No More Learning

#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 ? Murder at Sarajevo. Look back at the assassinations that have served as a spark for wars. And at those that were intended to start wars, but something went wet in the fuse.
? Connect 'em up. THINK what might have been back of 'em. To use a people, to send a people into war UNPREPARED is called destroying the people.
Ideogram of the knife and the sliver. USE people in war UNPREPARED. That is called destroying the people. ALL right, do you see anyone still blotting God's sunlight with their swollen bodies ? Roosevelt and Churchill, for instance, who have pushed the American and English into the war. That is the first phase. Hurl people into wars they CAN'T WIN. KNOWN in England in 1938 that England would LOSE.
Damn it, I was told in London in November 1938 that England would lose. Military expert sez to me (a furriner): "WE will lose India, we will lose all our eastern possessions. "
WELL, why weren't men like that LISTENED TO ? Why didn't the British people listen to THEM, and not to the dirt off the hog's hind leg, like they did listen to ? What causes that ? Astor, Times, Manchester Guardian, and the rest of 'em. Chief Usurer's usurious brother at the head of the B. B. C. before that stable was cleaned that much, and an equally mendacious traitor to the people of England, put there to replace him, to be followed by another S. P. O. B. and Mr. Churchill's last by- blow. Yaaas, and what is the SECOND phase, or second link of the poison offensive--London OR Washington?
Cries for prosecution of the war (not of the bastids that caused it).
Bevin and company in the HIRED fake labor pseudo-opposition crying for more energetic, etc.
Get the nation's neck against the buzz saw, and then PUSH. Russians in the last war and in this war. Something pushing 'em. Someone HAD BLUNDERED.
? DAMN it all, every man that dies in McArthur's army is sacrificed to Frankfurter's friends. But NOT to WIN. To destroy himself, to destroy any nation, one after another. Not that the Russian empire should survive, that the Austrians should survive, that England or the British Empire should survive, but to pull down the mighty.
Will you OBSERVE what these forces are, that shove nations from one disaster to another ? France hurled against the unbeatable Germans, England pushed unprepared, and the climax of unpreparedness, the Lehman, Frankfurter, Morgenthau SUCCESS, of SUC/Cess in hurling America into the conflict, and now yelling for MORE disasters.
I did NOT stand with Lindbergh. I am not a pacifist of the prize-taking variety. There are times when a nation should fight, even without what appears a chance, as Finland against Russia.
When threatened with extinction. SUCH was NOT the case in 1939 with the United States, NO one for the past hundred years had dreamed of threatening the United States of America with extinction.
A damned fool, or a half hypnotized vacuum in our White House threatened Japan with starvation, sent silly school girl notes to Mussolini and Hitler, threatened to starve the world, talked TOSH to the Axis powers and to Japan. The world has seen that propaganda and smelt the stink.
I did not, however, take Lindbergh's line, wrong line as I see it. The Nordic race seemed to be wholly ignorant of the nature of England's owners, expressed sympathy with England, NOT distinguishing between the nice Englishmen that one meets, and the gang of thieves and murderer's pimps who have been in control of the London government.
Out-in-front-men, for the in-behind-men, Beits, Goldsmid, Sassoor's, and Sieffs and Rothschild. I said the cause was rotten, it was ROTTEN, and it was KNOWN to be rotten, and it was known that MOST of the
? gold in the world is in the United States, in the British Empire and in Russia. And as I was told in our National Capital, any attempt to diminish the power of them that held it will meet with fairly serious resistance.
Waaal, it was NOT honest resistance, witness dirty Donovan, in Yugoslavia, witness the betrayal of one after another by the nations who are CONTROLLED by the gold VERMIN. William J. Bryan must have been unhealthy. His family is so gone to rot that they can let Hank Wallace say, "NO PEACE without restoration of the gold standard," and NOT shove Hank's head into a milk pudding, and treat him for progressive infantilism.
WHERE are the men of the sons of the men who had the sense to hear of the CROSS OF GOLD, are they all dead?
Anyhow, that dirty alley cat is out of the BAG. Whoever died at Dunkirk died for gold. Whoever was shot at Dakar died for gold.
AND the bombardment of PARIS ? As I have told you, NOT military, done to PREVENT the cessation of wars, done to so embitter French feeling that there can be NO peace between France and England. Oh yes, pullin' in more nations, hope of stealing Martinique, and Madagascar.
