurpassable cleverness in appealing to what is most utterly damned rotten, brutal, and stupid in the worst type of Englander. Just as I think other idiots and pathological specimens are often picked for a set job of wreckin'. I don't want to descend into vague general statements. When I was in England in November '38 a good soldier told me: We will lose India, we will lose all our Eastern possessions. Meanin' IF England goes into war. A Naval man told me how rotten material was bein' put into British submarines, or at any rate
? he was tellin' it to company at a lunch table where I was present. I heard it stated, with perfect truth, that the profit system was so rotten and stupid that no matter WHAT they spent, no matter how many millions sterling was spent, the British industrial system could NOT deliver the goods. That bein' so I consider that England has suffered treason, low treason, high treason, red, green, pink, purple treason. And that Eddie may have felt it was comin', at any rate he hadn't the backbone to stick it [out]. And the traitors were afraid that he might balk at the last moment and refuse to sign on the dotted line, for mobilization.
Well, that is guesswork. I don't know that the little shrimp was much fit for his job. But as to the betrayal of England, Mr. Churchill has at least some responsibility. But knowing EXACTLY what kind of an obstinate idiot he is, the men who put him into the Premiership have MORE responsibility. Concerning which the English have as yet shown no EFFECTIVE curiosity.
Well, you are their allies, and the allies of the Stalin canalites. Now what causes that? Press lies in part are responsible. Who HIRED the press lies? Are you, NONE of you, even amateur sleuths? Are all your Ellery Queens and Van Dines on cheap fiction paper? Is there NO Yankee curiosity left? Is New England (according to birth statistics) to be populated only by bohunks at the end of the next 60 years?
Razza, race? Is the ruck end of the old colonial stock so hog stupid, so sterile, so stubborn that NONE of 'em have the sense to raise the race issue? That none of 'em have an even polite parlor interest in enquirin' even the ouija board or the whist table whether the American colonial race shall survive?
Kipling said it: he said the Americans obligingly slaughtered each other during the Civil War, so that the Czechoslovaks could inherit Boston Common. Well, what causes that?
? Is it too late to inquire, is inquiry become impolite and unYankee? And what races coalesce or amalgamate? What races can dwell together without constantly inciting other races to start fraternal slaughter, and civil assassination?
The Welsh didn't spend 800 years trying to get English and Scotch to murder each other. The Irish refused to forget their race for hundreds of years, but they weren't continually fomenting internal warfare in England, no third race was at the bottom of even the Wars of the Roses. English, Scotch, Irish and few minorities made the American colonies. Germans, and Italians came in without causing civil slaughter. If the American intelligentzia ever THOUGHT about anything, these facts would enter the mental range.
[The] point I took up the other night might do with an emphasis. Also my curiosity; WHY does the intelligent American, the bright lad who CAN write, but doesn't, why does such a man take it as a matter of course that to earn his living he has to hide his intelligence and work for some blob-headed vulgarian SLOB?
Whence comes this superstition that the worst pays and the better doesn't and that the BEST is impossible; that America has NO place at all for the best, despite the American instinct [of] knowin' the best, and insistin' on having it, the minute they are in position to get it? No other race on earth [is] so almost fanatical on wantin' maximum, up to what they know. And then the refinement, the flair in some of these Americans who get over to Europe. Of course they may be exceptions, but I have known cases, I don't mean persons of genius, but people of moderate mental energy, and with that funny little flair for the best. How do you figure along with this, the acceptance of being bossed by pigheads, by almost inhuman objects; the equivalents of Litvinovs and Maiskys at the head of big industry, big radio corporations, the [whores? ] of the Hollywood ghetto? What is there in the ruck end of the American era that makes Americans stand it?
? Have they all been bred down into halfbreed and quarterbreeds? I ask you, I don't quite make it out. Doth avarice make cowards of them all?
As for their opposite numbers in Britain. They aren't quite opposite as against Americans working for blob headed kikes on your radio. England has naught quite similar, they have refinement. Perfect Alice in Wonderland, perfectly poisonous, but refined and unconscious. I don't suppose you take it very seriously either. I have always told you the Atlantic and Nation were festers, spoon fed from the nectar of England.
I daresay you can't see that. Well, get some of British equivalents, say by New Statesman and Nation. ALICE in Wonderland. G. D. H. Cole. As long as a printin' press functions in London, those blokes will go on gettin' 25 dollars an article: doing IMAGINARY geometry. Imaginary futures for the land that never was and never will be. Schizophrenia. Alice in Wonderland, Little Lord Fauntleroy, private worlds, in the gook house sense of these words. Over Hell's Kitchen. It is perhaps time for young Americans to start reading the classics, Plutarch, or Cicero against Verres.
#48 (June 19, 1942) U. S. (B59) THE FALLEN GENTLEMAN (IL SIGNOR DECADUTO)
Among my American memories is that of the fallen gent in shabby overcoat selling lead pencils in a Washington soda bar. Wishing to get something, other than Senatorial and Congressional views, on the results of the nude eel and subsequent American cataclysms in the year 1939, in fact about cherry time, I inquired of him (rather than of the wristwatch- swallowing ostrich) what HE thought of it all, and got the indubitably uncontrovertible reply: "AHG, we're all mixed UP, this gennerrrrashun! " That undoubtedly represented the real man in (or at that moment very slightly and momentarily removed from) the street, as contrasted with the B. B. C. hand-picked specimens.
? And any man's clarity must start inside his own head. I therefore propose to put my own ideas in order, and to communicate that order in the hope that it assists the hearer in finding out where he or she is.
Now in the FIRST place, every sane man, including finally some British M. P. 's, KNOWS that every sane man prefers Fascism to Communism, as soon as he has any concrete factual knowledge of either.
