No More Learning

[TEXT MISSING IN ORIGINAL] been seen only too clearly. And your foul papers, the filth of your news print has been subsidized to keep your minds off it.
A dirty bit of meat by the name of Gollancz has used your book trade to conceal it. You have almost NO means of communication.
When a Brooks Adams writes five volumes that would help you to see it, six copies reach England. You have LOST the health of the mind. God knows how the scattered handful of Englishmen still in England can still speak one with another.
I see NO remedy in your parliament. I don't mean as parliament. I mean in the personnel. It is your problem. You do not NOW even elect your own parliament. Whether WITH an election you could get anything save old dead meat, I do not know. During the last war a few men had a glimmer of instinct. On whatever formula, they called it pacifism. Was it ? All of 'em I ever met were pugnacious. Was it an instinct to save the butt end of the RACE by not fighting ? Is it a mistake to combat Germans by force ?
Is there a RACE left in England ? Has it ANY will left to survive ? You can carry slaughter to Ireland. Will that save you ? I doubt it. Nothing can save you, save a purge. Nothing can save you, save an affirmation that you are English.
Whore Belisha is NOT. Isaccs is not. No Sassoon is an Englishman, racially. No Rothschild is English, no Strakosch is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Khan, Baruch, Schiff, Sieff, or Solomon was ever yet born Anglo-Saxon.
? And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your empire, and it is this filth that elects your politicians.
You have lost your tradition. You have not even learned what Lord Byron told you. You are, as even that foul rag the Times tells you, a little late in making a start.
In the year 1942 Anno Domini, there is only one start you can make. And that is a start toward being England. A refusal to be a province of Israel, or an outpost of Yankee-Judaea.
Quando tutti saremo forti.
17 (March 19, 1942) U. K. (B21) AND THE TIME LAG
Speakin' of Fan mail. I got a funny lookin' card the other day headed Kriegs Statlag XXI A.
with the prisoners number runnin' up into the thousands.
Dear Mr. Pound. If this card reaches you and you can manage it, I would be very grateful if you will send me one or two of your recent works on economics. Reading matter from England rather scarce at present and not very enlightening.
Signed. So and so.
Well, mebbe this is all very flattering. But the point is the TIME LAG. If a man has to be made a prisoner of war before he will read my works on economics--what good does it do him ? Or let us say what IMMEDIATE good. Of course he may be gittin' ready to make a home fit for a hero; in a new order England when he GITS out of Gefangenenlager.
? But wouldn't it have been a sight easier if he and his 12000 fellow recliners in the Genfangenenlager had STARTED readin' my economics just a bit SOONER?
I ask particularly my American hearers, whether the START on the new economics, which would have PREVENTED the war and let the now so mangy ole worm eaten Trafalgar lion go on lying down with the French Rooster, and the assorted eagles of Europe; and left the old Killyloo bird screechin' away on the 4th of July every summer, and no bone broken, and a lot fewer oil ships sunk, and more cars on the American roads, and more rubber for tires. And abundance, no longer potential: but real. Wouldn't it have been bit nicer?
Mr. Brown, known as Buffalo Bill, tellin' you I am in propaganda. Waal, damn it all, I was runnin' this SAME propaganda, back before Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich.
I don't mean I dug down into it, not down to the bottom, I was leadin' the pleasant life, and to men like Hitler and Mussolini, if they had ever got wind of my bein' here, they would have thought me a possibly harmless eccentric. HOWever, in my perlite and refined manner, I did try to do a spot of work educatin', here or there, puttin' in a drop of enlightenment.
I didn't go in hell for leather, economics EXCLUSIVE, straight at once. I had to find out how the old show was runnin'. Runnin' DOWN.
I say it was runnin' DOWN. I began to say that in my poetry. "This land turns evil slowly. "
Treatin' it by way of young man's intuition, I said something about getting the SENSE of a city, like the savage hunter has the sense of the forest. Somethin' was running DOWN.
? There is a poem, not by me, back in Blast, about a mud hydro. That was healthy mud, by comparison.