But for God's sake look at the POLICY, look at the pattern, how is it done ? Who now is drawing pay for demanding vigorous prosecution of war?
Vigorous prosecution of Frankfurter and that golliwog glove that covers his fingers.
Frankfurter down inside the Punch and Judy show booth, and that curse of God, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gesticulating and shrieking up there in front to distract the children, to get the boys into the trenches. And the papers, the hired press, howling that the interventionists musn't be
? allowed to take advantage of the abysmal mess made by Roosevelt, that the war must be PUSHED.
The place to defend the American heritage is ON the American continent. AND no man who had any part in helping Delano Roosevelt get the United States into it has enough sense to WIN ANYTHING.
If Roosevelt were not BELOW the biological level at which the concept of honor ENTERS the mind, below the biological level at which human beings can CONCEIVE the existence of such a thing as HONOR, that liar would go out on to the steps of the American Capitol and commit hara-kiri to atone for the evils he has wrought on the American people.
And I say it. Here's my John Hancock.
Ezra Pound speaking from Rome, speaking as an American citizen, and hoping to God there are still some Americans left as distinguished from IMPORTATIONS.
#22 (April 6, 1942) U. S. (B27) DESTRUCTION
Ezra Pound speaking in the name of a little sanity and human intelligence. The mere distruction of vast amount of goods, tools, ships, etc. solves NO problem, save the temporary, artificial and man-made problem of: GLUT on the market.
It does NOT solve the market problem as a whole. The mere absence of GLUT does NO good either to marketer, maker or would-be buyer if the absence of GLUT is accompanied by the absence of everything else, or even of nearly everything else.
Sumner Welles and company have, I admit, opened up a market for tankers. Anybody who can make tankers can now sell them. IF he is con
? tent to receive Morgenthau dollars as recompense, regardless of what the Kike dollar will buy. The continuance of destruction does NOT remedy the effects of destruction.
You have lent some more "Money" as you call it to Chile, a country notoriously in default. The confessions of a bond-salesman, an informative work, written by an author who had learned very little from his own tribulations, might be reprinted. The author was pretty much of an ass, but an intelligent reader might derive benefit from his revelations. The Loeb Chart of Plenty, the Chart of United States potential production has just been reprinted here. That shows the opportunity that the United States once HAD. Shows the abundance that might have been if Lehman's damn son-in-law had never been born, or if the American people had had sense enough to keep him and his likes OUT of the American Treasury, and if our lunacy commissions were more effective. NOW the American money system is cuckoo. It is dishonest. It is unethical, it is blitheringly idiotic, and every man fit to be called human knows it.
There are simple means of remedying it. Had they been applied, you would not now be at war. Applying them now will not mend all the harm already done by Kuhn, Cohen, and Company to the American people, but the LONGER you put off starting, the worse rotted the whole country will be by the financial syphilis, whose out-in-front chief protractor is Franklin Delano.
And NO war promises have ever been kept by usurers' governments, not since Cain took a pot shot at Abel. IF the monetary reformers IN the United States of America don't get busy NOW, the opportunities offered 'em at the end of the war will be NIL.
If you can't learn from England's experience in homes for heroes, and war veterans trying to sell matches in the gutters of the Strand, after the last war, then God help you.
? A system wherein the public is MILKED and bilked of TWO dollars for every dollar spent by the government is not the way to win either a war or a peace.
And the usury (now the Warburg) system is as old as the gold brick wheeze. The money system practiced by Monty Norman, and by Baruch's fireside cronies is the system of claiming MORE than there is.
The CLAIMS are printed on paper (in the old days they were printed on metal), they are also partly printed on paper, and those forms filled in with ink.
Twenty dollars printed on a gold piece will NOT buy eggs on a desert raft, where no eggs are. It is as impotent to get tungsten out of grass in your back yard, as is a claim for 20 bucks printed on a Treasury note.
The value of money, as Aristotle observed, is determined by what it will BUY.
Hence, the howls about INFLATION. I'll say inflation. Baruch will NOT want inflation until he has got out money and put it into something else, or until he is two jumps ahead of the public in unloading a dying currency like the British STERLING, and getting into Pesos or [some thing able to rise if anything in the western hemisphere] can be considered as rising or promising.
OVER a hundred years of stealing and cheating the South Americans is NOT [the] basis for lasting delight. Morgenthau's government can pump money OUT of the AMERICAN people and spend it on Brazilian Ambassadors, it can LEND it to insolvent countries, who have neither the intention nor the capacity to REPAY it.