The labour conditions, the mode of treating human beings, known in Russia as human MATERIAL on the Stalin canal, deserve study. The auditor knows nothing of Russia until he has heard or read the reported facts of that horror, inciting eagles and the rest of the details. Until he has considered the number of lives crushed out by Stalin's system BEFORE the massing of Russia's gigantic armies in the threat to all Europe's heritage. And enough of those facts are printed to enlighten any sane man.
As to the Bolshie system of persuading people to build or pay for the building of apartments, and then taking chunks of said apartments from them, that I have on first-hand information, from a victim. Neither farmer (peasant) nor business man has anything to hope from the Communist system. Bolshevism, yes, Hank, the belief that non-Jews ought not to own property.
As to Bolshevism two things are established everywhere save possibly in the dim mind of a Gunther or Thompson. First, that Bolshevism pretended to be an attack on capital, that it was financed by New York Jew millionaires, and that it, in effect, attacked private ownership of land and of living space (which would be YOUR kitchen and bathroom, as well as YOUR farm or workshop. )
And England and the United States got OFF sides, they are caught OFF sides, alling themselves with the Red Russian horror.
? I might say, in historic flashback, that the difference between the American Revolution of 1776 and the French terror following 1789 lay largely in Mr. Adams', Mr. Jefferson's and General Washington's race. OUR American revolution was an Anglo-Scottish Revolution and the French Revolution was not, hence the analogies between its breakdown, its massacres and what our time has seen in Russia.
England and the United States OUGHT to be on the Axis side AGAINST the Red terror. And every Englishman and American knows that. Probably even the new comic of Canterbury is aware of it and his genuflections and prayers are signs rather of episcopal flurry than of conviction. In fact the Rev. Temple has got all mixed up with his vestments, tangled so to speak in his lace, his dalmatic, his cape.
The Occident is based on the homestead. By which I mean, the civilization of the whole Western world comes up from the soil, and from the personal responsibility of the man who produces things from it.
All mixed up? NO, as long as men face the responsibility of feeding themselves and their families from what they can get from the earth, by planting seed, reaping crops, raising cattle, there is NOT any great confusion. That responsibility includes NOT letting the cows eat all the grass in the fields when part of it should be stored as hay to feed the said cows during the winter.
All capital is NOT (in our muddled world) the result of labor. John Citizen is not only mixed [up] about money, he is mixed [up] in his views about gold.
Now GOLD is the product of labor. Apart from small beady particles, nuggets, nature offers man a natural mixture of quartz, heteroclite substances and gold in a crystaline or at least hard hotchpotch bouillabaisse, or in the sands "of the Indies. "
? And that gold chemistry is studied by students of INorganic chemistry, it is not rams and ewes, it is not amoebas, as Shakespeare definitely indicates. He points out that gold is NOT fecund, it does not increase and multiply as the sheep and goats of a herd. Plant it, and it does not come up in the spring, yielding 20 fold, or 30 fold or one hundred.
MONEY does not become interesting until it means something more than that sterility. Money is not interesting until it CAN represent something fecund, such, namely AS rams and ewes.
This difference between money and metal, puzzled mankind for millennia. It goes back into prehistory. The idea of interest existed before the invention of metal coin.
And there is MUCH more justification for collecting interest on a loan of seed, on a loan of she-goats and buck-goats, than on a loan of non- breeding, non-breedable metal. It only remained for the philosopher or the expert in ethics to figure out HOW much interest. For a thousand years from St. Ambrose to St. Antonino some of the best and most candid minds in Europe worked on that problem.
And Europe in the interim built her cathedrals during an age when usury was classed with the vices. COIN being used as counters, and the work of makin' those counters considered as work. I don't mean that the public had a clear view of this process. There is a considerable amount of Latin writing about the question of intrinsic and token value of money. Totin' round the counters, etc. , havin' the money ready and handy required a lot of technique. A lot of technique was developed. Then somebody found out they could do without metal counters. Just like Loomis found out you could send an electric signal without using wire. Found out electricity would travel thru air.
Nothin' practical came of it, till Sig. Marconi got it into a system.
? Credit HAD existed, just like lightnin' existed. Men had known about credit long before Ben Franklin sent up his kite. Difference being that Ben was a scientist. When he hitched his latch key on the kite-string, he was in search of knowledge. Paterson was lookin' for profits when he sent up HIS kite: Bank hath profit of the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing.
Moral for good little boys: Mr. Franklin died honored, and I believe fairly well off. Paterson died unhonored, and almost undiscovered; I forget if it [his profit? ] was cast away on a desert island, anyhow he went bust. Yet Paterson got Europe pretty well muddled. You have THREE phases in what might be called the increase of muddlement.
FIRST, mankind's natural allurgicity, his natural rebellion against belief that metal breeds, that silver or copper or gold will grow if you plant it or shut it up in a box.
SECONDLY, the perception that MONEY which represents something alive, vegetable or animal, may up to a point have the right to a periodical profit or interest if used in a way that helps to produce something useful, something enjoyable.
THIRDLY, you have the lowdown Scotch trick of trying to collect that interest on money that represents nothing at all, money that is just FLIGHT of an airy fancy, or that banks on human credulity, or on the known trustfulness and laziness of mankind. And THAT'S what the shootin's about, brother Henry, that's what the shootin's about TO-day.
Do you follow me? Do you follow me? Or am I to be once more accused of speakin' in a rambling manner.
Faith, said the Irishman, NO man could be in two places at once . . . uh . . . uh, not unless he were a bird. I am NOT trying to be in two places at once. I am trying to get you to DISSOCIATE a few economic ideas, trying to get your mind to conceive the nature of motion, to conceive the
? difference between money and credit. Some other time I will try to get you to understand that credit is a social phenomenon.
Money (I am now quotin' Aristotle), money comes not of nature but from custom. Money is something man-made, it does not exist by itself in nature. Money is a social phenomenon.
