The moment calls for realism of a kind more real than you are
accustomed
to.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
I have protested against the interruption of communications.
I wish more Americans had been hard-headed enough to stay over here in Europe and try to speak to America.
I wish that during the twenty and more sad years that followed the Versailles Treaty more Americans had had the patience to learn what was going on in Europe, instead of which, even the better class of journalists were told to HOLD down, hold down on even the rather superficial stuff they usually sent you, let alone on the stuff deliberately colored to suit the real or supposed prejudice of the American newspaper readers.
Now Italy was an open book. I have seen violently prejudiced partisans come to Italy and be much disappointed at not finding food for their polemics. Very few impartial witnesses visited these shores, or at any rate very few who made use of the pen and the typewriter. Serious correspondents, in particular one English correspondent of a highly esteemed British paper, now extinct, complained of the way his reports were doctored. He said to me: "I have to watch every sentence. If they find a single phrase that they can twist or cut out and use as a headline, they do it. "
American views of Europe have, I think none of you will deny it--that is, you won't deny it if you stop and think over it--American views of Europe have been influenced, if not colandered thru British newsprint, and British magazine or weekly paper publications. Germany invited the young to come over. Various people went into Germany and tried to report on factors of German life OTHER than those which Mr. Welles brought into his foreground. After the first flush of pure idealism, days of John Read and Linc Steffens, Russia notably ceased to invite careful
? inspection. Even Mr. William Bullitt began to have doubts as to the humanity of Russian state administration.
Now admittin' that I may have old fashioned views, admittin' that I may at this moment be speaking to an America that no longer exists, to a type of American that is almost as extinct as the bison or buffalo, would it occur to any of you that Mr. Welles might be inveighing against a Germany that is no longer the country he visited? He said nothin' about the homestead reforms. There WAS the militarist Germany of the Kaiser, there was the Germany of Mr. Stinnes and Thyssen, but there also IS the Germany of the young fellows who now come down to Rapallo for holidays. God knows they have probably earned 'em. No, no I have NOT spoken of Germany in the past. I tried to speak of the Italy that I live in. I tried to convey a knowledge of specific facts, which if not sufficient to prove my particular estimate of the DIRECTION of Italy were at least components that should have been taken into consideration by those responsible for the U. S. relations with Italy.
In EVERY country there are two or more forces; one dispersive or shiftless and, at least in a happy era, another constructive. ANY constructive or positive idea is now labeled propaganda. There is an enormous prejudice vs. what is called propaganda. Yet almost any valid and serious statement IS propaganda in the best sense of the term, The modern world has been fed narcotic. The deadly propaganda IS precisely the shiftless, is precisely the stuff that has built up the prejudice against ALL order, and all coherence.
It is the easiest propaganda to write, and to distribute. It does not have to preach at all. It says nichivo, it says, what does it matter, it says let's be funny, let's jitterbug. It is hard to be heard against it. Any tendency to discount it, anybody who makes any attempt to withstand it, gets called a blue nose. Liberty is not a right but a duty. Now what do you know about Italians who can read that on a wall? Nothin'.
? A new concept of civics has been built up in Europe. The old mercantilist life went on, violently and unscrupulously. You won't look at the record. You won't count the cost of having your ideas after a TIME lag. Mazzini never got into the American curriculum.
The incidence of this war into a whole series of wars has had very little publicity. I wish to God I could meet Mr. Welles or any other American who wanted to get the thing straight. Mussolini and Hitler are not enemies of the people. You sabotage a constructive effort, the effort both of and for a new generation, by the process of going on with OLD wars. Yes, economic aggression OUGHT to be checked. I don't believe it can be wiped out all at once, but it might be reduced to a minor tension, to a tension compatible with making trade agreements, such as both Germany and Mr. Welles advertise.
BUT there is the twin brother, or perhaps it would be better to say the PAST tense, the aorist, or continuing past tense, of economic aggression. Namely, ECONOMIC OPPRESSION. What about economic oppression?
Economic aggression IS the prelude to economic oppression.
Now what is the U. S. record for economic oppression of weaker nations? What is the U. S. record, or even Mr. Welles' own record in the matter of economic OPPRESSION of, specifically Italy? . Somewhere, and some time, we should go into this matter, if Mr. Welles or anyone else in the U. S. A. wants to clear up the tangle of political ideology, and of geopolitical tensions. Or if Mr. Agar be so inclined. Let them put their cards on the table.
There are other matters of detail: Does the destruction of the world's historic monuments constitute economic aggression? Does the scattering of explosive pens and pencils, to be picked up by three and five year old children, constitute economic aggression? Are these parts of a coherent
? program or do they occur in some world whereto Mr. Welles has been denied access? Are we to suppose that NO one is responsible for the marks of the non-aggressive style in Mr. Welles' cosmos?
#89 (May 22, 1943) U. S. (D4) IN THE WOODSHED
Before paintin' the picture of the nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed, I think we ought to be clear about Mr. Welles' intentions.
He was talkin' of economic aggression at Toledo, Ohio. That was ten days or a fortnight ago, so I suppose the American people have already forgotten it. Our U. S. A. memory is brief, it is fleeting. Hardly a man is now alive who can remember what Sumner said at Toledo. "Bitter experience of two wars, destroyin' so much which is beyond price, and which has taken the patient toil of centuries to create. " Sounds like as if he was talking of utterly irreplaceable historic monuments, which aren't really objects of warfare. NOT essential objects of warfare. They don't sink any merchantmen.
