Speculations
in war material?
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Without young men being advised to run crooked.
You got to define your terms, define your words, think what money will BUY (as that constitutes the value of money).
All that is part of a nation's INTERNAL structure.
But in the immediate foreground, get it into your block that the U. S. A. has not been livin' for a thousand years NEXT door to ALIEN races, formed, compacted with relatively clear national or tribal frontiers. We are all intermixed, interwoven, livin' next door to each other. We do NOT need more land, we may need land improvement. If you go on destroyin' and urging others to DESTROY, you will need more production. Don't believe me if you don't want to, but do at least look into facts of American history. Why was the U. S. founded? How come we had any colonial architecture, any American craftsmanship?
What part did local colonies' groups of different European races take in the development, in the foundation of what made our life worth livin'?
You look into that, before you go shootin' Frenchmen at Dakar, or keepin' up dope sales in the Orient. You can't go to war without small meanness to SOME of the neighbors. You get het up over the sorrows of
? Mrs. Ikestein, the tailor's wife; you can't DO anything about it without doin' dirt to Giovanni the grocer, and the Hungarian livin' next door, or the grandson of R. Schuz's old friend who sells delicatessen.
#114 (1941) U. S. (50) ARISTOTLE AND ADAMS
Johnnie Adams, the first, the real father of his country, the man who picked General Washington, George, to lead the Colonial armies against a damned, stinking and cheating British Government, no better than Roosevelt and Morgenthau, or Churchill or any other set of enemies of the people and thieves of the public purse, was on the trail of Aristotle's studies of constitutions, constitutions of a lot of Greek states. In fact Johnnie wanted to know what really was the best form of government. And more than any other man, not excludin' Jim Madison and Thomas Jefferson, he got on the trail. And it is a damn pity that the only known copy of Harry Stotl's brochure on the Athenian constitution was then lying on an Egyptian dump heap. In fact the back side had been used as a farmer's account book, and if Mr. Didymus, farm bailif, hadn't akept his accounts on the back of the sheets, that admirable work might have been lost to mankind altogether, near the Egyptian town of Hermopolis, in the year '78/'79 A. D. in the time of Vespasian. Well, Mr. Adams would have enjoyed readin' it; but as he didn't, you can.
At any rate it might broaden the mind, especially it might inconvenience some of them 4,000 paid liars attached to the British legation or embassy in Washington, and graduated from that sink of hell and bog of iniquity, the London Pseudo-school of Pseudonomics.
For years economics professors have been lying, even going so far as to deprecate loans BY THE STATE, when the fleet that won the battle of Salamis was BUILT with money lent by the Athenian state to the ship builders, INSTEAD of morgagin' the whole nation to kikes, Biddies,
? swine, and enemies of the people as has been done in damn near every nation ever since the Stank of England was founded.
Well states have lent money, and the Pennsylvania Colony lent it. And the French frawgs are lendin' it. So the British fire on their late allies. And every damn possible thing is done to prevent the American in Utah or Montana from learning economics or history.
And our Constitution DOES give Congress the right to determine prices, though it is worded, "right to determine the value of money," which is the same thing. If you can determine HOW long a yard stick is, you can determine how may yards there are in a piece of linen. Well, ole Harry he noted some features in that model DEMocratic and Republican constitution, along with regulations fer not having balconies overhanging roads, and conduits overflowing into the roads; he mentions market controllers. Blame it on me and on Mussolini. Go on, blame it on us. Athens was a light amid ancient civilizations. There was superintendence of merchandise, to prevent the sale of spurious and adulterated articles. And there were also the corn wardens, or wheat wardens, to see that unground grain was in market at a FAIR PRICE, and next, that millers sell their barley meal at a price corresponding with that of barley, and the baker women at a price corresponding with that of wheat, weighing the amount fixed by the officials.
HENCE, the Catholic doctrine of the just price, which, roughly speakin', built the cathedrals, and assured European civilization from the time of St. Ambrose to the time of St. Antonio. Sure, blame it on Hitler! blame it on Mussolini. And don't, don't learn anything of WHY there was a French revolution. What abuses it set out to correct, what abuses it failed to correct, and hence all the flimflam.
Even Marx KNEW what the abuses were. In fact he is pretty good at diagnosis of evil. Waaal, then there is also a very pretty little passage in
? Harry Stotl's li'l book labeled Politics. And if you had read it Franklin Delano might not have got so far away with HIS politics.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Times when money is humbug
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
People go alterin' the currency, and somebody is played for a sucker.
In fact a classical education WOULD be useful if the universities didn't wrap it in cotton wool, and keep the stewdents from reading the more vital passages.
In fact a little Greek of the right kind or even readin' some with a crib IF you have the real curiosity would be useful. It would put you wise as to WHY Keynes and Guggleheim alias Gregory, and the scientific departments have managed to get Economics, so called, studied so COMpletely separate from any general education, classical education and general culture, so that they can LIE and not get caught out, and ball up the simple facts about money, and what it is. Without havin' the student ask inconvenient questions based on a knowledge of HISTORY, of the salient facts in our history or Greek history, or Demosthenes law cases, or Lincoln's fight for a national currency, or the Pennsylvania Colony's loans of PAPER money to the Colonists, to be paid back in ten lot, one tenth per year, as brought prosperity to the colony, and was the admiration of Europe, till the sons of bitches in London cracked down on it, and tried to sell the 13 colonies into slavery as the same bastids succeeded in doing after the great betrayal of 1863, Ikieheims, Vandergould, Sherman, playin' stinky with Rothschild, and betrayin' the American people.
Like Roosevelt is doin' with Morgenthau's able assistance, down underneath, down at BED rock, and quite apart from using war as top dressing to keep your minds OFF the American Treasury.