Credit is a social phenomenon. I am not going into that now. I may have already said too much for one talk. I dunno whether the United States listens to B. B. C. nonsense. I should like to put my compatriots in condition to DEBUNK British B. B. C. nonsense as fast as they hear it, and this talk of mine is aimed at gittin' over to you one point and one point only, or say one dissociation of ideas, or dissociations about one point. That is the question of INTEREST. The difference between the interest on metal and the interest on money, and the interest on credit (that is the interest on money that isn't THERE).
Dearly beeloved brevrem, this is ole Ezry speaking. You probably do not doubt it. You probably have derived that belief from the intrinsic nature of the discourse even if you tuned [in] after the announcement of what was comin'.
#49 (June 25, 1942) U. S. (B62) THAT INTERVAL OF TIME
People are allus tellin' me to be PATIENT. Even now when you would think a state of emergency had not only been declared but become almost apparent, people tell me to be patient about one thing or another.
Well, I have said before, said it in poetry and said it in prose. I was twenty years late in startin' and as my friend Carlo DeVoto sez to me on the tennis court: "Twenty years at 5%! What do they care, if it runs 20 years, they double their capital. And most of the dirt in this world is put
? over by people who have NOT twenty years to run. After them, then hell-bust and they should worry! "
It is that 50 year interval, that FIFTY years between the time some European finds OUT. The devil gits his work in durin' the 50 years between the time some European discovers what the hell is going on, and the time the news reaches the general public. Europeans have SEEN their countries goin' to ruin, but they didn't get the publicity. Brooks Adams saw various processes runnin' along. He even said we were in for 30 years war, and he was only 15 or 20 years after a fellow named Drumont.
Then again these people who see too much so often have their own peculiar conditionings. Some bloke with a phobia against Orleanists writes a book that no Hoosier is likely to read.
What's an untranslated European BOOK against the whole howl of Howwywood? Or the combined kosher radios of Baaastun [Boston] and Schenectedy?
The sons of the pioneers! Lord, are there any sons of the pioneers? The decline of New England. No damn it, the WHOLE of the American people, of the real United States stock isn't dead, it's just lazy, and muddled, and jitterbug, and things were so EASY, up there in the university levels. BY comparison I mean with the subcollege levels. And there is a defect with the non-family system. I mean people shiftin' around, people NOT passin' on what they know INSIDE their families. And then there is snobism. That's another great barrier against learnin'.
HOW are you goin' to know Europe if you don't KNOW the United States of America? I don't mean tourism; you can see a lot of sights at the cinema. Only you don't generally see anything but stucco and paper. I mean IF you have no clue to what is goin' on IN America, how can you know what is goin' on here in Europe? If you don't know ANY history
? whatever, how can you understand HOW things happen? You don't expect a bloke who has never SEEN a game of football to rush in and play a star game.
There are moments when I git plumb discouraged. I mean I sweat for a couple of hours over some volume of history. Then I reflect on what I learned ABOUT history itself. I mean when I was doing my Sigismundo Malatesta I wanted to git at the facts, original documents, etc. and I noticed how loosely some history is written, in fact about 97% of it. Abstract statement, DUE to ignorance, bloke just don't KNOW, so he makes some generality, then when he does GIT right down to the bone he finds he can't always print it.
Or Mr. Henry Adams, pindlin' Henry, sez to his brother that he has no hankerin' after martyrdom. I mean some of these blokes git scared. Lord knows there is plenty to scare 'em, in one sense.
The chronicle of human chicken-headedness is SO long, the sheer heedlessness of the majority of mankind is so persistent. Nevertheless a man must do what he can.
Boy named Mac . . . no I won't give you the rest of it, he may want to pass an examination--at any rate he shows a couple of REAL questions to a professor and the professor shows blank incomprehension. Don't shoot the pore beggar. Most of your professors were up against what you are up against. Those favored few who GOT the cushy jobs got there for a reason. They didn't annoy their precursors. And the ones that RISE were those who showed no EXCESSIVE curiosity. Don't matter whether it is literary merit, which is largely precision, or history. Well, well, HISTORY is a VERY dangerous subject.
But keep on a pluggin'. Some college libraries have a FEW books. All the public libraries haven't suffered from the habits of borrowing, that is,
? not fatally. Some of the real books are still on the shelves, and not represented by wooden dummies.
Dig in. Look up the ECONOMIC background of Cromwell. I keep hammering on the BASIC facts of our own American history. I don't want you to lay off that subject. But you may as well know WHAT the Pilgrim Fathers came to New England to get OUT of.
Don't think the usury process STARTED with the invention of modern banking. So-called. Most swindles have prototypes that were already known to Demosthenes. Of course the swindles get bigger and LARGER. The technique of war loans, peace loans, has extended. Figures keep getting bigger and bigger. And the SPEED of the operations. If it took what were called "the AFRICANS" 150 years to ruin one European nation, seems like there is an American speed record impendin'.
Entertainment in soldiers' canteens on the one hand, I mean immediate, entertainment for the United States armed forces, by the legged forces. And then comes the payment of interest. An old, tough country probably takes longer to bust. Peasantry has been ruined. Every country in Europe has seen repeated duels between the plow and the mortgate.
Mr. Warburg calls 'em both CAPITAL--both the plow and the mortgage. I forget if he coined the phrase "capital in the form of transportation. " Gettin' a lot of DIFFERENT things hugger-muggered in under one label. My boy, you BEWARE of folks who lump things under one label. You call a plow, plow, you call work, work, you call a stock certificate a stock certificate. And try to learn the difference between a bond and a share.