I want Mr. Welles or someone in authority to sort out TWO kinds of acts. Those having to do with this war, and those intended to embitter mankind, and make way for the next general massacre.
Who wanted the conflict, who has extended the conflict, who has embittered the conflict, for fear that the desire for peace might break out? I mean out might become effective too soon for the war makers' comfort.
A young Italian returned from America, knowing the race tracks, and stock exchange and various lines of hard business says to me:
Aw what is the use of your talking. Take a fellow gettin' four hundred dollars a month, and his wife two hundred and fifty, what do
? they want with peace? They might have been gettin' twenty eight dollar between 'em. TELL them, there will be a crisis in ten years' time, and what of it?
That is undoubtedly the hinterland of several districts of the American mind at this moment. Bitter experience of two wars. Well, I remember the old Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, settin' 'round the lobby of the old Mint in Philadelphia. Down there on Chestnut Street with the front of a classic temple. Before it went up to near Columbia Avenue, next to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, to be just one more factory among factories. But nobody talked THEN about the war that the United States LOST.
That is, I tell you, and I go on a tellin' you THAT WAR that the U. S. lost in 1863, and that was followed by the assassination of Lincoln. THAT war is the war that you ought to be winning. Right now.
NOT after, not next to, not waitin' till this war has destroyed the best mosaics in Europe, and shot up a few hundred more or ten thousand more school children, for the [sake] of getting' a bonus. That was the war FOR economic aggression, the war conducin' to economic oppression. And it got very little publicity, or rather it has had waning and paling publicity. Calhoun said something about it. Lincoln knew that it was in process. He said something about the internal enemy.
Now I think the U. S. has been hooked into sabotaging the clean forces of Europe, just as the North was hooked into hostilities against the States that stood out for state rights. I think Mr. Welles himself has been hooked by propaganda. God knows he had a chance to see things in Europe that perhaps I had not. I mean he had high and official contacts, but he didn't set 'round for so long. He came the last time, on a mission. He learned, I mean he must have learned a number of things about England, that were not confided to me, for example. And yet, I don't think he has the full picture. I never much thought, until his speech at
? Toledo, that he was over here to get the full picture. The German capitalists whom he was a cursin' seem to me to be the very people who went OUT of power in Germany. I mean I think that part of his speech is out of date.
If you are trying to be fair, whatever facts you can heap up, I mean facts not mere rumors, to support Mr. Welles' thesis, you got to, I mean you should if you aim at justice, you should take count of another set of facts which I see as standing to total opposition to those Mr. Welles drug into his foreground.
Every social amelioration, every clause of the homestead laws in Germany, every act in Italy put thru [with] the intention of getting a better life for the mass of the people, ought to be sacred.
I mean that part of the Nazi revolution and of the Fascist revolution. Fascist revolution started it first, every part of that new social order, which is the continuation of the strife for the rights of man, of OUR own four revolutions, ought to be sacred. We ought to defend it, just as we ought to defend habeas corpus, and our right to life, liberty and the rest of it. No real liberty without economic liberty. And NO maintainable liberty that does not recognize that the free man has DUTIES. That was the bed rock of Mazzini's sainthood, or the key to his quite impractical historic opposition.
And when I cite "Liberty is not a right but a duty," as I did the other day to a young undersecretary, he opened up; he had been wondering what sort of an animal he had in front of him. And he said: "Yes, THAT is the real Mussolini. "
It is NO use puttin' up false horizons. War is too serious. If war has a use, it might be that it destroys false horizons. It never destroys ENOUGH false horizons, and in the heat of the conflict other stage sets are rigged up. Meet Europe, meet Mr. Europe. Something has happened
? in Europe since Kruger was considered a Titan. But there is the question of TIME in these things, the question of times.
People in Italy ask WHY Mr. Welles chose that particular date to tell us about non-aggression. I can't look into his inner mind. There is in Europe a distinct memory of Mr. Welles as photographed in a French government office with several French politicians, in front of a MAP. Well now, many Europeans took that map at that TIME as indication of a distinct plan, or at least daydream of . . . eh . . . eh . . . of aggression. Of course Mr. Welles may reply that the map didn't mean, or perhaps that it didn't STOP at . . . economic aggression. We do need a clear terminology. To Europe, at that time, that map looked awfully aggressive.
Would Mr. Welles specify? At the time he said he just hadn't noticed the map, it was just part of French government scenery.
How, Sumner?
#90 (May 23, 1943) U. K. (D6) SOBERLY
The moment is serious, just as serious for you as it is for anyone else. For twenty years you have fought against shadows. And now a real danger affronts you. In fact several enemies confront you. Quite solid dangers. You have been stirred up against a Germany that did not exist. For two decades your press has conducted a campaign of defamation against Italy. The campaign of lies does no good to anyone. You included. One expects you to be a bit up in the bottle. Perhaps it will be easier, or more nearly possible for you to hear in such a moment than when you are in the doldrums.
The moment calls for realism of a kind more real than you are accustomed to. Let us take down the stage set. It is very easy to fall into
? rhetoric. It is very easy for people to be swayed by cliche? . No one is immune from THAT danger. Least of all men who write in a hurry.
YOU are threatened. You are threatened by the Russian METHODS of administration. Those methods are not theoretic. The theory of Bolschevism has never constituted a danger to England. Mr. Churchill knows quite as much about Bolshevik METHODS of administration as anyone else. Mr. Churchill has in the past expressed himself quite clearly on that subject. Nothing equivocal about Winston's words when referring to Russia under Bolshevik rule. The mass graves at Katyn surprised NO one.