? When will American college students realize that almost ANY bit of real knowledge would keep 'em from being dead rabbits? Aristotle, Demosthenes, Mencius or Confucius, all antidotes to bein' suckers. And of course it would be a revolution, and INTERlexshul revolution if college students would be wondering what they spend four years in college NOT learning! ! Which would be both an adornment in the conversation and of use in their business. Business of LIVIN', I mean, cent per cent, 100% livin', gettin' something out of life by the process of puttin' their interest, mental interest, into it. Instead of being played for a sucker, by an ex bank tout and international swindler, a specialist in inflation and devaluation. And of course it is a mere matter of opinion, but it WAS Aristotle's opinion, expressed in the 5th book of his Politics, that the three qualities which supreme magistrates ought to possess are loyalty to established constitutions; secondly, great capacity for the duties of the office; and thirdly, virtue and justice.
In each the sort of justice suited. It seems a bit hard on Franklin Delano, but so it is in the Greek ably translated by Mr. Rackham, and verified by the present speaker.
#115 (1942) U. S. (27) TO CONSOLIDATE
If anyone takes the trouble to record and to examine the series of talks I have made over this radio it will be found that I have used three sorts of material: Historical facts; convictions of experienced men, based on fact; and the fruits of my own experience. The facts go back to the opening of a copper mine by Tching Tang in the year 1766 B. C. , they mostly antedate the fascist era and can not be considered as improvisations trumped up to meet present requirements. Neither can the beliefs of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln be laughed off as mere Fascist propaganda. And even my own observations date largely before the opening of the present hostilities, as do those of my grandfather expressed in the U. S. Congress in 1878.
? I defend the particularly American, North American, United States heritage. If anybody can find anything hostile to the Constitution of the U. S. A. in these speeches, it would greatly interest me to know what.
It may be bizarre, eccentric, quaint, old-fashioned of me to refer to that document, but I wish more Americans would at least read it. It is not light and easy reading but it contains several points of interest, whereby some of our present officials could, if they but would, profit greatly.
Or, considering the jack in office, of less importance than the whole people and the whole nation, I should say the nation would greatly benefit if the literate citizens would attend to the document, both it its more important details and in its spirit. Even if Charles Beard does think it a barrier against real democracy. I would remind Prof. Beard that Adams studied republics. Even Beard now knows less of the Constitution than did John Adams and Madison. The treasure of a state is its equity. That is to say, its capacity to give every man a square deal. Teddy used to say square deal. There is no sane economics, without a sane ethic at its base.
And certain kinds of honesty have been known for 5000 years. Certain kinds of dishonesty are equally well recorded in history; and the capacity, anybody's capacity, for fooling all men ALL the time is, as Lincoln remarked, limited.
A considerable force, in some cases a force of inertia, has been espoused to my views, to my perceptions, to my patient collecting of data, ever since I had any views, or perceptions, or started collecting data. I have in the main been confined to papers of very small circulation, but not invariably. As I can not AT ALL count on the present hearers, if there are any present hearers, [not] having read a line of [my] writing I have, for the sake of clarity, to repeat things I have said before.
? Sometime the DATE at which I emitted my beliefs adds, or should add, a bit of weight or interest, to the fact shown, or the conviction presented. This is not in retrospect, but in prospect. If I had always been WRONG, as nine tenths of the people to whom you listen, I should have less cause to rake up old articles printed, or old statements made when I have been interviewed, now and again often by reporters who did not expect their copy to get past the editor's desk. New York Sun, April 21, 1939: "We don't think that much will be heard of it since many of the author's comments . . . aren't likely to get beyond the copy desks. "
Most of the lads kept their notes simply as curiosities . . . and so forth, referring to remarks by present speaker, my own conclusion being that an American newspaper can occasionally print something useful, but can very seldom do so TWICE. American editors and newspaper men having a perfectly well grounded terror of the power that rules by night, and strikes mercilessly at the pocket. I did, however, suggest, and it is in print in the files of several N. Y. papers, that there was on April 21, 1939 a group of people in America trying to get a war started, there were people doing so. Mr. Wallace, now Vice President, in a definition of the Democratic body of faith, started off with demanding action based on the will of the majority AFTER the people have had an opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. Mebbe he has changed his view since 1938, when his book was printed? The real facts about British bank agents in America, Mr. Ikleheimer, etc. , during the past 80 years have NOT been very amply revealed to the citizens. The real facts regarding the connection of at least ONE of Kuhn Loeb's directors, with the British Intelligence Service have not, so far as I know, had the publicity they deserve.
One of the Roosevelt cabinet, in 1939, asked me where I thought the link was? I told him. Mr. Dies hadn't been quite as diligent in looking into the activities of British financial agents in the U. S. as some of his own committee would at that date seem to have wished. What opportunity has the people had to get information regarding gold purchase by
? Morgenthau's department? What facts of American history are widely available? Not only of past eight years' sins against the whole people, but of the record of the past 80 or 100 years? Munitioneers?
Speculations in war material? Speculation in other materials made scarce by diversion of work FROM sane activities in production [? ] of food and clothing to war material.
WAR IS THE MAXIMUM SABOTAGE. Nothing so helps the creators of artificial scarcity as a condition wherein goods are rapidly destroyed without doing direct good to ANYONE. There seems today to be at least an audible minority of people who think NOW, as I did in 1939, that some group or groups of interested persons in the U. S. desire and then desired war. My remarks on gold at that time seem to have a considerable confirmation within the past few weeks. In an interview printed on June 15th, 1939, I stated that "A war on Germany in our time would be a war against an honest concern of money. " I cited Schacht's remark about money issued against goods. I might have cited Mr. Zubly in one of the earliest sessions of the American Congress. I should be glad, I should be very glad indeed, if Mr. Wallace and his friends would get busy and give the people an ADEQUATE opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. "Paths to Plenty," lovely little title for a booklet, but is your gasoline going to be rationed? I can't read you the whole of Wallace's booklet. What I don't make out is how, having written that booklet, Mr. Wallace has been got at--HAD in the interim-- and is now out yelling bloody murder ALL on the side of the loan sharks, the munitioneers, the despoilers of agriculture and murderers of the working man. And what the Sam Hill he thinks a ten years war would do toward attaining the very ideals he was preaching in Californy three years ago? He can't believe in the filthy hell of Geneva, he can't believe in the infamy of the League of Nations with its 20 year record of refusal to make ANY move toward social justice constantly working for the international swine and bleeders and scarcity makers, monopolists. Churchill and company represent usury they represent tyranny oppression, greed, unrestricted exploitation of humanity, by the most
? contemptible batch of egotists the world has seen in our time. Betrayers of their allies, public enemies of their own people. Suppressors in excelsis of those FACTS which Mr. Wallace was three years ago suggesting as necessary for majority opinion. Not even the wildest jungo denies that Churchill is a phenomenal liar. Not even that canting nark Halifax would sustain publicly that Churchill gives the poor deluded Britons the facts, or ever believed in ANY of the main points of Wallace's doctrine. The men with whom Wallace could agree are in Rome and in Berlin. They are not all of 'em in the limelight. They are DOING the things Wallace asks for. How the heck he has got over onto the other side of the fence needs some explaining.