Naturally a lot of fancy language has been used to conceal that difference. Get any company prospectus, about common, preferred, etc. and the need of three lawyers and an expert to know what the difference
? is between the common, preferred, pink tipped, etc. before and after the 3rd, 5th, and 14th conversions. You'll be needing them and they'll be needing a consultant. Beware of folks who lump DIFFERENT kinds of things under one label. Such as a plow and a mortgage and call BOTH of 'em capital. Keep lands and hands QUITE separate in your mind. And remember that all capital does NOT come from labor, and that the reason WHY the JEW has been able to wreck one European country after another is that the ploots, the nobility, the better classes, the NICE people in those countries were always ready to borrow money. And that the whole of life in our time has been run by people who were collectin' interest on money. Kings, dukes, merchants, all in a row fallin' for that "false help" in time of emergency. War loans, peace loans, that is how necks get into nooses.
I am still waitin' for indication or confirmation that any appreciable body or ganglia of men in the United States have any real perception of what has been PUMPED out the country, by the treasuries. Eh . . . policy . . . the bastids call it a POLICY. As to assumption, Mr. Bowers might like a list of precedents, just showing that the CLEVER financiers, the Gouverneur Morris's, etc. didn't INVENT anything--all the jokes are so much older than Harpo.
And apparently when it is a matter of finance or a legislative assembly cheatin' the people, NO wheeze, no dirty swindle EVER wears out. The Hoosier NEVER learns, no nice college boy ever fails to fall under the spell of a plateglass partition, and a few holes and [a] fine marble floor.
Here lies America, she died of the romance of luxury. The wreck of a country, the wreck of a nation starts when the ruling class starts being bribed. Same old story, Grand Dukes betraying Russia, French nobles selling up France, British nobility utterly worm-eaten by greed. And now the old United States of America dying off, 80 years after the sellout to Rothschild. Eighty years of usury taking, 80 years of grovelling before wealth, being ready to accept pay without ever thinkin' what causes it.
? Damn [it] all, I seem to be gittin' moral. Well, what about it? Be scientific, HOW much pizin' can the national body stand?
That question can be put scientifically, just as well as puttin' it in a hortatory form, or asking what is nice, or what ought a decent man do. No man will do anything WORTH doin' till some sense of "OUGHT" enters his system. Profit motive is silly, in the sense that it ultimately kills the good life; makes the mare go, yass, makes the mare go, money makes the mare go. And then somebody wakes up crazy. And that takes JUST long enough, so nobody notices what is going on. Suddenly wake up and find American abundance has been chucked out of the window. Ten billion here, ten billion there, and then ease has departed, and sailors don't care.
Saxony under the Kings of Poland had emitted bonds, Slauer that had fallen to 35%, reimburse 'em at par. The Congressmen who voted for assumption invented nothing, they were just being dirty. And all of 'em ought to have been shot. It's a long list. Tunis bonds. These particular kinds of swindle weren't invented in the new United States of America during the times of the early Congressional sessions. Just small town stuff, provincial villainy. Should we keep on after 160 years? Does it show political development?
What the United States lacks under the Morgenthau infamy is any sense that dirty swindles bring misery to thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, that we have risked something more than mere comfort.
My time is about up for this session. Ezra Pound speakin'.
And of course, you ought NOT to be in this war. Even to cover up the gross failure of the Administration to govern the United States of America, let alone fixing up the affairs of Europe and Asia.
? #50 (June 28, 1942) U. K. (B64) THE GIFTIE
It was Bobbie Burns, and no Englishman, who sent up his prayer: O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
And the emotion behind the lines is probably more unEnglish than anyone who hasn't lived amongst it for over a decade can ever imagine.
I am having another go at it. And if wandering about Mayfair in 1916 the life of your ruling caste appeared to me perched on a very thin crust of painted cardboard, what must it seem now when looked at from OUTSIDE the circle of your tight little private world of illusion?
And one more factor: every German knows that he fights for Bismarck, for the work of Bismarck, every Italian knows that he fights for the work of Cavour, of Crispi, and Ricasoli.
But every American with a knowledge of his own history, possibly a MINORITY, but still a segment not wholly negligible, I repeat: every American with any sort of grasp of the glory of American history, knows that he is NOT in this war for the work of Adams and Jefferson, of Van Buren and Lincoln. Not yesterday that was written:
. . . try to drag us into their real or supposed coalitions.
? For my part thought that Americans had been embroiled in European wars long enough, easy to see that France and England will be constantly at manoeuvre to work us into their real or imaginary balances.
John Adams
Ezra Pound speaking.
The Americans are unqualified for intervention, they are DISqualified by reason for their intense, abysmal, unfathomable IGNORANCE of the state and past facts of Europe. Even my colleagues in the Academy of Social and Political Science have no competent perception of the DIFFERENCE, the basic difference between the American problem and that of Europe. And most of them have not made any adequate use of even such fragmentary fragments of knowledge as they possess.
#47 (June 15, 1942) U. S. (B58) VIOLENCE
I have been looking over a careful study of America by a careful writer, it is not an edition deluxe and the photo reproductions are not pretty. Some of them deal with gangsters, and gangsters' ends. There are also a few Negroes suspended from trees, without apparently due trial by law.
There are also photos of Mexican pyramids. The traveler was quite impartial, he recorded whatever he saw, or the parts that aroused his interest.
The book leads me to reflections on violence. American lynch law had its origins in the Jewish ruin of the American South. It is very hard to explain lynch law to Europeans.
The Ku Klux once had a reason. Today the survival of lynch law appears, at least from Europe, to be a sheer manifestation of
? COWARDICE. It is an expression of course of brutality. But the European sees nothing distinguished in a mob of a thousand men, chasing one man. It does not find lynch law heroic.
Neither does he find British treatment of Italian prisoners a convincing proof of British honesty or civility or of military capacity. All that will in time go into history.
What I am trying to work out in my head is WHY American violence always takes such a monotonous form. Perhaps Clemenceau found the answer in what he alleged to be the American incapacity for ideas.