BUT the Russian system of administration in Iran, for example, is not your sole danger. It is, in fact, so far from being your sole danger that I have, in over two years of talk over this radio, possibly never referred to it before.
Usury has gnawed into England since the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on Earl's estates; usury against the feudal nobility. Then there were attacks on the common land, filchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a usury system, an international usury system, from Cromwell's time, ever increasing. That system gave you your slums. It brought in that civic leprosy that has made England a byeword. It has taken the shock of this war, three years of war to jog your memory, to bring your slums up again into headlines.
The usury system does NO nation good, it does no nation any good whatsoever. It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make NO use of nations in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them and use the worst as flails against the best.
It is the usurer's game to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit.
? A ruined Europe gives you no market. A ruined England will give no market to the new usury control.
Systems grow rotten and die. You have thrown Poland, had thrown half of Poland, to Russia, not in any attempt to save Poland. With the new Russia you have no longer any need of that particular dagger thrust into Germany's vitals. Russia constitutes a quite sufficient counterpoise to German force, now that they have a common frontier.
Let me interrupt myself at this point, to be perfectly clear as to my own convictions. EVERY social reform that has gone into effect in Germany and Italy should be defended. And the best men in England know that as well as I do. The time of calumny is past, and its passing should be seen very clearly. It should be seen very clearly IN England. Colonial empires should be administered by those nations who can best TEACH how such empires can and should be administered. That sentence perhaps needs a whole talk to itself.
The usury system rots the earth. It is a malady dangerous to ALL people. As your own slums can testify. The usury system has ruined millions of poor devils in England just as it has brought misery to millions in India. And that system is shifting its central. That shift represents NO gain to your American allies. It merely means an increase of vigor, it means a new and more violent infraction of America's 120 millions, and that infection will do YOU no good. Your middle class will be engulfed, London will feel the blow as Vienna felt the blow after the last war. That is to say, the glitter of scum, the feverish distribution of tidbits among a privileged few, and among the art world surrounding "society" will decline.
The nomadic parasites will shift out of London and into Manhattan. And this will be presented under a camouflage of national slogans. It will be represented as an American victory. It will not be an AMERICAN victory. The moment is serious. The moment is also confusing. It is
? confusing because there are two sets of concurrent phenomena, namely, those connected with fighting this war, and those which sow seeds for the next one. Your leading men ought to see that. You ought to see it.
It should constitute food for reflection. For YOUR reflection. You are between two very rough millstones.
#91, FCC Transcript (May 24, 1943) U. S. [? ] [TITLE UNKNOWN]
The Italians in America will have noted the American inability to understand what Italy is, the inability to acknowledge the American debt to Italy. The average American admits that the continent was discovered by Christopher Columbus. The more cunning are disposed to believe that Columbus committed a grave error.
But seriously speaking, how many Americans have you met who know that the constructive ideas to which is due the creation of the North American Republic, the United States, were an Italian product? Does one speak at Harvard and in the other great American universities of the Leopoldien Reforms? The Tuscan history of the 18th century is almost completely ignored by the Americans. I say, "almost," advisedly. Have you met in America a man of politics who does know anything about 16th century Tuscany? Perhaps they have heard somebody speak about some painter or musician, but of the policy, the reforms--I wager-- never.
The American is disposed or was disposed to acknowledge theoretically an intellectual debt to France. Perhaps he believes that the American Revolution was due to the French revolution. This is to say that they are ignorant of the dates, also having forgotten that the French Revolution took place a decade after the end of the American revolution. The ideas
? of Leopoldo were largely experimented with under the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, in Tuscany.
The errors of exaggerations, manifest in the materialization of ideas or ideals, were also known. And his son Ferdinand went about correcting them, aided by the very same counselors who had aided his father. This movement of castigation was interrupted by the French disturbances and by the chaos brought about by the Jews, who took part in the French chaos.
One waited more than a century to continue the rectification, to continue the historical process, in the constructive sense. I do not tell you on whose part, because perhaps many among you are not yet ready to recognize these further manifestations of the Latin's genius! The more or less military gentleman Fiorello La Guardia is not possessed of the Latin spirit (genio).
The classical mentality differs from the Rooseveltian. And it seems stupid to me for one to entrust himself to a Lehman or a Morgenthau. None among these American officials possesses the Latin spirit. I would say that the Italians do well, every time they run true to their own spirit, the Italic, the Latin (spirit). I would say that they are doing well to differentiate that spirit from the Gaelic spirit. I would say that you would do very well to investigate it a bit, to search, if possible, for the causes of the confusion.
I know that your situation is difficult. The American press does not guide you and does not help you, but rather admonishes you to forget your own culture, your Italic instincts, your language, the most beautiful daughter of the mother Latin (language). Do not yield! Persevere in reading your Italian books among yourselves. Those among you who have the opportunity to get into universities, must retain their Latin culture, not looking backward, but forward.
? France did not create Latinism. And rather, I say to you, insist, persist! You are American citizens. The America of the Fathers of the Republic worshipped Latin wisdom. That America of the-- --ones has almost disappeared, forgetting the Latin wisdom. That Latinism is preserved in Italy; it manifests itself anew.
I divide this short address into different parts. I say that the Americans around you ignore the Italian tradition. You ought to educate them, and first of all you ought to educate yourselves.
I say that in observing the Americans you will note that they are anarchic, profoundly anarchic, not organized, do not apply their own inventions. When an idea is born or seems to be born, in America, that idea does not sprout in America itself. When propaganda is made on a sound idea in America, something impedes its fertilization.