A new order means a world where every man has the chance to work and GET PAID enough to feed and clothe at least four people, himself, wife, and two kids. Roosevelt's 10 million employed are men employed ONLY on condition that cannons are being made and goods sunk. They are NOT promises of a world ORDER. They are proof of the present DISORDER, based on Keynes, Baldwin, Salter, and all the other bleeders and liars who refuse to let facts into print.
#116 (1941) U. K. (20) TO ALBION
I have hesitated several months before asking Rome radio to let me speak TO England. I have been exercising my native right as an American to speak to my own compatriots, but I have not considered it suitable to meddle in the internal affairs of another country.
I did as much as the foreigner of good will could do, to keep you OUT of this war. I am convinced that every honest Englishman did likewise. I am convinced that the minority who got you into it are utter fools, but they are also that particularly unpleasant KIND of fool, the dishonest fool who thinks other men will be taken in by his inept trickery.
? For a decade or more, everyone NOT wholly blinded and hoodwinked has been remarking on the peculiar stink of your press, the mixture of dung and saccharin dished up each morning in your newspapers. Everyone not fed directly BY a putrid and decrepit system has been filled with an increasing DISesteem of your chief politicians, particularly with Baldwin, and in minor degree with his epigones. The various tricks whereby the British Empire has fleeced the world were already threadbare. The Rothschild trade espionage, etc. All old, all stinking, all decrepit, all worn out. Months ago I typed the draft of a radio talk, and destroyed it. I advised you to bump off Churchill before he bumped off all the rest of you.
That appeared to be out of order. It was not my place to advise civic violence in a foreign country, especially as it might cost some clean and decent young lad his life.
Still you had better get rid of Winston. Put him OUT. Get a few sane men into your government somehow.
I am speaking these words in PITY for the decent men left in England. Many of 'em saw Winston coming. Many of 'em prayed to God, or whatever else they invoke, to spare England the final calamity. Only a nation as moderate as Italy would allow me to speak over its radio in this vein and from these motives.
As to right and justice. Your unspeakable government of worn-out pantaloons and senile commedians has NO right to ask MY relative, decent young man from Montana to fight for the scum of the earth and slime of your millionaire ghetto. Sassoons, Beits, Sieffs, and their fellow Christians, the Astors, the owners of your lying and slimy news sheets. That I stand on and am ready to fight. If profiteers in America cheat you out of your eye teeth and betray you, it is no more than you as a nation have done to every one of your dupes and allies.
? You can not wipe out the past. You can not undo your lies, and your cheatings, and your pretenses, from the question of Danzig onward. But you CAN STOP. You can dissociate yourselves from the fools and knaves, who have made you ridiculous by their inefficient deceits, their caddishness to the French dupes, and so forth. You haven't, historically, a leg or a peg to stand on. You lied as to causes of war. You suppressed truth. But that had already become a habit, with your Mendes, Edens, Jecketts, your ape faced Beaverbrooks, and your stock jobbers. It all falls back on your own heads. Your island is being cleaned OUT, you're cattle slaughtered. "As barren as her deck. /My sons shall see the land I am leaving as barren as her deck," wrote the greatest of your living poets, Basil Buntin'. You have silenced your honest authors, or you have [flooded? ] out their speech with the sewers of Fleet Street. Your cranks have stopped their ears with cotton wool, and now it is too late to help it. You refused to hear your soldiers. You put aside all good council. You covered over the facts. A year, nine months, ten months, you can not go back on it.
Your Tommies have been sent to the slaughter. Your leaders have lied, and kept silent. The little cheats are no alternative for the big ones. You had better clean out the lot. I could have found you a better government when I was in London in 1939. I had even then the wild idea that I ought to try to TELL Chamberlain what he was headed for. I missed a phone call. It is probably BETTER for Europe that you were governed by fools, it is probably better for Europe that you cheated, and lied, and dragged in worse fools from Washington to settle the Balkans. But your government of idiots has probably served its turn and it has probably done all the good that it can do. And you had better get out from under, while there are still a few tons of beef left in England, and a few hens to lay eggs for your population.
I am of set purpose writing this a few weeks before speaking it. I wish to set down nothing in haste or in excitement. People who dislike you were saying months ago that, if the U. S. A. came into the war, so much the
? worse for England, as Japan would absorb American products, especially in munitions.
Few nations have ever made a worse showing that you have. France in 1870 did NOT drag down a half dozen innocent countries before her debacle. Twenty years of your reformers' warning were insufficient to turn you from infamy. Many of you do not YET know your sin; or the sin wherein you permitted your loathsome overlords to entangle you. All you can do is to LAY OFF IT.
Stop shooting Frenchmen, and flogging Hindoos. Stop trying to extend the war into still further regions. Lay off it, while there are still a few loaves of bread left in England.
In 1939 I said: in wartime one farmer is worth more than forty lenders of money.
As far as I can recall, no one in England would print that. Some day you may know it.