You would think with all that anarchy and violence and contempt for everything, that political violence might be possible in America, yet it apparently is not.
I am asking, I don't know the answer, does anyone in the audience, in visible audience, know the answer? You lynch the Negro, you glory in the manhunt, but you are incapable of political violence. But the degraded Finkelstein, coward and accomplice of murderers, accomplice of the men responsible for the labor conditions on the Stalin canal, put such utter swine in an official position, and Americans at once become little Lord Fauntleroy.
The British poisoners have become sacred persons. The 5,000 members of a wholly corrupt secret government get diplomatic passports and all is suave and serene. Perhaps some of our college psychologists will explain it.
The American has the head, evidently of a chicken, he is incapable of political revery.
The existence of a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE government does not worry him. It has been there at least since 1863 and he takes it as a matter of course. It gets worse daily and hourly.
? All the means of intercommunication pass into the hands of the secret and largely Semitic control; and the American dreams of Thoreau and says, "who am I to interfere in such muchness? "
The Stalin Canal is a matter of psychological interest. The British treatment of Italian prisoners is a matter of pathological interest. But unfortunately I arrive at these points after the fact. The historian's job is not soothing. One would rather have used preventive measures. I, quite honestly, don't see what more I could have done to prevent this unholy shindy. I have tried, I think fairly, to diminish my personal ignorance. I have only two eyes, and not very good for readin'.
No one can accuse me of not trying to communicate what I knew, what I have known, during the past 20 years, often with tactless insistency, often when I might have gained official approval by not sayin' it quite so soon. History shows us certain recurrin' phenomena. Goin' back to Philippe le Beau or before that in Europe, going back to the days of King Wen, and before that.
I have done what I could to give some of these facts--what seemed to me significant facts--some publicity, as far as was in my means.
As to Churchill betrayin' England and the people of England, I don't know how far the boosy old hog knows what he is doing. I should lay a bet, and quite heavy, that Mr. Churchill was picked and put into the place he could do the most dirtiness exactly because he is an obstinate fool. A fool possessing almost unsurpassable cleverness in appealing to what is most utterly damned rotten, brutal, and stupid in the worst type of Englander. Just as I think other idiots and pathological specimens are often picked for a set job of wreckin'. I don't want to descend into vague general statements. When I was in England in November '38 a good soldier told me: We will lose India, we will lose all our Eastern possessions. Meanin' IF England goes into war. A Naval man told me how rotten material was bein' put into British submarines, or at any rate
? he was tellin' it to company at a lunch table where I was present. I heard it stated, with perfect truth, that the profit system was so rotten and stupid that no matter WHAT they spent, no matter how many millions sterling was spent, the British industrial system could NOT deliver the goods. That bein' so I consider that England has suffered treason, low treason, high treason, red, green, pink, purple treason. And that Eddie may have felt it was comin', at any rate he hadn't the backbone to stick it [out]. And the traitors were afraid that he might balk at the last moment and refuse to sign on the dotted line, for mobilization.
Well, that is guesswork. I don't know that the little shrimp was much fit for his job. But as to the betrayal of England, Mr. Churchill has at least some responsibility. But knowing EXACTLY what kind of an obstinate idiot he is, the men who put him into the Premiership have MORE responsibility. Concerning which the English have as yet shown no EFFECTIVE curiosity.
Well, you are their allies, and the allies of the Stalin canalites. Now what causes that? Press lies in part are responsible. Who HIRED the press lies? Are you, NONE of you, even amateur sleuths? Are all your Ellery Queens and Van Dines on cheap fiction paper? Is there NO Yankee curiosity left? Is New England (according to birth statistics) to be populated only by bohunks at the end of the next 60 years?
Razza, race? Is the ruck end of the old colonial stock so hog stupid, so sterile, so stubborn that NONE of 'em have the sense to raise the race issue? That none of 'em have an even polite parlor interest in enquirin' even the ouija board or the whist table whether the American colonial race shall survive?
Kipling said it: he said the Americans obligingly slaughtered each other during the Civil War, so that the Czechoslovaks could inherit Boston Common. Well, what causes that?
? Is it too late to inquire, is inquiry become impolite and unYankee? And what races coalesce or amalgamate? What races can dwell together without constantly inciting other races to start fraternal slaughter, and civil assassination?
The Welsh didn't spend 800 years trying to get English and Scotch to murder each other. The Irish refused to forget their race for hundreds of years, but they weren't continually fomenting internal warfare in England, no third race was at the bottom of even the Wars of the Roses. English, Scotch, Irish and few minorities made the American colonies. Germans, and Italians came in without causing civil slaughter. If the American intelligentzia ever THOUGHT about anything, these facts would enter the mental range.
[The] point I took up the other night might do with an emphasis. Also my curiosity; WHY does the intelligent American, the bright lad who CAN write, but doesn't, why does such a man take it as a matter of course that to earn his living he has to hide his intelligence and work for some blob-headed vulgarian SLOB?
Whence comes this superstition that the worst pays and the better doesn't and that the BEST is impossible; that America has NO place at all for the best, despite the American instinct [of] knowin' the best, and insistin' on having it, the minute they are in position to get it? No other race on earth [is] so almost fanatical on wantin' maximum, up to what they know. And then the refinement, the flair in some of these Americans who get over to Europe. Of course they may be exceptions, but I have known cases, I don't mean persons of genius, but people of moderate mental energy, and with that funny little flair for the best. How do you figure along with this, the acceptance of being bossed by pigheads, by almost inhuman objects; the equivalents of Litvinovs and Maiskys at the head of big industry, big radio corporations, the [whores? ] of the Hollywood ghetto? What is there in the ruck end of the American era that makes Americans stand it?