The banks can UNLOAD some of the bonds onto suckers, of whom the United States seems to possess a super-Loeb-chart supply. CHEAP agricultural products can be BOUGHT in South America and dumped
? into North America to the ruin of North American farmers so long as the ships will carry the stuff. BUT you can not get tungsten or even petroleum out of the carcasses of Brazilian ambassadors.
In fact your chief purchases in South America seem to be GOVERNMENTS, and you have yourself got more government than you can use.
You are tied up to Moscow and you have not yet the faintest conception of what that union means. You are tied up to England in a somewhat de pressing hour. BUT the knot either may or may not prove a slip knot or noose. When the strangulation becomes excessively painful, Winston's name may be spelled PAUL REYNAUD.
You should keep an open eye on these possibilities. I know Franklin has his EYE on Australia and on Madagascar and on the African gold coast the Belgian Congo, Liberia, and the whatnots.
BUT the dawg in the fable also had his eye on the meat, reflected meat in the water. The aqueous metaphor may be invidious.
If I start on all the whatnots and the might have beens, this talk may start gettin' depressin'.
God Almighty, you go get out your readin' books. They say no man knows more than his grandad. If you can't learn about money from Jackson, Adams (I mean John Adams) and Van Buren, I dunno when you are I going to start learning to read. Of course, very few people HAVE read any history and it will become increasingly difficult for you to get the real books. Henry Adams' Life of Gallatin cost 35 dollars last time I heard: and was out of print, nacterly, at that time. So I don't even know what is in it. But you MUST someday either DIE or learn the nature of money.
? I told you about that chap in a prison camp, writin' to ME for some of my books on economics. Seemed to me a bit late. But anyhow, he is still livin'. You CAN read about money in a Gefangenenlager, but you can't read about it in Davy Jones s locker. You can NOT. When are you startin?
INTEREST on money. When does it become a title to what don't exist ? When can you divide the fruits of nature and Labor?
You can divide 'em AFTER the harvest. England, by REFUSIN' to put that into law, is now losing India. Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Bombay tomorrow. CAUSE she would collect taxes before the harvest. Farmer hadn't got any money. Even TITHES can not be paid before harvest, so Hindoo had to borrow MONEY from the bunyah, the kike, to PAY taxes, and got more and more into debt.
DEBT. Debt, or the white man's burden. The people of the United States may be fairly low in the scale. I doubt if they are much lower than others, but your Washington government still HOPES that South American Indians are and WILL STAY sufficiently ignorant of how bank swindles are swoggled, to keep a gang of theives above water, for the next twenty years.
The last hope of [the] North American war party is a victory in South America.
#23 (April 9, 1942) U. S. (B28) INDECISION
That yaller hound Dawg Franklin Roosevelt was complainin' the other day about "indecision" or people favorin' indecision. I trust there is nothin' Undecided about my position.
? I think Roosevelt ought to be jailed, if a committee of doctors thinks him responsible for his actions, and I think he ought to be in a high walled gook house, or insane asylum if he is NOT.
And I do not belong to that romantic school of writers who think lunatics are interestin' or that their characters are necessarily more admirable than those of plain low down crooks.
I trust this statement is perfectly DECIDED, and that Lord Halifax will not get any more free feeds with Finkelstein. To have conspired to bring down the United States to a level where Finkelstein can get by the Ellis Island or other port authorities on ANY excuse whatever is to deserve ILL of the American people.
And I think Mr. Morgenthau is outside Sing Sing, through an IMPERFECTION, or indecision or lack of foresight on the part of our national legislators. I trust there is nothin' undecided about that statement EITHER.
I do like to be CLEAR. SOVEREIGNTY inheres in the right to issue money, and the American sovereignty belongs by LAW to the people, and their representatives in CONGRESS have the right to issue money and determine the value thereof. And one hundred and twenty MILLION suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this "DECIDED law," and have been DIDDLED since along about the time Abe Lincoln was getting himself bumped off. Since then the people OUTSIDE Nebrasky and Dakota have been signally slack about demanding a legal GOVERNMENT of our country. AND there is NO time like the present to STOP being such asses as the American people have been for the past 80 years, or 79 years or whatever.
THAT is the first point.