#117 (1941) U. K. (65) TWO PICTURES
On the 20th of November, two days after the anniversary of SANCTIONS (52 nations vs. Italy), I said to the couple at the next table: Would you say there was a difference of FEELING, I mean FEELING, not thought? I said, would you say there was a difference of FEELING in your country, difference in the way you FEEL about this war and about the last one?
I was in my humble caravansary, the Albergo Rapallo, and they were a pair of John Everyman. I should say PLAIN folk from Germany, of a bit less than my age, but well on, past the middle. The waiter had a try at
? making 'em understand octopus sauce, which is DElicious. I was havin' rice, with octopus sauce, little octopi, young and tender, and before the pair had come in, I had fished all visible bits of octopus out of my sauce dish so as not to lose any tidbits. However, my persuasions were to no avail, once they knew it was octopus. They had some other kind of sauce with their risotto. After that I put my question, saying I shall probably go to the microphone; can you tell me?
Then the lady said: Very . . . First place, sicher. We were using my broken German as medium of communication. First place, no worry about the outcome. And in the second, i. e. , in 1914 our old government MADE the war, started the war. This time our government did all it could to avoid it. It might be time to recall that even in England reliable parties admitted that Mussolini had done all any man could, to avoid an armed outbreak.
Whatever you still think were the facts, I report this conversation. It at least proves a point of view. None of your war muggers have, so far as I know, adduced any evidence to the contrary. There were doubts, fears, lies, but NO evidence. None of your spoutin' pets has ever lined up to a SINGLE ONE of my statements. Not for six years so far as I can remember. That goes back to before the war. And I have told you what Chamberlain's chance was, AFTER he staved off one war, and WHAT occurred in your dirty press within 48 hours, according to my lights, thereby dishing England's chance to regain her prestige. Chamberlain could have had a European triumph of prestige, and England could have jogged on for 40 years, and built up her own inner structure. Which is exactly what some folk figger out, the usury central DID NOT intend that she should do.
God knows I began noticin' cracks in that structure about as soon as I got to your island in 1908. And nobody has yet even accused me of ONE subversive act during the interval. I am still stickin' on with brother Gibbs in these monologues. It may take me a month to get thru with
? him. And nearly everything Gibbs openly loves is loved, I should say, more or less by most human beings. I say THINGS cause when he gits to PERSONS I differ. And I haven't yet wept pink tears at a coronation. I have observed certain dates, such as that on which W. S. Landor departed from England. I have observed that Landor wrote a poem to Andy Jackson, which puzzled me no end when I first read it. I have observed that Byron, Shelley, and Keats lived partly in Italy, NOT with the idea of being hauled up by a pair of counter jumpers like Percy Loraine and the late Lord Lloyd as national advertisements.
I have heard of an Earl of Oxford, I think it was, already farmin' out his rents in the time of Elizabeth. Subversion was not invented in the days of Disraeli. I have told young Englishmen to read Cobbett. I have heard of Tories and WHIGS, and been told that Whigs were the fathers of Liberals. I got out of London slums, that is to say in 1908 I passed thru Islington; I spent seven days in Islington, and that was ENOUGH. I got into Kensington Church Yard, and during 12 years I took occasional bus rides, but I did NOT go slumming. And the term "distressed area" was not widely current till I had moved over to Paris. So I can't wring anyone's heart.
You got your own native born statisticians to tell you who is not fed. You got your own writers to tell you dole rots the morale of a nation.
My second picture is one Gibbs ought to like. Before my British demise, or whatever it's listed as, it was my privilege to go up a tower. That is, I went up stairs in a manor, where there are some I believe 14 century or thereabouts cloisters. And I crawled over the roof beams of an attic, and thence into the top of a tower, where they conserve a Charter, not Magna Charter, but I think it is Henry II's guarantee or confirmation of what John had pledged to the barons. And I believe her late Majesty Queen Mary, or one or the other, went over the same set of rafters about six weeks later.
? It's not my period, and some specialist in English history may correct me, but that is what I recall of the charter. It is the STATE of the manor that mattered to me as an observer of England. Some of the best pictures had been sold, the library was not in working order, there had been some restoration, about Walpole's time, I should imagine, but the ECONomic system of THAT time hadn't permitted FULL restoration. What had been done when England had far LESS money, was not to be done; and now the place, that OUGHT to have been a center of life, that would have housed 80 guests splendidly was as far from action as you might say Carcassonne or St. Bertrand de Cominges. Then, we drove some miles across country for tennis, and an amiable man explained to me how hound's feet ought to be formed.
I asked something about a hound in a sportin' print or perhaps it was a water color of the-- --sportin' print period, and he said the hound was, as I recall it, a bit long in the pasterns, if that is the word. And all of this, as far as it was ALIVE is, I suppose, what Sir P. Gibbs was upholdin' in his liberal way. In 1938 and before that. But as an economist, I say god damn, here you have the scene, you have the SHELL of the plant (to use a commercial term), you have the perfect setting. You have the OUTSIDE of the picture, and you go on from decade to decade, for hundred years or more years, eating the VITALITY out of it. And this is the work of the USURY system, you have done that with the adoration of PROFITS, you have done that with SLOP in your politics, and the JEWS have NOT saved you. Whatever they have done, they have not saved you and they have not helped you to SAVE IT. And by IT I mean all of your welfare. I mean all of your yeomanry. Jew Rothschild and his fellow Jew Goldsmid and his fellow Christian Baring have NOT helped you to save it.
And I now ask you and Sir Philip WHAT CAUSES that? I will leave one of the regular lecturers here in Rome to talk to you of slums that he knows better than I do. I will merely ask about a FEW rural scenes in England. What caused 'em? Or a few friends from the English country,
? or a landlord of my room in Church Walk, or some of the humbler GOOD people that I met at one time or another, who are the right sort of English, WHAT have THEY had from your system? Or takin' it a grade or two further up, when I was last over in London after a lapse of ten years, about the time Gibbs was writin' his book, a good poet motored me out to a suburb and looked at the shoestring building and said "Jerusalem in England's pleasant land" with FULL understanding of usury, and the dry rot and wet rot. And then went into the Army the minute this was got going, knowin' what started it, but wantin' his own hands clean from the beginning.