For instance, the battle against gold was fought half a century ago in the United States; it was fought by the Democratic party. William Jennings Bryan was a great orator--more or less an orator with a large popular following. But he cried out to the world that humanity was being crucified on a golden cross. But he did not speak with perfect frankness. He spoke of silver (sic) instead of speaking openly of money.
All the truth, or almost all the truth, about money had been known in the United States already for a century, but Bryan did not reveal it completely. Now the world all of Europe and a large part of Asia know that the monopoly of gold and the fiction of money based on gold is an infamy an instrument used to fool the people, to strangulate all the peoples. I say that this idea has had in the past, it has had great publicity in America. But the American is slow. He has not placed high the wisdom of his best men. And the same thing with electrical experiments. You probably do not know that in 1863, a certain Loomis succeeded in sending wireless electric signals, he invented wireless telegraphy. But the Americans did nothing about it. He was considered a madman, a
? fool. The world was waiting for the Italian genius of Guglielmo Marconi, before putting into practice the possibilities of wireless transmissions.
The same thing is taking place in the political and economic spheres. And, if you wish to understand true economics, you must look outside the damned American press. You must read that which is being printed in Europe, in Italy. And for the moment it being difficult to obtain printed press, you ought to listen as much as possible to the European transmissions and the European addresses in this connection, in connection with money, with credit, with money on the basis of work, with work that you have--every one of you--residing in your brains and brawn.
Ezra Pound speaks from Rome, in a regime under which liberty is considered a duty; and where one knows that economic freedom carries with it the freedom from falling into debts.
#92 (May 25, 1943) U. S. (D5)
AND BACK OF THE WOODSHED
I am not going to go into the details of Mr. Welles' schemes; I can't in ten minutes get down to as many details as he put forth in an hour. And as for your international currency scheme, your allies in London and Mr. Keynes can, I 'spose, be counted on to put up a much more audible howl. Though whether it will be loud enough, or have any effect, remains for the chroniclers of the future.
Economic aggression. Economic oppression. Economic oppression, the past tense, and the future tense of economic aggression.
Welles admitted that the U. S. had in the past participated in the aggression. Now does he propose, or does the State Department really propose to lay off certain forms of economic oppression after this war is
? over? If so, can the State Department really assure itself or anyone else that the American business man will consent to mislay or to lay off economic aggression?
England and America made ugly, England pretty well gutted by economic oppression? By the economic aggression that has reduced England so largely to a C-3 population to national health statistics that no British government bureau dares print. When you talk of economic aggression or oppression your European hearers say: My God, their whole life, the whole life inside both those countries is one compost of economic oppression. That was what we were resisting. That was what was held over us. God knows Italy wanted to work, and to EARN economic freedom. She didn't go round weeping and asking someone to give her the earth on a platter, or any slice of the earth on a platter. She sent out her roadmakers and plowmen. No, no, by right a colonial space, land space ought to be administered by the folks who will use it.
Italy's colonies never tried to hide living conditions. Which is NOT what Mr. Welles can say for America's strange ally Russia. Vide the Stalin canal, vide all those known liquidations which lead the Christian Science Monitor to say "the thing was not such in itself as to arouse
incredulity" (or whatever the words were. I am quoting from memory, but that was the gist of it).
There is a great deal of undisputed and incontroversial evidence about Soviet Russia that makes many things "not impossible," not such as to 'rouse incredulity.
For every honest word, for every constructive statement in Mr. Welles' speech in Toledo, Italy was and IS the United States' natural ally. She was England's natural ally UNDER any system that had even a tendency toward eschewing economic oppression. She was the natural partner and guardian of one of England's main trade routes.
? Twenty years ago, when I saw Italy risin', when I saw the constructive work toward economic justice startin' in Italy, I had a wild idea, an impractical idea due to my ignorance of economic geography at that time. I say AT that time; I wish more men of my age would come out and admit that they once knew less than they now know. Mr. Welles has made a good step forward. He has talked of aggression of the selfish and unenlightened kind. Well, aggression is probably selfish, and as for economic cooperation, if Mr. Welles' little group had started thinking of economic cooperation WITH Italy ten years ago, we would most certainly not be now in bloody conflict.
And I don't think Mr. Welles is yet ready to make a dispassionate and thought-out, reasoned, analyzed, articulate statement of the fact about Italy and about Germany and about the corporate state.
I think a man in his position ought to make honest comparisons. There is, God knows, enough ground for friction, there are enough REAL contrasts of interests without building up false horizons. You don't need to slander an enemy, not when you are bombing his cities, his women and children, the noncombattants.
A man might think he had to lie about some foreign country in order to get a war started. But now the war is a goin' on. It will take more than a clear statement about either opponent to bring it to a conclusion.
Further slander or further misrepresentation of the nature of the Axis regimes is just so much waste motion. Economic collaboration. That is the front name and the last name of corporate organization. And the doin' away with the laws of God is part of the Russian program, not of the Roman program. Hang it all, a new ethics has grown up, an ethics of responsibility, of the responsibility of him that hath. The revolution goes on, under the fireworks and the polemics.
? The corporate state is a state in which representation of interests have been revived, after its lapse in the parliamentary countries. I mean to say the division of the representation is programmed to be by trades; if America went corporate, I would be MORE represented in the confederation of artists and professional men than I would be as a citizen of Montgomery county, though I would or could also be a component of both articulations. And the YOUNG men in Italy, and the Hitler Jugend have nothing whatever to do with economic aggression. That ain't the way they are geared.