Then after I saw it was BAD, I began to wonder how you could fix it. After ten year askin' questions, askin' 'em of Bank Lawyers, askin' 'em of Max Pam or any other wise guy I could git near to. After ten years, I say, I began to get top sides with the subject. Usury, profits, monopolization of money. Then I began diggin' into American history, and other history. All there plain as a biscuit. But the means of TELLIN you people ? That was the question. Oh Hamlet. Oh village hamlets. Big papers did NOT want open discussion--it had to be bootlegged.
Then there was "education" beginning with the top shelves of the colleges. I am goin' to quote from a paper with an equine title printed out in Wisconsin. A little magazine, the kind that comes up alive and dies down usually rather sudden, inside a couple of years. Along in the Spring of 1935 I came up with this answer to those young editors in their quarterly as follows:
The best I can do in reply to yours is to offer programs recalling a few FACTS. For 30 years I have been trying to reorganize the study of literature so that it would be of some use to the student, and for 15 I have been trying to reorganize education, in general, to the same end.
The best I can tell you to date, is contained in my ABC of Reading and in my ABC of Economics with the volumes following it, Social Credit, an Impact; Jefferson and/or Mussolini (then in press).
Why aren't they used as YOUR textbooks ? For advanced students, there is my Make it New, which must be correlated with my ABC of Reading if you are clearly to see what it is driving at.
If American students will recognize that Universities are there to prepare students for life in a given country and in a given TIME, and insist on finding out what will help them to LIVE in that place and time, they can
? ? get their four years' worth. No body can do this for the students. They have got to do it for themselves.
"Mark Hopkins on one end of the log, and the student on the other. "
When Abelard was kicked out of the University of Paris 5,000 students followed him into the country, [where] there were no dormitories and million dollar gymnasia. That is the sort of thing that spells "revival of learning" or "intellectual rebirth. "
My generation was brought up ham ignorant of economics. History was taught with OMISSIONS of the most vital facts. Every page our generation read was over shadowed by usury. Not only was the press false, but every current idea had been warped by generations of antecedent perversion.
The ACID TEST of public men today is plain and simple. MISTRUST any man, no matter how high in office who tries to get you AWAY from the questions:
WHAT is money?
Who makes it?
How is it issued?
Why can't the WHOLE people buy what the WHOLE people produces?
Start on that at once, and throw out any man who won't give you a straight answer. You can not cure Wisconsin in Pekin. I mean, start where you are. Don't let anyone wriggle out of LOCAL honesty, by talking internationally. Investigate the Carnegie Peace Foundation. When you find out why they avoid the study of the economic causes of war, you'll be part way toward preventing another.
? Printed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1935, LONG before Hitler was so influential in world affairs.
You can lead a Rocking Horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.
And young America's problem is what was young England's problem. And the answers were KNOWN; the answers COULD have been broadcast, the answers could have been printed in daily papers, they could have been taught in the schools, they could have been used as the basis for action. I mean political action. And WHAT prevented it?
Waaal, go ask yourselves what prevented it ? Ask yourselves why these things were NOT widely printed ? Why the real thought of the American founders was hidden, stuffed into corners ? Why every man in England who foresaw disaster, and who saw HOW England could have avoided it IF . . . Why these men were NOT heeded. Why they were hugger-muggered out of the way, or reduced, shall we say often by FEAR, into silence.
Not all were afraid, some were prudent. Where are they ? Some of 'em got out in front. Now where are they ? Where are the back seaters, the men who knew, but saw no way to ACT on their knowledge ? The men who assembled tiny minorities ? Waaal, where are they ? And when will the people learn wisdom?
OZeus.
O Chan Ti, how long is the time lag?
#18 (March 22, 1942) U. K. (B20) BUT HOW?
? I unhooked my radio the other night and the word REVOLUTION came floatin' over the ambient air. Very English voice, usin' the word RE VO LU TION.
And I thought, yaaas, very nice but HOW' ? How CAN they revolute.