But in the immediate foreground, get it into your block that the U. S. A. has not been livin' for a thousand years NEXT door to ALIEN races, formed, compacted with relatively clear national or tribal frontiers. We are all intermixed, interwoven, livin' next door to each other. We do NOT need more land, we may need land improvement. If you go on destroyin' and urging others to DESTROY, you will need more production. Don't believe me if you don't want to, but do at least look into facts of American history. Why was the U. S. founded? How come we had any colonial architecture, any American craftsmanship?
What part did local colonies' groups of different European races take in the development, in the foundation of what made our life worth livin'?
You look into that, before you go shootin' Frenchmen at Dakar, or keepin' up dope sales in the Orient. You can't go to war without small meanness to SOME of the neighbors. You get het up over the sorrows of
? Mrs. Ikestein, the tailor's wife; you can't DO anything about it without doin' dirt to Giovanni the grocer, and the Hungarian livin' next door, or the grandson of R. Schuz's old friend who sells delicatessen.
#114 (1941) U. S. (50) ARISTOTLE AND ADAMS
Johnnie Adams, the first, the real father of his country, the man who picked General Washington, George, to lead the Colonial armies against a damned, stinking and cheating British Government, no better than Roosevelt and Morgenthau, or Churchill or any other set of enemies of the people and thieves of the public purse, was on the trail of Aristotle's studies of constitutions, constitutions of a lot of Greek states. In fact Johnnie wanted to know what really was the best form of government. And more than any other man, not excludin' Jim Madison and Thomas Jefferson, he got on the trail. And it is a damn pity that the only known copy of Harry Stotl's brochure on the Athenian constitution was then lying on an Egyptian dump heap. In fact the back side had been used as a farmer's account book, and if Mr. Didymus, farm bailif, hadn't akept his accounts on the back of the sheets, that admirable work might have been lost to mankind altogether, near the Egyptian town of Hermopolis, in the year '78/'79 A. D. in the time of Vespasian. Well, Mr. Adams would have enjoyed readin' it; but as he didn't, you can.
At any rate it might broaden the mind, especially it might inconvenience some of them 4,000 paid liars attached to the British legation or embassy in Washington, and graduated from that sink of hell and bog of iniquity, the London Pseudo-school of Pseudonomics.
For years economics professors have been lying, even going so far as to deprecate loans BY THE STATE, when the fleet that won the battle of Salamis was BUILT with money lent by the Athenian state to the ship builders, INSTEAD of morgagin' the whole nation to kikes, Biddies,
? swine, and enemies of the people as has been done in damn near every nation ever since the Stank of England was founded.
Well states have lent money, and the Pennsylvania Colony lent it. And the French frawgs are lendin' it. So the British fire on their late allies. And every damn possible thing is done to prevent the American in Utah or Montana from learning economics or history.
And our Constitution DOES give Congress the right to determine prices, though it is worded, "right to determine the value of money," which is the same thing. If you can determine HOW long a yard stick is, you can determine how may yards there are in a piece of linen. Well, ole Harry he noted some features in that model DEMocratic and Republican constitution, along with regulations fer not having balconies overhanging roads, and conduits overflowing into the roads; he mentions market controllers. Blame it on me and on Mussolini. Go on, blame it on us. Athens was a light amid ancient civilizations. There was superintendence of merchandise, to prevent the sale of spurious and adulterated articles. And there were also the corn wardens, or wheat wardens, to see that unground grain was in market at a FAIR PRICE, and next, that millers sell their barley meal at a price corresponding with that of barley, and the baker women at a price corresponding with that of wheat, weighing the amount fixed by the officials.
HENCE, the Catholic doctrine of the just price, which, roughly speakin', built the cathedrals, and assured European civilization from the time of St. Ambrose to the time of St. Antonio. Sure, blame it on Hitler! blame it on Mussolini. And don't, don't learn anything of WHY there was a French revolution. What abuses it set out to correct, what abuses it failed to correct, and hence all the flimflam.
Even Marx KNEW what the abuses were. In fact he is pretty good at diagnosis of evil. Waaal, then there is also a very pretty little passage in
? Harry Stotl's li'l book labeled Politics. And if you had read it Franklin Delano might not have got so far away with HIS politics.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Times when money is humbug
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
People go alterin' the currency, and somebody is played for a sucker.
In fact a classical education WOULD be useful if the universities didn't wrap it in cotton wool, and keep the stewdents from reading the more vital passages.
In fact a little Greek of the right kind or even readin' some with a crib IF you have the real curiosity would be useful. It would put you wise as to WHY Keynes and Guggleheim alias Gregory, and the scientific departments have managed to get Economics, so called, studied so COMpletely separate from any general education, classical education and general culture, so that they can LIE and not get caught out, and ball up the simple facts about money, and what it is. Without havin' the student ask inconvenient questions based on a knowledge of HISTORY, of the salient facts in our history or Greek history, or Demosthenes law cases, or Lincoln's fight for a national currency, or the Pennsylvania Colony's loans of PAPER money to the Colonists, to be paid back in ten lot, one tenth per year, as brought prosperity to the colony, and was the admiration of Europe, till the sons of bitches in London cracked down on it, and tried to sell the 13 colonies into slavery as the same bastids succeeded in doing after the great betrayal of 1863, Ikieheims, Vandergould, Sherman, playin' stinky with Rothschild, and betrayin' the American people.
Like Roosevelt is doin' with Morgenthau's able assistance, down underneath, down at BED rock, and quite apart from using war as top dressing to keep your minds OFF the American Treasury.