The Italians are, by the way, by temperament so full of the Renaissance tradition that you will know a man for two years without finding out how he spends his time. 1 mean he is autarchic, often to a surprisin' degree, whereas freedom in the anti-Axis countries has in many cases been perverted or watered down into the one freedom, namely economically to aggress onto everyone or anyone else.
Of course Mr.
Now Italy was an open book. I have seen violently prejudiced partisans come to Italy and be much disappointed at not finding food for their polemics. Very few impartial witnesses visited these shores, or at any rate very few who made use of the pen and the typewriter. Serious correspondents, in particular one English correspondent of a highly esteemed British paper, now extinct, complained of the way his reports were doctored. He said to me: "I have to watch every sentence. If they find a single phrase that they can twist or cut out and use as a headline, they do it. "
American views of Europe have, I think none of you will deny it--that is, you won't deny it if you stop and think over it--American views of Europe have been influenced, if not colandered thru British newsprint, and British magazine or weekly paper publications. Germany invited the young to come over. Various people went into Germany and tried to report on factors of German life OTHER than those which Mr. Welles brought into his foreground. After the first flush of pure idealism, days of John Read and Linc Steffens, Russia notably ceased to invite careful
? inspection. Even Mr. William Bullitt began to have doubts as to the humanity of Russian state administration.
Now admittin' that I may have old fashioned views, admittin' that I may at this moment be speaking to an America that no longer exists, to a type of American that is almost as extinct as the bison or buffalo, would it occur to any of you that Mr. Welles might be inveighing against a Germany that is no longer the country he visited? He said nothin' about the homestead reforms. There WAS the militarist Germany of the Kaiser, there was the Germany of Mr. Stinnes and Thyssen, but there also IS the Germany of the young fellows who now come down to Rapallo for holidays. God knows they have probably earned 'em. No, no I have NOT spoken of Germany in the past. I tried to speak of the Italy that I live in. I tried to convey a knowledge of specific facts, which if not sufficient to prove my particular estimate of the DIRECTION of Italy were at least components that should have been taken into consideration by those responsible for the U. S. relations with Italy.
In EVERY country there are two or more forces; one dispersive or shiftless and, at least in a happy era, another constructive. ANY constructive or positive idea is now labeled propaganda. There is an enormous prejudice vs. what is called propaganda. Yet almost any valid and serious statement IS propaganda in the best sense of the term, The modern world has been fed narcotic. The deadly propaganda IS precisely the shiftless, is precisely the stuff that has built up the prejudice against ALL order, and all coherence.
It is the easiest propaganda to write, and to distribute. It does not have to preach at all. It says nichivo, it says, what does it matter, it says let's be funny, let's jitterbug. It is hard to be heard against it. Any tendency to discount it, anybody who makes any attempt to withstand it, gets called a blue nose. Liberty is not a right but a duty. Now what do you know about Italians who can read that on a wall? Nothin'.
? A new concept of civics has been built up in Europe. The old mercantilist life went on, violently and unscrupulously. You won't look at the record. You won't count the cost of having your ideas after a TIME lag. Mazzini never got into the American curriculum.
The incidence of this war into a whole series of wars has had very little publicity. I wish to God I could meet Mr. Welles or any other American who wanted to get the thing straight. Mussolini and Hitler are not enemies of the people. You sabotage a constructive effort, the effort both of and for a new generation, by the process of going on with OLD wars. Yes, economic aggression OUGHT to be checked. I don't believe it can be wiped out all at once, but it might be reduced to a minor tension, to a tension compatible with making trade agreements, such as both Germany and Mr. Welles advertise.
BUT there is the twin brother, or perhaps it would be better to say the PAST tense, the aorist, or continuing past tense, of economic aggression. Namely, ECONOMIC OPPRESSION. What about economic oppression?
Economic aggression IS the prelude to economic oppression.
Now what is the U. S. record for economic oppression of weaker nations? What is the U. S. record, or even Mr. Welles' own record in the matter of economic OPPRESSION of, specifically Italy? . Somewhere, and some time, we should go into this matter, if Mr. Welles or anyone else in the U. S. A. wants to clear up the tangle of political ideology, and of geopolitical tensions. Or if Mr. Agar be so inclined. Let them put their cards on the table.
There are other matters of detail: Does the destruction of the world's historic monuments constitute economic aggression? Does the scattering of explosive pens and pencils, to be picked up by three and five year old children, constitute economic aggression? Are these parts of a coherent
? program or do they occur in some world whereto Mr. Welles has been denied access? Are we to suppose that NO one is responsible for the marks of the non-aggressive style in Mr. Welles' cosmos?
#89 (May 22, 1943) U. S. (D4) IN THE WOODSHED
Before paintin' the picture of the nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed, I think we ought to be clear about Mr. Welles' intentions.
He was talkin' of economic aggression at Toledo, Ohio. That was ten days or a fortnight ago, so I suppose the American people have already forgotten it. Our U. S. A. memory is brief, it is fleeting. Hardly a man is now alive who can remember what Sumner said at Toledo. "Bitter experience of two wars, destroyin' so much which is beyond price, and which has taken the patient toil of centuries to create. " Sounds like as if he was talking of utterly irreplaceable historic monuments, which aren't really objects of warfare. NOT essential objects of warfare. They don't sink any merchantmen.
I want Mr. Welles or someone in authority to sort out TWO kinds of acts. Those having to do with this war, and those intended to embitter mankind, and make way for the next general massacre.
Who wanted the conflict, who has extended the conflict, who has embittered the conflict, for fear that the desire for peace might break out? I mean out might become effective too soon for the war makers' comfort.