? Have they all been bred down into halfbreed and quarterbreeds? I ask you, I don't quite make it out. Doth avarice make cowards of them all?
As for their opposite numbers in Britain. They aren't quite opposite as against Americans working for blob headed kikes on your radio. England has naught quite similar, they have refinement. Perfect Alice in Wonderland, perfectly poisonous, but refined and unconscious. I don't suppose you take it very seriously either. I have always told you the Atlantic and Nation were festers, spoon fed from the nectar of England.
I daresay you can't see that. Well, get some of British equivalents, say by New Statesman and Nation. ALICE in Wonderland. G. D. H. Cole. As long as a printin' press functions in London, those blokes will go on gettin' 25 dollars an article: doing IMAGINARY geometry. Imaginary futures for the land that never was and never will be. Schizophrenia. Alice in Wonderland, Little Lord Fauntleroy, private worlds, in the gook house sense of these words. Over Hell's Kitchen. It is perhaps time for young Americans to start reading the classics, Plutarch, or Cicero against Verres.
#48 (June 19, 1942) U. S. (B59) THE FALLEN GENTLEMAN (IL SIGNOR DECADUTO)
Among my American memories is that of the fallen gent in shabby overcoat selling lead pencils in a Washington soda bar. Wishing to get something, other than Senatorial and Congressional views, on the results of the nude eel and subsequent American cataclysms in the year 1939, in fact about cherry time, I inquired of him (rather than of the wristwatch- swallowing ostrich) what HE thought of it all, and got the indubitably uncontrovertible reply: "AHG, we're all mixed UP, this gennerrrrashun! " That undoubtedly represented the real man in (or at that moment very slightly and momentarily removed from) the street, as contrasted with the B. B. C. hand-picked specimens.
? And any man's clarity must start inside his own head. I therefore propose to put my own ideas in order, and to communicate that order in the hope that it assists the hearer in finding out where he or she is.
Now in the FIRST place, every sane man, including finally some British M. P. 's, KNOWS that every sane man prefers Fascism to Communism, as soon as he has any concrete factual knowledge of either.
The labour conditions, the mode of treating human beings, known in Russia as human MATERIAL on the Stalin canal, deserve study. The auditor knows nothing of Russia until he has heard or read the reported facts of that horror, inciting eagles and the rest of the details. Until he has considered the number of lives crushed out by Stalin's system BEFORE the massing of Russia's gigantic armies in the threat to all Europe's heritage. And enough of those facts are printed to enlighten any sane man.
As to the Bolshie system of persuading people to build or pay for the building of apartments, and then taking chunks of said apartments from them, that I have on first-hand information, from a victim. Neither farmer (peasant) nor business man has anything to hope from the Communist system. Bolshevism, yes, Hank, the belief that non-Jews ought not to own property.
As to Bolshevism two things are established everywhere save possibly in the dim mind of a Gunther or Thompson. First, that Bolshevism pretended to be an attack on capital, that it was financed by New York Jew millionaires, and that it, in effect, attacked private ownership of land and of living space (which would be YOUR kitchen and bathroom, as well as YOUR farm or workshop. )
And England and the United States got OFF sides, they are caught OFF sides, alling themselves with the Red Russian horror.
? I might say, in historic flashback, that the difference between the American Revolution of 1776 and the French terror following 1789 lay largely in Mr. Adams', Mr. Jefferson's and General Washington's race. OUR American revolution was an Anglo-Scottish Revolution and the French Revolution was not, hence the analogies between its breakdown, its massacres and what our time has seen in Russia.
England and the United States OUGHT to be on the Axis side AGAINST the Red terror. And every Englishman and American knows that. Probably even the new comic of Canterbury is aware of it and his genuflections and prayers are signs rather of episcopal flurry than of conviction. In fact the Rev. Temple has got all mixed up with his vestments, tangled so to speak in his lace, his dalmatic, his cape.
The Occident is based on the homestead. By which I mean, the civilization of the whole Western world comes up from the soil, and from the personal responsibility of the man who produces things from it.
All mixed up? NO, as long as men face the responsibility of feeding themselves and their families from what they can get from the earth, by planting seed, reaping crops, raising cattle, there is NOT any great confusion. That responsibility includes NOT letting the cows eat all the grass in the fields when part of it should be stored as hay to feed the said cows during the winter.
All capital is NOT (in our muddled world) the result of labor. John Citizen is not only mixed [up] about money, he is mixed [up] in his views about gold.
Now GOLD is the product of labor. Apart from small beady particles, nuggets, nature offers man a natural mixture of quartz, heteroclite substances and gold in a crystaline or at least hard hotchpotch bouillabaisse, or in the sands "of the Indies. "
? And that gold chemistry is studied by students of INorganic chemistry, it is not rams and ewes, it is not amoebas, as Shakespeare definitely indicates. He points out that gold is NOT fecund, it does not increase and multiply as the sheep and goats of a herd. Plant it, and it does not come up in the spring, yielding 20 fold, or 30 fold or one hundred.
MONEY does not become interesting until it means something more than that sterility. Money is not interesting until it CAN represent something fecund, such, namely AS rams and ewes.
This difference between money and metal, puzzled mankind for millennia. It goes back into prehistory. The idea of interest existed before the invention of metal coin.
And there is MUCH more justification for collecting interest on a loan of seed, on a loan of she-goats and buck-goats, than on a loan of non- breeding, non-breedable metal. It only remained for the philosopher or the expert in ethics to figure out HOW much interest. For a thousand years from St. Ambrose to St. Antonino some of the best and most candid minds in Europe worked on that problem.
And Europe in the interim built her cathedrals during an age when usury was classed with the vices. COIN being used as counters, and the work of makin' those counters considered as work. I don't mean that the public had a clear view of this process. There is a considerable amount of Latin writing about the question of intrinsic and token value of money. Totin' round the counters, etc. , havin' the money ready and handy required a lot of technique. A lot of technique was developed. Then somebody found out they could do without metal counters. Just like Loomis found out you could send an electric signal without using wire. Found out electricity would travel thru air.