? When will American college students realize that almost ANY bit of real knowledge would keep 'em from being dead rabbits? Aristotle, Demosthenes, Mencius or Confucius, all antidotes to bein' suckers. And of course it would be a revolution, and INTERlexshul revolution if college students would be wondering what they spend four years in college NOT learning! ! Which would be both an adornment in the conversation and of use in their business. Business of LIVIN', I mean, cent per cent, 100% livin', gettin' something out of life by the process of puttin' their interest, mental interest, into it. Instead of being played for a sucker, by an ex bank tout and international swindler, a specialist in inflation and devaluation. And of course it is a mere matter of opinion, but it WAS Aristotle's opinion, expressed in the 5th book of his Politics, that the three qualities which supreme magistrates ought to possess are loyalty to established constitutions; secondly, great capacity for the duties of the office; and thirdly, virtue and justice.
In each the sort of justice suited. It seems a bit hard on Franklin Delano, but so it is in the Greek ably translated by Mr. Rackham, and verified by the present speaker.
#115 (1942) U. S. (27) TO CONSOLIDATE
If anyone takes the trouble to record and to examine the series of talks I have made over this radio it will be found that I have used three sorts of material: Historical facts; convictions of experienced men, based on fact; and the fruits of my own experience. The facts go back to the opening of a copper mine by Tching Tang in the year 1766 B. C. , they mostly antedate the fascist era and can not be considered as improvisations trumped up to meet present requirements. Neither can the beliefs of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln be laughed off as mere Fascist propaganda. And even my own observations date largely before the opening of the present hostilities, as do those of my grandfather expressed in the U. S. Congress in 1878.
? I defend the particularly American, North American, United States heritage. If anybody can find anything hostile to the Constitution of the U. S. A. in these speeches, it would greatly interest me to know what.
It may be bizarre, eccentric, quaint, old-fashioned of me to refer to that document, but I wish more Americans would at least read it. It is not light and easy reading but it contains several points of interest, whereby some of our present officials could, if they but would, profit greatly.
Or, considering the jack in office, of less importance than the whole people and the whole nation, I should say the nation would greatly benefit if the literate citizens would attend to the document, both it its more important details and in its spirit. Even if Charles Beard does think it a barrier against real democracy. I would remind Prof. Beard that Adams studied republics. Even Beard now knows less of the Constitution than did John Adams and Madison. The treasure of a state is its equity. That is to say, its capacity to give every man a square deal. Teddy used to say square deal. There is no sane economics, without a sane ethic at its base.
And certain kinds of honesty have been known for 5000 years. Certain kinds of dishonesty are equally well recorded in history; and the capacity, anybody's capacity, for fooling all men ALL the time is, as Lincoln remarked, limited.
A considerable force, in some cases a force of inertia, has been espoused to my views, to my perceptions, to my patient collecting of data, ever since I had any views, or perceptions, or started collecting data. I have in the main been confined to papers of very small circulation, but not invariably. As I can not AT ALL count on the present hearers, if there are any present hearers, [not] having read a line of [my] writing I have, for the sake of clarity, to repeat things I have said before.
? Sometime the DATE at which I emitted my beliefs adds, or should add, a bit of weight or interest, to the fact shown, or the conviction presented. This is not in retrospect, but in prospect. If I had always been WRONG, as nine tenths of the people to whom you listen, I should have less cause to rake up old articles printed, or old statements made when I have been interviewed, now and again often by reporters who did not expect their copy to get past the editor's desk. New York Sun, April 21, 1939: "We don't think that much will be heard of it since many of the author's comments . . . aren't likely to get beyond the copy desks. "
Most of the lads kept their notes simply as curiosities . . . and so forth, referring to remarks by present speaker, my own conclusion being that an American newspaper can occasionally print something useful, but can very seldom do so TWICE. American editors and newspaper men having a perfectly well grounded terror of the power that rules by night, and strikes mercilessly at the pocket. I did, however, suggest, and it is in print in the files of several N. Y. papers, that there was on April 21, 1939 a group of people in America trying to get a war started, there were people doing so. Mr. Wallace, now Vice President, in a definition of the Democratic body of faith, started off with demanding action based on the will of the majority AFTER the people have had an opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. Mebbe he has changed his view since 1938, when his book was printed? The real facts about British bank agents in America, Mr. Ikleheimer, etc. , during the past 80 years have NOT been very amply revealed to the citizens. The real facts regarding the connection of at least ONE of Kuhn Loeb's directors, with the British Intelligence Service have not, so far as I know, had the publicity they deserve.
One of the Roosevelt cabinet, in 1939, asked me where I thought the link was? I told him. Mr. Dies hadn't been quite as diligent in looking into the activities of British financial agents in the U. S. as some of his own committee would at that date seem to have wished. What opportunity has the people had to get information regarding gold purchase by
? Morgenthau's department? What facts of American history are widely available? Not only of past eight years' sins against the whole people, but of the record of the past 80 or 100 years? Munitioneers?
Speculations in war material? Speculation in other materials made scarce by diversion of work FROM sane activities in production [? ] of food and clothing to war material.
WAR IS THE MAXIMUM SABOTAGE. Nothing so helps the creators of artificial scarcity as a condition wherein goods are rapidly destroyed without doing direct good to ANYONE. There seems today to be at least an audible minority of people who think NOW, as I did in 1939, that some group or groups of interested persons in the U. S. desire and then desired war. My remarks on gold at that time seem to have a considerable confirmation within the past few weeks. In an interview printed on June 15th, 1939, I stated that "A war on Germany in our time would be a war against an honest concern of money. " I cited Schacht's remark about money issued against goods. I might have cited Mr. Zubly in one of the earliest sessions of the American Congress. I should be glad, I should be very glad indeed, if Mr. Wallace and his friends would get busy and give the people an ADEQUATE opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. "Paths to Plenty," lovely little title for a booklet, but is your gasoline going to be rationed? I can't read you the whole of Wallace's booklet. What I don't make out is how, having written that booklet, Mr. Wallace has been got at--HAD in the interim-- and is now out yelling bloody murder ALL on the side of the loan sharks, the munitioneers, the despoilers of agriculture and murderers of the working man. And what the Sam Hill he thinks a ten years war would do toward attaining the very ideals he was preaching in Californy three years ago? He can't believe in the filthy hell of Geneva, he can't believe in the infamy of the League of Nations with its 20 year record of refusal to make ANY move toward social justice constantly working for the international swine and bleeders and scarcity makers, monopolists. Churchill and company represent usury they represent tyranny oppression, greed, unrestricted exploitation of humanity, by the most
? contemptible batch of egotists the world has seen in our time. Betrayers of their allies, public enemies of their own people. Suppressors in excelsis of those FACTS which Mr. Wallace was three years ago suggesting as necessary for majority opinion. Not even the wildest jungo denies that Churchill is a phenomenal liar. Not even that canting nark Halifax would sustain publicly that Churchill gives the poor deluded Britons the facts, or ever believed in ANY of the main points of Wallace's doctrine. The men with whom Wallace could agree are in Rome and in Berlin. They are not all of 'em in the limelight. They are DOING the things Wallace asks for. How the heck he has got over onto the other side of the fence needs some explaining.