The point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of high officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists,
? and not by a hand picked set of JUDGES hired to support illegality. BUT the swindles performed by the present administration should be ANALYZED carefully while there is still some faint memory left among us as to what the United States Constitution once was. The American nation will never win a war or a peace or anything more than the support of a few BRIBED South American ambassadors and bought governments, as long as the Frankfurter, Lehman, Morgenthau, Roosevelt amalgamation is settin' on , the top of our government, not if the war goes on FORTY years; you won't win it with that set of Kikettes running the nation, and the treasury acting like one huge running sore. And I haven't the latest items, I have only some old reports signed by the mute in the treasury. I use the term mute in its technical, its highly technical, significance.
I trust I am bein' clear and decided. I objected to having the United States governed by British espionage service.
I object to having it governed by secret committees who have NO responsibility for the government and NONE by law to the people. I trust I am being DECIDED.
AND I do NOT want the United States to lose Hawaii. I do not much hanker to have us become a race of cheats and thieves makin' war (de facto) on the South American people for the sake of a job lot of loan sharks, but that may be beside the immediate question. A government worthy of the name from 1932 onward WOULD have made sure of the Caribbean defenses, instead of dragging Japan into war.
That is the sort of thing that I incline to regard with disfavor. I mean the neglect of what is near, for the sake of attempting to starve out some far distant nation in the interest of a kike-like Sassoon, or some other hook- nosed exotic. I am not flattering some of the so-called old timers. The stock broker is NOT my ideal. He is NOT a sport. A poker player plays with his own money; if he loses, he loses. A man who buys a lottery
? ticket takes his chance with the other purchasers of lottery tickets, neither gambles with the bread of the people.
Hence the old disparagement or contempt for stock jobbers, long away back when there still was some perception of ethics, and men were supposed to LOOK at the consequences of their acts, before thinking they were being both honest and clever. This remark will make me exceedingly unpopular among the American rich, if any of 'em become aware of my saying it. There are various devious and twisty ways of arguing about the uses of short selling, etc. , none of 'em, NONE of 'em would cut any ice with a jury of IMPARTIAL and disinterested men sufficiently intelligent to understand the question. NONE of 'em have any ethical weight. A century ago a congressman could rise to the creation of such a phrase as "a very undigested system of ethics. "
That is what the stockbrokers have mostly got wrong with 'em.
Except those who say frankly that they are predatory ANIMALS, and want to rob and predate. Well, that predatory spirit is NOT inspirin' Europe at this present moment. Certain primitive types go out of fashion, one might almost believe in social progress, the cave man, the robber baron, etc. are not in the front line. They are relegated to history. And anyone interested in the theory of historic PHASE might by now lay a conjecture as to whether the old Wall Street ideal of robbin' the widdys and orphans by means of stock deals, and rigged markets etc. , may not be driftin' OUT of the picture.
EUROPE is on. Europe is distinctly ON to the speculation racket. On to what it does to a country, how it injures the plain common people.
Hence of course Mr. Eden's war. Mr. Churchill's war, Mr. Roosevelt's WAR, and the support or pursuit [or at least the tail end] CHASE of that war by six hundred renters of bench room in the British Westminster Parliament. An assorted set of skin games; sort of palm' out in the bright
? lexicon of European Youth, in this the year XX of the Fascist Era. ALL in favor of the men who want to do an honest day's work either physical or mental, or by using skill that combines both the labor of hand and brain, and git for it a wage that will support at least a man, his wife and two children. I said two children MINIMUM, cause if two people don't reproduce two people, the race DIMINISHES and you get invaded: as the United States has been invaded by VERMIN, among whom the Rothschild, and Sassoon, and Warburg, are more deadly than syphilis.
The danger to the United States as a system of government is NOT from Japan, but from Jewry, and whether that invasion has been absolutely SUCCESSFUL, having been gradual since 1863, but accelerated since Taft was eased out of the White House.
Waaal, that remains to be seen. But if the remains of the AMERICAN settlers population, if the remains of the races that got there and made the country don't git into action shortly, then the United States of America will register one K. O. or Knock Out. And it will be pretty right as decisive as any executive can desire. Possibly the LAST chance for the American SYSTEM of government will occur in the oncoming Autumn.
Ezra Pound trying to tell you. The danger is not that you WILL BE invaded, it is that you HAVE BEEN invaded.