A young Italian returned from America, knowing the race tracks, and stock exchange and various lines of hard business says to me:
Aw what is the use of your talking. Take a fellow gettin' four hundred dollars a month, and his wife two hundred and fifty, what do
? they want with peace? They might have been gettin' twenty eight dollar between 'em. TELL them, there will be a crisis in ten years' time, and what of it?
That is undoubtedly the hinterland of several districts of the American mind at this moment. Bitter experience of two wars. Well, I remember the old Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, settin' 'round the lobby of the old Mint in Philadelphia. Down there on Chestnut Street with the front of a classic temple. Before it went up to near Columbia Avenue, next to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, to be just one more factory among factories. But nobody talked THEN about the war that the United States LOST.
That is, I tell you, and I go on a tellin' you THAT WAR that the U. S. lost in 1863, and that was followed by the assassination of Lincoln. THAT war is the war that you ought to be winning. Right now.
NOT after, not next to, not waitin' till this war has destroyed the best mosaics in Europe, and shot up a few hundred more or ten thousand more school children, for the [sake] of getting' a bonus. That was the war FOR economic aggression, the war conducin' to economic oppression. And it got very little publicity, or rather it has had waning and paling publicity. Calhoun said something about it. Lincoln knew that it was in process. He said something about the internal enemy.
Now I think the U. S. has been hooked into sabotaging the clean forces of Europe, just as the North was hooked into hostilities against the States that stood out for state rights. I think Mr. Welles himself has been hooked by propaganda. God knows he had a chance to see things in Europe that perhaps I had not. I mean he had high and official contacts, but he didn't set 'round for so long. He came the last time, on a mission. He learned, I mean he must have learned a number of things about England, that were not confided to me, for example. And yet, I don't think he has the full picture. I never much thought, until his speech at
? Toledo, that he was over here to get the full picture. The German capitalists whom he was a cursin' seem to me to be the very people who went OUT of power in Germany. I mean I think that part of his speech is out of date.
If you are trying to be fair, whatever facts you can heap up, I mean facts not mere rumors, to support Mr. Welles' thesis, you got to, I mean you should if you aim at justice, you should take count of another set of facts which I see as standing to total opposition to those Mr. Welles drug into his foreground.
Every social amelioration, every clause of the homestead laws in Germany, every act in Italy put thru [with] the intention of getting a better life for the mass of the people, ought to be sacred.
I mean that part of the Nazi revolution and of the Fascist revolution. Fascist revolution started it first, every part of that new social order, which is the continuation of the strife for the rights of man, of OUR own four revolutions, ought to be sacred. We ought to defend it, just as we ought to defend habeas corpus, and our right to life, liberty and the rest of it. No real liberty without economic liberty. And NO maintainable liberty that does not recognize that the free man has DUTIES. That was the bed rock of Mazzini's sainthood, or the key to his quite impractical historic opposition.
And when I cite "Liberty is not a right but a duty," as I did the other day to a young undersecretary, he opened up; he had been wondering what sort of an animal he had in front of him. And he said: "Yes, THAT is the real Mussolini. "
It is NO use puttin' up false horizons. War is too serious. If war has a use, it might be that it destroys false horizons. It never destroys ENOUGH false horizons, and in the heat of the conflict other stage sets are rigged up. Meet Europe, meet Mr. Europe. Something has happened
? in Europe since Kruger was considered a Titan. But there is the question of TIME in these things, the question of times.
People in Italy ask WHY Mr. Welles chose that particular date to tell us about non-aggression. I can't look into his inner mind. There is in Europe a distinct memory of Mr. Welles as photographed in a French government office with several French politicians, in front of a MAP. Well now, many Europeans took that map at that TIME as indication of a distinct plan, or at least daydream of . . . eh . . . eh . . . of aggression. Of course Mr. Welles may reply that the map didn't mean, or perhaps that it didn't STOP at . . . economic aggression. We do need a clear terminology. To Europe, at that time, that map looked awfully aggressive.
Would Mr. Welles specify? At the time he said he just hadn't noticed the map, it was just part of French government scenery.
How, Sumner?
#90 (May 23, 1943) U. K. (D6) SOBERLY
The moment is serious, just as serious for you as it is for anyone else. For twenty years you have fought against shadows. And now a real danger affronts you. In fact several enemies confront you. Quite solid dangers. You have been stirred up against a Germany that did not exist. For two decades your press has conducted a campaign of defamation against Italy. The campaign of lies does no good to anyone. You included. One expects you to be a bit up in the bottle. Perhaps it will be easier, or more nearly possible for you to hear in such a moment than when you are in the doldrums.
The moment calls for realism of a kind more real than you are accustomed to. Let us take down the stage set. It is very easy to fall into
? rhetoric. It is very easy for people to be swayed by cliche? . No one is immune from THAT danger. Least of all men who write in a hurry.
YOU are threatened. You are threatened by the Russian METHODS of administration. Those methods are not theoretic. The theory of Bolschevism has never constituted a danger to England. Mr. Churchill knows quite as much about Bolshevik METHODS of administration as anyone else. Mr. Churchill has in the past expressed himself quite clearly on that subject. Nothing equivocal about Winston's words when referring to Russia under Bolshevik rule. The mass graves at Katyn surprised NO one.
BUT the Russian system of administration in Iran, for example, is not your sole danger. It is, in fact, so far from being your sole danger that I have, in over two years of talk over this radio, possibly never referred to it before.