A new order means a world where every man has the chance to work and GET PAID enough to feed and clothe at least four people, himself, wife, and two kids. Roosevelt's 10 million employed are men employed ONLY on condition that cannons are being made and goods sunk. They are NOT promises of a world ORDER. They are proof of the present DISORDER, based on Keynes, Baldwin, Salter, and all the other bleeders and liars who refuse to let facts into print.
#116 (1941) U. K. (20) TO ALBION
I have hesitated several months before asking Rome radio to let me speak TO England. I have been exercising my native right as an American to speak to my own compatriots, but I have not considered it suitable to meddle in the internal affairs of another country.
I did as much as the foreigner of good will could do, to keep you OUT of this war. I am convinced that every honest Englishman did likewise. I am convinced that the minority who got you into it are utter fools, but they are also that particularly unpleasant KIND of fool, the dishonest fool who thinks other men will be taken in by his inept trickery.
? For a decade or more, everyone NOT wholly blinded and hoodwinked has been remarking on the peculiar stink of your press, the mixture of dung and saccharin dished up each morning in your newspapers. Everyone not fed directly BY a putrid and decrepit system has been filled with an increasing DISesteem of your chief politicians, particularly with Baldwin, and in minor degree with his epigones. The various tricks whereby the British Empire has fleeced the world were already threadbare. The Rothschild trade espionage, etc. All old, all stinking, all decrepit, all worn out. Months ago I typed the draft of a radio talk, and destroyed it. I advised you to bump off Churchill before he bumped off all the rest of you.
That appeared to be out of order. It was not my place to advise civic violence in a foreign country, especially as it might cost some clean and decent young lad his life.
Still you had better get rid of Winston. Put him OUT. Get a few sane men into your government somehow.
I am speaking these words in PITY for the decent men left in England. Many of 'em saw Winston coming. Many of 'em prayed to God, or whatever else they invoke, to spare England the final calamity. Only a nation as moderate as Italy would allow me to speak over its radio in this vein and from these motives.
As to right and justice. Your unspeakable government of worn-out pantaloons and senile commedians has NO right to ask MY relative, decent young man from Montana to fight for the scum of the earth and slime of your millionaire ghetto. Sassoons, Beits, Sieffs, and their fellow Christians, the Astors, the owners of your lying and slimy news sheets. That I stand on and am ready to fight. If profiteers in America cheat you out of your eye teeth and betray you, it is no more than you as a nation have done to every one of your dupes and allies.
? You can not wipe out the past. You can not undo your lies, and your cheatings, and your pretenses, from the question of Danzig onward. But you CAN STOP. You can dissociate yourselves from the fools and knaves, who have made you ridiculous by their inefficient deceits, their caddishness to the French dupes, and so forth. You haven't, historically, a leg or a peg to stand on. You lied as to causes of war. You suppressed truth. But that had already become a habit, with your Mendes, Edens, Jecketts, your ape faced Beaverbrooks, and your stock jobbers. It all falls back on your own heads. Your island is being cleaned OUT, you're cattle slaughtered. "As barren as her deck. /My sons shall see the land I am leaving as barren as her deck," wrote the greatest of your living poets, Basil Buntin'. You have silenced your honest authors, or you have [flooded? ] out their speech with the sewers of Fleet Street. Your cranks have stopped their ears with cotton wool, and now it is too late to help it. You refused to hear your soldiers. You put aside all good council. You covered over the facts. A year, nine months, ten months, you can not go back on it.
Your Tommies have been sent to the slaughter. Your leaders have lied, and kept silent. The little cheats are no alternative for the big ones. You had better clean out the lot. I could have found you a better government when I was in London in 1939. I had even then the wild idea that I ought to try to TELL Chamberlain what he was headed for. I missed a phone call. It is probably BETTER for Europe that you were governed by fools, it is probably better for Europe that you cheated, and lied, and dragged in worse fools from Washington to settle the Balkans. But your government of idiots has probably served its turn and it has probably done all the good that it can do. And you had better get out from under, while there are still a few tons of beef left in England, and a few hens to lay eggs for your population.
I am of set purpose writing this a few weeks before speaking it. I wish to set down nothing in haste or in excitement. People who dislike you were saying months ago that, if the U. S. A. came into the war, so much the
? worse for England, as Japan would absorb American products, especially in munitions.
Few nations have ever made a worse showing that you have. France in 1870 did NOT drag down a half dozen innocent countries before her debacle. Twenty years of your reformers' warning were insufficient to turn you from infamy. Many of you do not YET know your sin; or the sin wherein you permitted your loathsome overlords to entangle you. All you can do is to LAY OFF IT.
Stop shooting Frenchmen, and flogging Hindoos. Stop trying to extend the war into still further regions. Lay off it, while there are still a few loaves of bread left in England.
In 1939 I said: in wartime one farmer is worth more than forty lenders of money.
As far as I can recall, no one in England would print that. Some day you may know it.
#117 (1941) U. K. (65) TWO PICTURES
On the 20th of November, two days after the anniversary of SANCTIONS (52 nations vs. Italy), I said to the couple at the next table: Would you say there was a difference of FEELING, I mean FEELING, not thought? I said, would you say there was a difference of FEELING in your country, difference in the way you FEEL about this war and about the last one?