#24 (April 12, 1942) U. K. (B26) COMIC RELIEF
I came alongside a COMIC paper the other day, English of course. It was ten or twelve days old, that is, the DATE antedated the day I read it by 10 or 12 days, via Lisbon. But in another sense it was "Old"; it might have been the TIMES for March 1912, so far as the naked eye could perceive. And I first groaned "how LONG can they keep on saying it? " Then I hit an article about Italy, "Voices of Fascist ITALY. " And my face
? was wreathed in smiles, I declined to hand over the paper to a friend, I wanted the cream for myself, precisely for this broadcast, which will be delayed into April or mebbe MAY, 'cause I have more serious communications to make to you. But some day or other I shall read out my notes on the "Old Thunder er," old thunderer still mousin' along.
I'll probably read those notes some day when there is a lull, some day when you ain't losin' a Hong Kong, or a Singapore, or Rangoon, or Bombay or Calcutty. That will be after I have remitted the museum piece, the evidence copy from Printing House, repaired square to its owner, who is a collector of such things. Of course the nature of the object bein' the same, I shan't have to say anything much new. I mean anything I hadn't already said 30 years ago in 1912 about the venemous nature and dangerousness to the people of that frowsy old paper.
Ellerrnan Jew influence didn't cure it. AND of course like all prestidigitators the Times takes the eye OFF the immediate, geographically, spatially, raumlich, visible object.
The Times does NOT tell you about the conditions in the collieries [and] potteries, what were distressed areas before this war was got goin', nothing about the people who petitioned from Coventry for example. NO the Times don't bring us much news of England, except insofar as it shows us a state of mind.
No, no, the Times tells us about Italy. That is an accident, 'cause of course the Times was printed to tell you about ITALY, and you are such mugs you believe it. The special correspondent, NO raumlich, or spatial or geographic address given, not his lodge number or his kahal cabala indication. I think he is a subjected Aryan, from the writin'. I have met Englanders of his mental calibre.
? Wall, he starts off, and somewhere in the . very first sentence he sez "the maintainance of war sentiment in Italy becomes an increasingly hard problem. "
Oh, is THAT so ? sez the aristocrat, wrinklin' up his nose with amusement.
So I continue readin' the tidbits:
"A SINISTER image HAUNTS the rulers of Italy. It portrays (I'spose in some kind of language an image can portray, but I ain't yet seen an IMAGE portrayin'; if the word portray means to paint a portrait. But let us pass the Times writer choice of words. ) It PORTRAYS Britain emerging from the present struggle impoverished but still sound and strong. It portrays America turning her mighty industry . . . and SO forth.
Waaal, now really. If some of the Sassoon's last opium cargoes got toted up from what is now Shonanko, into the Printing House Square or Holland Park West, or wherever, there may be an IMAGE portrayin'. But the only reaction to America having an industry I have read was one about the multiplication of bed bugs; that was considered beneath the dignity of Rome radio, but might in time be found to be the only adequate reply to such nonsense.
As to Britain's FUTURE might, you git "420," quattro cento venti; the Italian penny comic and you will find what Italy is FEELING and thinking; during the 1914 unpleasantness "420" used to bring weekly pleasure to thousands with its "IMAGES" of Franz Josef. That is now what Italy THINKS about Roosevelt and England. And as for being strong but impoverished, there are still tender hearts, NO longer anglophile in general; but having traces of friendship for personal friends IN England and they have been known to wonder whether people who had 1000 sterling per annum will after this war have 100, and those
? that had 100, whether they will have 20 left 'em or the purchasing power of 20 pounds per annum left to their credit.
And IMPOVERISHMENT is not strength. Neither is the loss of your eastern possessions and the British Broadcasting Company view that Malta is a (textually) "LONELY OUTPOST of empire," used to be umbelicus in my time; in the days of my heady youth.
After the comic prelude of the anonymous "special correspondent" not even alleged to be over in Lisbon, probably in Kensington West or South West, after the comic prelude he gets a bit dirty: usual mean streak of a man with a weak case. Then he talks about Apuleius and so forth. Dis liking Italian broadcasts.
Why don't he stand up to the broadcasts from Rome transmitted in English ? Why is he such an abject moral and intellectual coward that he DARE not face the arguments about money that go over this air from me, as an independent speaker, and from the REGULAR staff speakers, whenever they touch on the problem of making money by FOUNTAIN pen scribblin' instead of doing an honest day s work?