Usury has gnawed into England since the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on Earl's estates; usury against the feudal nobility. Then there were attacks on the common land, filchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a usury system, an international usury system, from Cromwell's time, ever increasing. That system gave you your slums. It brought in that civic leprosy that has made England a byeword. It has taken the shock of this war, three years of war to jog your memory, to bring your slums up again into headlines.
The usury system does NO nation good, it does no nation any good whatsoever. It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make NO use of nations in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them and use the worst as flails against the best.
It is the usurer's game to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit.
? A ruined Europe gives you no market. A ruined England will give no market to the new usury control.
Systems grow rotten and die. You have thrown Poland, had thrown half of Poland, to Russia, not in any attempt to save Poland. With the new Russia you have no longer any need of that particular dagger thrust into Germany's vitals. Russia constitutes a quite sufficient counterpoise to German force, now that they have a common frontier.
Let me interrupt myself at this point, to be perfectly clear as to my own convictions. EVERY social reform that has gone into effect in Germany and Italy should be defended. And the best men in England know that as well as I do. The time of calumny is past, and its passing should be seen very clearly. It should be seen very clearly IN England. Colonial empires should be administered by those nations who can best TEACH how such empires can and should be administered. That sentence perhaps needs a whole talk to itself.
The usury system rots the earth. It is a malady dangerous to ALL people. As your own slums can testify. The usury system has ruined millions of poor devils in England just as it has brought misery to millions in India. And that system is shifting its central. That shift represents NO gain to your American allies. It merely means an increase of vigor, it means a new and more violent infraction of America's 120 millions, and that infection will do YOU no good. Your middle class will be engulfed, London will feel the blow as Vienna felt the blow after the last war. That is to say, the glitter of scum, the feverish distribution of tidbits among a privileged few, and among the art world surrounding "society" will decline.
The nomadic parasites will shift out of London and into Manhattan. And this will be presented under a camouflage of national slogans. It will be represented as an American victory. It will not be an AMERICAN victory. The moment is serious. The moment is also confusing. It is
? confusing because there are two sets of concurrent phenomena, namely, those connected with fighting this war, and those which sow seeds for the next one. Your leading men ought to see that. You ought to see it.
It should constitute food for reflection. For YOUR reflection. You are between two very rough millstones.
#91, FCC Transcript (May 24, 1943) U. S. [? ] [TITLE UNKNOWN]
The Italians in America will have noted the American inability to understand what Italy is, the inability to acknowledge the American debt to Italy. The average American admits that the continent was discovered by Christopher Columbus. The more cunning are disposed to believe that Columbus committed a grave error.
But seriously speaking, how many Americans have you met who know that the constructive ideas to which is due the creation of the North American Republic, the United States, were an Italian product? Does one speak at Harvard and in the other great American universities of the Leopoldien Reforms? The Tuscan history of the 18th century is almost completely ignored by the Americans. I say, "almost," advisedly. Have you met in America a man of politics who does know anything about 16th century Tuscany? Perhaps they have heard somebody speak about some painter or musician, but of the policy, the reforms--I wager-- never.
The American is disposed or was disposed to acknowledge theoretically an intellectual debt to France. Perhaps he believes that the American Revolution was due to the French revolution. This is to say that they are ignorant of the dates, also having forgotten that the French Revolution took place a decade after the end of the American revolution. The ideas
? of Leopoldo were largely experimented with under the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, in Tuscany.
The errors of exaggerations, manifest in the materialization of ideas or ideals, were also known. And his son Ferdinand went about correcting them, aided by the very same counselors who had aided his father. This movement of castigation was interrupted by the French disturbances and by the chaos brought about by the Jews, who took part in the French chaos.
One waited more than a century to continue the rectification, to continue the historical process, in the constructive sense. I do not tell you on whose part, because perhaps many among you are not yet ready to recognize these further manifestations of the Latin's genius! The more or less military gentleman Fiorello La Guardia is not possessed of the Latin spirit (genio).
The classical mentality differs from the Rooseveltian. And it seems stupid to me for one to entrust himself to a Lehman or a Morgenthau. None among these American officials possesses the Latin spirit. I would say that the Italians do well, every time they run true to their own spirit, the Italic, the Latin (spirit). I would say that they are doing well to differentiate that spirit from the Gaelic spirit. I would say that you would do very well to investigate it a bit, to search, if possible, for the causes of the confusion.
I know that your situation is difficult. The American press does not guide you and does not help you, but rather admonishes you to forget your own culture, your Italic instincts, your language, the most beautiful daughter of the mother Latin (language). Do not yield! Persevere in reading your Italian books among yourselves. Those among you who have the opportunity to get into universities, must retain their Latin culture, not looking backward, but forward.
? France did not create Latinism. And rather, I say to you, insist, persist! You are American citizens. The America of the Fathers of the Republic worshipped Latin wisdom. That America of the-- --ones has almost disappeared, forgetting the Latin wisdom. That Latinism is preserved in Italy; it manifests itself anew.
I divide this short address into different parts. I say that the Americans around you ignore the Italian tradition. You ought to educate them, and first of all you ought to educate yourselves.
I say that in observing the Americans you will note that they are anarchic, profoundly anarchic, not organized, do not apply their own inventions. When an idea is born or seems to be born, in America, that idea does not sprout in America itself. When propaganda is made on a sound idea in America, something impedes its fertilization.
For instance, the battle against gold was fought half a century ago in the United States; it was fought by the Democratic party. William Jennings Bryan was a great orator--more or less an orator with a large popular following. But he cried out to the world that humanity was being crucified on a golden cross. But he did not speak with perfect frankness. He spoke of silver (sic) instead of speaking openly of money.