I was in my humble caravansary, the Albergo Rapallo, and they were a pair of John Everyman. I should say PLAIN folk from Germany, of a bit less than my age, but well on, past the middle. The waiter had a try at
? making 'em understand octopus sauce, which is DElicious. I was havin' rice, with octopus sauce, little octopi, young and tender, and before the pair had come in, I had fished all visible bits of octopus out of my sauce dish so as not to lose any tidbits. However, my persuasions were to no avail, once they knew it was octopus. They had some other kind of sauce with their risotto. After that I put my question, saying I shall probably go to the microphone; can you tell me?
Then the lady said: Very . . . First place, sicher. We were using my broken German as medium of communication. First place, no worry about the outcome. And in the second, i. e. , in 1914 our old government MADE the war, started the war. This time our government did all it could to avoid it. It might be time to recall that even in England reliable parties admitted that Mussolini had done all any man could, to avoid an armed outbreak.
Whatever you still think were the facts, I report this conversation. It at least proves a point of view. None of your war muggers have, so far as I know, adduced any evidence to the contrary. There were doubts, fears, lies, but NO evidence. None of your spoutin' pets has ever lined up to a SINGLE ONE of my statements. Not for six years so far as I can remember. That goes back to before the war. And I have told you what Chamberlain's chance was, AFTER he staved off one war, and WHAT occurred in your dirty press within 48 hours, according to my lights, thereby dishing England's chance to regain her prestige. Chamberlain could have had a European triumph of prestige, and England could have jogged on for 40 years, and built up her own inner structure. Which is exactly what some folk figger out, the usury central DID NOT intend that she should do.
God knows I began noticin' cracks in that structure about as soon as I got to your island in 1908. And nobody has yet even accused me of ONE subversive act during the interval. I am still stickin' on with brother Gibbs in these monologues. It may take me a month to get thru with
? him. And nearly everything Gibbs openly loves is loved, I should say, more or less by most human beings. I say THINGS cause when he gits to PERSONS I differ. And I haven't yet wept pink tears at a coronation. I have observed certain dates, such as that on which W. S. Landor departed from England. I have observed that Landor wrote a poem to Andy Jackson, which puzzled me no end when I first read it. I have observed that Byron, Shelley, and Keats lived partly in Italy, NOT with the idea of being hauled up by a pair of counter jumpers like Percy Loraine and the late Lord Lloyd as national advertisements.
I have heard of an Earl of Oxford, I think it was, already farmin' out his rents in the time of Elizabeth. Subversion was not invented in the days of Disraeli. I have told young Englishmen to read Cobbett. I have heard of Tories and WHIGS, and been told that Whigs were the fathers of Liberals. I got out of London slums, that is to say in 1908 I passed thru Islington; I spent seven days in Islington, and that was ENOUGH. I got into Kensington Church Yard, and during 12 years I took occasional bus rides, but I did NOT go slumming. And the term "distressed area" was not widely current till I had moved over to Paris. So I can't wring anyone's heart.
You got your own native born statisticians to tell you who is not fed. You got your own writers to tell you dole rots the morale of a nation.
My second picture is one Gibbs ought to like. Before my British demise, or whatever it's listed as, it was my privilege to go up a tower. That is, I went up stairs in a manor, where there are some I believe 14 century or thereabouts cloisters. And I crawled over the roof beams of an attic, and thence into the top of a tower, where they conserve a Charter, not Magna Charter, but I think it is Henry II's guarantee or confirmation of what John had pledged to the barons. And I believe her late Majesty Queen Mary, or one or the other, went over the same set of rafters about six weeks later.
? It's not my period, and some specialist in English history may correct me, but that is what I recall of the charter. It is the STATE of the manor that mattered to me as an observer of England. Some of the best pictures had been sold, the library was not in working order, there had been some restoration, about Walpole's time, I should imagine, but the ECONomic system of THAT time hadn't permitted FULL restoration. What had been done when England had far LESS money, was not to be done; and now the place, that OUGHT to have been a center of life, that would have housed 80 guests splendidly was as far from action as you might say Carcassonne or St. Bertrand de Cominges. Then, we drove some miles across country for tennis, and an amiable man explained to me how hound's feet ought to be formed.
I asked something about a hound in a sportin' print or perhaps it was a water color of the-- --sportin' print period, and he said the hound was, as I recall it, a bit long in the pasterns, if that is the word. And all of this, as far as it was ALIVE is, I suppose, what Sir P. Gibbs was upholdin' in his liberal way. In 1938 and before that. But as an economist, I say god damn, here you have the scene, you have the SHELL of the plant (to use a commercial term), you have the perfect setting. You have the OUTSIDE of the picture, and you go on from decade to decade, for hundred years or more years, eating the VITALITY out of it. And this is the work of the USURY system, you have done that with the adoration of PROFITS, you have done that with SLOP in your politics, and the JEWS have NOT saved you. Whatever they have done, they have not saved you and they have not helped you to SAVE IT. And by IT I mean all of your welfare. I mean all of your yeomanry. Jew Rothschild and his fellow Jew Goldsmid and his fellow Christian Baring have NOT helped you to save it.
And I now ask you and Sir Philip WHAT CAUSES that? I will leave one of the regular lecturers here in Rome to talk to you of slums that he knows better than I do. I will merely ask about a FEW rural scenes in England. What caused 'em? Or a few friends from the English country,
? or a landlord of my room in Church Walk, or some of the humbler GOOD people that I met at one time or another, who are the right sort of English, WHAT have THEY had from your system? Or takin' it a grade or two further up, when I was last over in London after a lapse of ten years, about the time Gibbs was writin' his book, a good poet motored me out to a suburb and looked at the shoestring building and said "Jerusalem in England's pleasant land" with FULL understanding of usury, and the dry rot and wet rot. And then went into the Army the minute this was got going, knowin' what started it, but wantin' his own hands clean from the beginning.