Why do ALL the British papers and ALL the British Broadcasting Company bunkosteers keep so gingerly OFF all the ground where there is ideological COMBAT ? Worse funk-holers [than] the Whore Behsha
WHERE are the Coventry marchers ? Where are the Green Shirts ? Suppressed of course [This] visible image EMBODYING thought on the hoof was prohibited before the Jews got you to fighting In the whole of your rotten parasitic ranks the whole of the British Broadcasting Company hireling company NO ONE dares and no one wants and no one would be there if they did want or dare to TOUCH the real issues.
Monopoly of gold components of your gold exchange, nature of money, how it is issued, how the people are bled, state of health in Your ISLAND.
? Now to get down to brass tacks, to answer that ass in the Times. No ONE here expects you to do ANYTHING in this war save to LOSE it. From Dunkirk to Dakar, with at most a few successes over your onetime ALLIES. No one expects you to do anything with or IN this war save to LOSE it. BOTH to Germany and to Roosevelt.
Roosevelt portrayin' (if you like the word) JEWRY No one expects you to do anything in or with this war but to lose it. If that expectation is an illusion it nevertheless EXISTS so that when the gent in the Fly Fisher s dub writes his next article, let him say that ENGLAND expects to emerge impoverished but fierce as [the] stone Trafalgar Square fountain lion of Briton, not as a stuffed lion skin, used as a bed mat.
But fer Gawd's sake let him lay off saying this is what ITALY looks to. Italy just ain't got that kind of jimjams. NO ONE here is surprised one atom at your fighting the war badly, from Dunkirk to Dakar, from Hong Kong to Calcutty. One is mildly set to wonder WHY you are fighting Europe instead of fighting Marx and P. Spencer, and Karl Marx and Lyons, and the one hundred enemies that had got you by the short hairs: and got you hog-tied BEFORE the war started. Over DANZIG, allegedly.
Over a year ago a man of the former social age, an international tennis ace, unsuspectible of political passions, the kind that jokes about these things, said his wife said to him, "WHY ever do they (meaning the English) FIGHT the Germans ? Don't they know that is all the Germans CAN do ? Why do they go to WAR? "
Now firstly, the lady was inexact, as anyone who has read enough German philosophy, or heard Johnnie Bach's music, or seen Albrecht Durer's painting, or knows the work of the Frobenius Forschung's Institute KNOWS. The Germans have quite a lot of assorted abilities.
? But the question SUBSISTS ? WHY did the people of England LET them selves get catched by the short hairs and HOG-tied, and led into losing the eastern parts of their empire, and getting allied to red Russia?
Let the TIMES go into THESE things--TELL PAPA! WHY did the Times, which LOST YOU Hong Kong, and Singapore, and Rangoon KEEP the REAL news and the real thought of the past 50 years (yaaas, not 20 but 50) years OUT of its columns. What causes that?
Well my time at this microphone is drawin' to a close for this evening and I haven't leisure to go into the other columns of that issue of the Old Thunderer. But when you are sad and downhearted, git out your back issues of the Times Newspaper of London, if they haven't been confis cated by the dog-catcher to make biscuit for miner's children, and lull yourself with Tennysonian legends, such as "Dutch leadership in the Indies," rivaling that of Luzon, resistance, all merry and bright.
I do hate to return that stray copy of the Old Thunderer to its owner. Lord knows when I shall see yet another one, and having my head chuck full of things I want to emit to you, it will be a long time before I again animadvert to the paleozoic habits of your island crustaceans.
#25 (April 13, 1942) U. S. (B20) QUESTION OF MOTIVE
I do not expect perfect and COMplete comprehension of these discourses on the part of all of my audience. I should be content if I get over even a small part of what I am driving at, and WHY I am drivin'. For over 30 years I have been driving at some of the same objective objectives.
I thought in 1908 and before then that a nation's literature IS important. State of a nation's literature, is important. Words, means of communication, literature, the most condensed form of communication,
? communication of the most basic and essential facts, ideas necessary for leading the good life, registered in the best books.
And man's duty, as soon as he is fully a man, is to keep those books, to keep that tradition available. Keep it handy. And the public: American and English, but for the moment let me stick to the United States of America. [The] American public [is] rather like that lunatic in Pea's novel Moscardino, chap in gook house who just wouldn't believe that there could be enough microbes on the back of a postage stamp to knock a man cold. Thought it was doctors' fables, in fact thought the doctors had heard it from other gooks in the asylum.
Waal, the Americans and the English just couldn't believe that it made any difference what a man or a nation put inside its head via its reading.