Nothin' practical came of it, till Sig. Marconi got it into a system.
? Credit HAD existed, just like lightnin' existed. Men had known about credit long before Ben Franklin sent up his kite. Difference being that Ben was a scientist. When he hitched his latch key on the kite-string, he was in search of knowledge. Paterson was lookin' for profits when he sent up HIS kite: Bank hath profit of the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing.
Moral for good little boys: Mr. Franklin died honored, and I believe fairly well off. Paterson died unhonored, and almost undiscovered; I forget if it [his profit? ] was cast away on a desert island, anyhow he went bust. Yet Paterson got Europe pretty well muddled. You have THREE phases in what might be called the increase of muddlement.
FIRST, mankind's natural allurgicity, his natural rebellion against belief that metal breeds, that silver or copper or gold will grow if you plant it or shut it up in a box.
SECONDLY, the perception that MONEY which represents something alive, vegetable or animal, may up to a point have the right to a periodical profit or interest if used in a way that helps to produce something useful, something enjoyable.
THIRDLY, you have the lowdown Scotch trick of trying to collect that interest on money that represents nothing at all, money that is just FLIGHT of an airy fancy, or that banks on human credulity, or on the known trustfulness and laziness of mankind. And THAT'S what the shootin's about, brother Henry, that's what the shootin's about TO-day.
Do you follow me? Do you follow me? Or am I to be once more accused of speakin' in a rambling manner.
Faith, said the Irishman, NO man could be in two places at once . . . uh . . . uh, not unless he were a bird. I am NOT trying to be in two places at once. I am trying to get you to DISSOCIATE a few economic ideas, trying to get your mind to conceive the nature of motion, to conceive the
? difference between money and credit. Some other time I will try to get you to understand that credit is a social phenomenon.
Money (I am now quotin' Aristotle), money comes not of nature but from custom. Money is something man-made, it does not exist by itself in nature. Money is a social phenomenon.
Credit is a social phenomenon. I am not going into that now. I may have already said too much for one talk. I dunno whether the United States listens to B. B. C. nonsense. I should like to put my compatriots in condition to DEBUNK British B. B. C. nonsense as fast as they hear it, and this talk of mine is aimed at gittin' over to you one point and one point only, or say one dissociation of ideas, or dissociations about one point. That is the question of INTEREST. The difference between the interest on metal and the interest on money, and the interest on credit (that is the interest on money that isn't THERE).
Dearly beeloved brevrem, this is ole Ezry speaking. You probably do not doubt it. You probably have derived that belief from the intrinsic nature of the discourse even if you tuned [in] after the announcement of what was comin'.
#49 (June 25, 1942) U. S. (B62) THAT INTERVAL OF TIME
People are allus tellin' me to be PATIENT. Even now when you would think a state of emergency had not only been declared but become almost apparent, people tell me to be patient about one thing or another.
Well, I have said before, said it in poetry and said it in prose. I was twenty years late in startin' and as my friend Carlo DeVoto sez to me on the tennis court: "Twenty years at 5%! What do they care, if it runs 20 years, they double their capital. And most of the dirt in this world is put
? over by people who have NOT twenty years to run. After them, then hell-bust and they should worry! "
It is that 50 year interval, that FIFTY years between the time some European finds OUT. The devil gits his work in durin' the 50 years between the time some European discovers what the hell is going on, and the time the news reaches the general public. Europeans have SEEN their countries goin' to ruin, but they didn't get the publicity. Brooks Adams saw various processes runnin' along. He even said we were in for 30 years war, and he was only 15 or 20 years after a fellow named Drumont.
Then again these people who see too much so often have their own peculiar conditionings. Some bloke with a phobia against Orleanists writes a book that no Hoosier is likely to read.
What's an untranslated European BOOK against the whole howl of Howwywood? Or the combined kosher radios of Baaastun [Boston] and Schenectedy?
The sons of the pioneers! Lord, are there any sons of the pioneers? The decline of New England. No damn it, the WHOLE of the American people, of the real United States stock isn't dead, it's just lazy, and muddled, and jitterbug, and things were so EASY, up there in the university levels. BY comparison I mean with the subcollege levels. And there is a defect with the non-family system. I mean people shiftin' around, people NOT passin' on what they know INSIDE their families. And then there is snobism. That's another great barrier against learnin'.
HOW are you goin' to know Europe if you don't KNOW the United States of America? I don't mean tourism; you can see a lot of sights at the cinema. Only you don't generally see anything but stucco and paper. I mean IF you have no clue to what is goin' on IN America, how can you know what is goin' on here in Europe? If you don't know ANY history
? whatever, how can you understand HOW things happen? You don't expect a bloke who has never SEEN a game of football to rush in and play a star game.
There are moments when I git plumb discouraged. I mean I sweat for a couple of hours over some volume of history. Then I reflect on what I learned ABOUT history itself. I mean when I was doing my Sigismundo Malatesta I wanted to git at the facts, original documents, etc. and I noticed how loosely some history is written, in fact about 97% of it. Abstract statement, DUE to ignorance, bloke just don't KNOW, so he makes some generality, then when he does GIT right down to the bone he finds he can't always print it.
Or Mr. Henry Adams, pindlin' Henry, sez to his brother that he has no hankerin' after martyrdom. I mean some of these blokes git scared. Lord knows there is plenty to scare 'em, in one sense.
The chronicle of human chicken-headedness is SO long, the sheer heedlessness of the majority of mankind is so persistent. Nevertheless a man must do what he can.