All the truth, or almost all the truth, about money had been known in the United States already for a century, but Bryan did not reveal it completely. Now the world all of Europe and a large part of Asia know that the monopoly of gold and the fiction of money based on gold is an infamy an instrument used to fool the people, to strangulate all the peoples. I say that this idea has had in the past, it has had great publicity in America. But the American is slow. He has not placed high the wisdom of his best men. And the same thing with electrical experiments. You probably do not know that in 1863, a certain Loomis succeeded in sending wireless electric signals, he invented wireless telegraphy. But the Americans did nothing about it. He was considered a madman, a
? fool. The world was waiting for the Italian genius of Guglielmo Marconi, before putting into practice the possibilities of wireless transmissions.
The same thing is taking place in the political and economic spheres. And, if you wish to understand true economics, you must look outside the damned American press. You must read that which is being printed in Europe, in Italy. And for the moment it being difficult to obtain printed press, you ought to listen as much as possible to the European transmissions and the European addresses in this connection, in connection with money, with credit, with money on the basis of work, with work that you have--every one of you--residing in your brains and brawn.
Ezra Pound speaks from Rome, in a regime under which liberty is considered a duty; and where one knows that economic freedom carries with it the freedom from falling into debts.
#92 (May 25, 1943) U. S. (D5)
AND BACK OF THE WOODSHED
I am not going to go into the details of Mr. Welles' schemes; I can't in ten minutes get down to as many details as he put forth in an hour. And as for your international currency scheme, your allies in London and Mr. Keynes can, I 'spose, be counted on to put up a much more audible howl. Though whether it will be loud enough, or have any effect, remains for the chroniclers of the future.
Economic aggression. Economic oppression. Economic oppression, the past tense, and the future tense of economic aggression.
Welles admitted that the U. S. had in the past participated in the aggression. Now does he propose, or does the State Department really propose to lay off certain forms of economic oppression after this war is
? over? If so, can the State Department really assure itself or anyone else that the American business man will consent to mislay or to lay off economic aggression?
England and America made ugly, England pretty well gutted by economic oppression? By the economic aggression that has reduced England so largely to a C-3 population to national health statistics that no British government bureau dares print. When you talk of economic aggression or oppression your European hearers say: My God, their whole life, the whole life inside both those countries is one compost of economic oppression. That was what we were resisting. That was what was held over us. God knows Italy wanted to work, and to EARN economic freedom. She didn't go round weeping and asking someone to give her the earth on a platter, or any slice of the earth on a platter. She sent out her roadmakers and plowmen. No, no, by right a colonial space, land space ought to be administered by the folks who will use it.
Italy's colonies never tried to hide living conditions. Which is NOT what Mr. Welles can say for America's strange ally Russia. Vide the Stalin canal, vide all those known liquidations which lead the Christian Science Monitor to say "the thing was not such in itself as to arouse
incredulity" (or whatever the words were. I am quoting from memory, but that was the gist of it).
There is a great deal of undisputed and incontroversial evidence about Soviet Russia that makes many things "not impossible," not such as to 'rouse incredulity.
For every honest word, for every constructive statement in Mr. Welles' speech in Toledo, Italy was and IS the United States' natural ally. She was England's natural ally UNDER any system that had even a tendency toward eschewing economic oppression. She was the natural partner and guardian of one of England's main trade routes.
? Twenty years ago, when I saw Italy risin', when I saw the constructive work toward economic justice startin' in Italy, I had a wild idea, an impractical idea due to my ignorance of economic geography at that time. I say AT that time; I wish more men of my age would come out and admit that they once knew less than they now know. Mr. Welles has made a good step forward. He has talked of aggression of the selfish and unenlightened kind. Well, aggression is probably selfish, and as for economic cooperation, if Mr. Welles' little group had started thinking of economic cooperation WITH Italy ten years ago, we would most certainly not be now in bloody conflict.
And I don't think Mr. Welles is yet ready to make a dispassionate and thought-out, reasoned, analyzed, articulate statement of the fact about Italy and about Germany and about the corporate state.
I think a man in his position ought to make honest comparisons. There is, God knows, enough ground for friction, there are enough REAL contrasts of interests without building up false horizons. You don't need to slander an enemy, not when you are bombing his cities, his women and children, the noncombattants.
A man might think he had to lie about some foreign country in order to get a war started. But now the war is a goin' on. It will take more than a clear statement about either opponent to bring it to a conclusion.
Further slander or further misrepresentation of the nature of the Axis regimes is just so much waste motion. Economic collaboration. That is the front name and the last name of corporate organization. And the doin' away with the laws of God is part of the Russian program, not of the Roman program. Hang it all, a new ethics has grown up, an ethics of responsibility, of the responsibility of him that hath. The revolution goes on, under the fireworks and the polemics.
? The corporate state is a state in which representation of interests have been revived, after its lapse in the parliamentary countries. I mean to say the division of the representation is programmed to be by trades; if America went corporate, I would be MORE represented in the confederation of artists and professional men than I would be as a citizen of Montgomery county, though I would or could also be a component of both articulations. And the YOUNG men in Italy, and the Hitler Jugend have nothing whatever to do with economic aggression. That ain't the way they are geared.
The Italians are, by the way, by temperament so full of the Renaissance tradition that you will know a man for two years without finding out how he spends his time. 1 mean he is autarchic, often to a surprisin' degree, whereas freedom in the anti-Axis countries has in many cases been perverted or watered down into the one freedom, namely economically to aggress onto everyone or anyone else.
Of course Mr.