Hence I was supposed to exaggerate when I bust out against such dung heaps of perfumed pus as the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's and Scribner's, as they were in the year 1900 and ceased not essentially to be as long as they lasted. The stink of stale perfume contains the deadly gasses which finally poison. No language could quite cover the loathing I feel for a Sedgewick, but it doubtless seems exaggerated. Later in London I did a sottisier, trying to make a few people see why the printed matter on sale in that city would finally kill off the inhabitants; witness Dunkirk.
The XIX stinking century saw what is called an advance in science. People learned that bacilli can kill. Prophylaxis entered the general mind, but an older concept got knocked OUT of the popular mind. It had been possibly once a good concept, but it had decayed. It was what is or was called a theological concept. The age, called the age of faith, thought a wrong idea could bring evil.
? In the Middle Ages they got a bit fantastic, got their eyes off the here and now, and thought the bad idea would land a man in perdition, eternal flames, purgatory, or whatever.
Then something got tangled, and the people got fanatic, and heretics were burned and so forth. And M. Voltaire tried to get that untangled, worked all his life against the cruelties of fanaticism, was called an atheist; which he was NOT. I strongly suspect that almost no heretics were burnt, at least not at the beginning, except those who interfered with the usury racket, those whose ideas were seen as inimical to the usury racket, leaving out the question. But so far as I know no research has ever been done along these lines. I am speaking of heretics proper, ideology, not people who went into witch persecutions.
The idea that a WRONG idea could damage people here and now was perhaps not fully developed. The British theory was that free speech was a blow hole. Let 'em TALK and they will DO nothing. Hyde Park corner, etc.
Gus Flaubert and I myself, and diverse others, includin' if you must go so far back, Mencius and Confucius, saw something worse than just one BAD idea, and that was the corruption of the whole and TOTAL means of communication of all ideas whatsoever. The corruption of language, the destruction of all precision in terminology, which takes man back and down to the status of beasts, or what beasts are SUPPOSED to be; namely, unable to communicate with one another.
Yet even animals, packs of wolves, and wild dogs do seem to under stand each other, and to collaborate. Very well, I set up and gradually got some ideas as to combat tin' this universal gonorrhea of language and this rotting of ALL Printed means of communication, monthlies, dailies, weeklies, mercantilist publishing system.
? All of which has bloody well dished and ditched the pore old British iniquitous empire. Too late to save that now. And anyhow, I am speaking to the United States of America. Forty years ago Brooks Adams made a quite good study of England, foreseein' she would bust up, and part go to the United States of America and part go to Germany with, if I remember it right, Japan gettin' a look in. Nacherly VERY few people read Mr. Adams. I only know of ONE Englishman who has quoted him.
And I am not enamoured of retrospect. I ought to have been given Brooks Adams when I was havin' a shot at American history in the University of Pennsylvania--that's 40 years ago. Might have accelerated me in giving him a little publicity. In fact ALL history teachin' in American universities ought to have got hold of Brooks Adams THEN, 1897-1900, 1903 his best volumes.
His weak an' pindlin' young brother Henry was not the man that his elder brother Brooks was. Brooks seeing what had happened in history, seem' it pretty clearly, foreseeing what would happen in HIS time, but not seeing beyond that. Knowing that an age of faith, or ages of faith had existed, but did not see the next one. Livin', you may say, in his own phase. Foreseein' the down flop of England, that is, of the Empire, noting symptoms of England's decline, which the English remained deaf to, and blind to.
BUT not foreseeing the Italian rise, not foreseeing the change of phase: from material to volitional.
Reactin' against John Quincy Adams' judized form of religion. I forget where he notes that, maybe in the preface to his book on New England.
ANYhow trying to figure out where John Quincy Adams, whom he greatly admired, had gone off the rails, not gittin' back to his great grandad John Adams, the father of his country and inventor to some extent of General Washington.
? Waaal, can't get it all into one discourse. But if there is still some campus not yet invaded by the hosts of Belial and Jewry not wholly squashed under the dung-flow from Wall Street and Washington, I suggest you start taking notes and figures. Figure out this affair of the ruin of language, the falsification of all reports in the well paid magazines, the falsification of newsprint. And ALSO the attack on historic knowledge. The rise of TALMUDIC schools, quite UNNOTICED by the high class periodicals. Note when America began to be filled with talmudic schools, not listed and having big sign boards.