Boy named Mac . . . no I won't give you the rest of it, he may want to pass an examination--at any rate he shows a couple of REAL questions to a professor and the professor shows blank incomprehension. Don't shoot the pore beggar. Most of your professors were up against what you are up against. Those favored few who GOT the cushy jobs got there for a reason. They didn't annoy their precursors. And the ones that RISE were those who showed no EXCESSIVE curiosity. Don't matter whether it is literary merit, which is largely precision, or history. Well, well, HISTORY is a VERY dangerous subject.
But keep on a pluggin'. Some college libraries have a FEW books. All the public libraries haven't suffered from the habits of borrowing, that is,
? not fatally. Some of the real books are still on the shelves, and not represented by wooden dummies.
Dig in. Look up the ECONOMIC background of Cromwell. I keep hammering on the BASIC facts of our own American history. I don't want you to lay off that subject. But you may as well know WHAT the Pilgrim Fathers came to New England to get OUT of.
Don't think the usury process STARTED with the invention of modern banking. So-called. Most swindles have prototypes that were already known to Demosthenes. Of course the swindles get bigger and LARGER. The technique of war loans, peace loans, has extended. Figures keep getting bigger and bigger. And the SPEED of the operations. If it took what were called "the AFRICANS" 150 years to ruin one European nation, seems like there is an American speed record impendin'.
Entertainment in soldiers' canteens on the one hand, I mean immediate, entertainment for the United States armed forces, by the legged forces. And then comes the payment of interest. An old, tough country probably takes longer to bust. Peasantry has been ruined. Every country in Europe has seen repeated duels between the plow and the mortgate.
Mr. Warburg calls 'em both CAPITAL--both the plow and the mortgage. I forget if he coined the phrase "capital in the form of transportation. " Gettin' a lot of DIFFERENT things hugger-muggered in under one label. My boy, you BEWARE of folks who lump things under one label. You call a plow, plow, you call work, work, you call a stock certificate a stock certificate. And try to learn the difference between a bond and a share.
Naturally a lot of fancy language has been used to conceal that difference. Get any company prospectus, about common, preferred, etc. and the need of three lawyers and an expert to know what the difference
? is between the common, preferred, pink tipped, etc. before and after the 3rd, 5th, and 14th conversions. You'll be needing them and they'll be needing a consultant. Beware of folks who lump DIFFERENT kinds of things under one label. Such as a plow and a mortgage and call BOTH of 'em capital. Keep lands and hands QUITE separate in your mind. And remember that all capital does NOT come from labor, and that the reason WHY the JEW has been able to wreck one European country after another is that the ploots, the nobility, the better classes, the NICE people in those countries were always ready to borrow money. And that the whole of life in our time has been run by people who were collectin' interest on money. Kings, dukes, merchants, all in a row fallin' for that "false help" in time of emergency. War loans, peace loans, that is how necks get into nooses.
I am still waitin' for indication or confirmation that any appreciable body or ganglia of men in the United States have any real perception of what has been PUMPED out the country, by the treasuries. Eh . . . policy . . . the bastids call it a POLICY. As to assumption, Mr. Bowers might like a list of precedents, just showing that the CLEVER financiers, the Gouverneur Morris's, etc. didn't INVENT anything--all the jokes are so much older than Harpo.
And apparently when it is a matter of finance or a legislative assembly cheatin' the people, NO wheeze, no dirty swindle EVER wears out. The Hoosier NEVER learns, no nice college boy ever fails to fall under the spell of a plateglass partition, and a few holes and [a] fine marble floor.
Here lies America, she died of the romance of luxury. The wreck of a country, the wreck of a nation starts when the ruling class starts being bribed. Same old story, Grand Dukes betraying Russia, French nobles selling up France, British nobility utterly worm-eaten by greed. And now the old United States of America dying off, 80 years after the sellout to Rothschild. Eighty years of usury taking, 80 years of grovelling before wealth, being ready to accept pay without ever thinkin' what causes it.
? Damn [it] all, I seem to be gittin' moral. Well, what about it? Be scientific, HOW much pizin' can the national body stand?
That question can be put scientifically, just as well as puttin' it in a hortatory form, or asking what is nice, or what ought a decent man do. No man will do anything WORTH doin' till some sense of "OUGHT" enters his system. Profit motive is silly, in the sense that it ultimately kills the good life; makes the mare go, yass, makes the mare go, money makes the mare go. And then somebody wakes up crazy. And that takes JUST long enough, so nobody notices what is going on. Suddenly wake up and find American abundance has been chucked out of the window. Ten billion here, ten billion there, and then ease has departed, and sailors don't care.
Saxony under the Kings of Poland had emitted bonds, Slauer that had fallen to 35%, reimburse 'em at par. The Congressmen who voted for assumption invented nothing, they were just being dirty. And all of 'em ought to have been shot. It's a long list. Tunis bonds. These particular kinds of swindle weren't invented in the new United States of America during the times of the early Congressional sessions. Just small town stuff, provincial villainy. Should we keep on after 160 years? Does it show political development?
What the United States lacks under the Morgenthau infamy is any sense that dirty swindles bring misery to thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, that we have risked something more than mere comfort.
My time is about up for this session. Ezra Pound speakin'.
And of course, you ought NOT to be in this war. Even to cover up the gross failure of the Administration to govern the United States of America, let alone fixing up the affairs of Europe and Asia.
? #50 (June 28, 1942) U. K. (B64) THE GIFTIE
It was Bobbie Burns, and no Englishman, who sent up his prayer: O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
And the emotion behind the lines is probably more unEnglish than anyone who hasn't lived amongst it for over a decade can ever imagine.
I am having another go at it. And if wandering about Mayfair in 1916 the life of your ruling caste appeared to me perched on a very thin crust of painted cardboard, what must it seem now when looked at from OUTSIDE the circle of your tight little private world of illusion?