Conjure up to my mind the pale grey light in Kensington Gardens, and the gulls floatin' over the round pond, and the so very quiet demeanor of the nicely dressed females that used to float up the broadwalk, along about 1910. How CAN THEY revolute?
Yaas, I hear Bela Kun was over in England, he was a revolution, bloody murder and all the trimmings. But does Kensington revolute?
I am so old I can remember the end of the nineteenth century, that is the century before this one that is gettin' on to be nigh half gone. How impressed the American visitors were by the beef-eaters in the Tower, and the teacups at Windsor and Stratford-on-Avon, with the coats of arms glazed into the chimney, and the quiet lawn in the park, and a time when the Route du Roi wasn't so rotten. The Row, not of course that I knew the riders, save occasionally Mr. Cunninghame Graham, a fine figure on horse back, and ole Colonel Jackson, suggestin' I should dine at his club, he wantin' to see the expressions on the faces of his contemporaries when faced with the vorticist movement. Well, all that must be fairly well bygone.
The question is how do folks revolute ? The Rooshians do it with fire and sword, and very unpleasant tortures. Very unEnglish, as England used to be in my memory. How DO you revolute?
Can you revolute without contacts, without collaboration, without COMMUNICATION ? I think not.
Yaas, there is Cripps. He didn't use to be there so much. In fact my sole memory of Stafford is secondhand, old Nelly Weaver saying "A
? DREADFUL man! " Seems like she had a cousin, that was manager, or editor, or managing editor of a paper called Pig and Piffle, I mean by its own staff in private. And it sold for a lot less than it cost, I mean it cost, let us say, ten pence a copy to print, and sold retail for a six pence, and turned over ten or twenty thousand a year in net profits.
Anyhow, Nelly's cousin died, and left his sons in Cripps' charge, Cripps being trustee or guardian, so my memory of Stafford boils down to Miss Nelly a sayin'
"A DREADFUL man! Heaven KNOWS what he is teaching the boys! "
Waaal, if heaven didn't know then, mebbe heaven will find out during the next few week's course of hostilities.
I mean internal hostilities. I don't know that England learns from abroad. I dunno that the fall of Madras, or Calcutta will teach you folks anything, cause Hong Kong, Singapore and the Island Indies don't seem to have started you. But mebbe a few INTERNAL hostilities ? Heaven knows!
Back in Queen Elizabeth's time, farmin' out their estates to some usurer, gettin' out of their feudal duties, Cobbett and Hobhouse--all sorts of velleities toward reform; confined to a few special segments. Lord, can you call 'em segments. They were mostly kind hearted fellows, thought to be CRANKS by the public.
Can you have ANY collaboration if you don't MEET ? How can you meet in a CITY, unless you are financed?
Yaas, you can, or COULD meet on a street corner, or in by Mubble Arch, so long as you didn't do anything SERIOUS.
Ole Kun, Cohen, Be? la was serious. People in Budapest found out he was serious. Mebbe Sir Stafford is SERIOUS. The bolo agents in
? England were serious, when I was last there, the top numbers in the Communist Party were all paid by Moscow, which as you know is sometimes paid by New York or London.
It WAS known to your intelligence service, all their numbers were listed, all of 'em engaged in industrial espionage. I am not tellin' anything to you that some of your own rulers don't KNOW.
And now we hear of the SCORCHED EARTH policy. Git ready for an invasion. Cit ready to destroy all that is left you. Bum down your houses.
Waaal, WHO is a going to live in those ruins?
An invading army, if it ever gits into London, would, one would suppose, pick its own quarters; and a man that had burnt down his own bedroom would be left to sleep in the ashes.
Margey Daw, see saw, and the rest of it.
Do you think the people who tell you to burn down your houses and get ready for bombing raids for North Ireland, droppin' leaflets saying they only do it to help you ? Do you think that these people LOVE you?
Have you got any data about the Ukraine ? I am movin' toward this proposition. I assume that some of you did NOT want Mr. Churchill. He was not a pig in a poke. He may have been a Baldwin piglet, but he certainly was not CONcealed from the purchaser.
Take Carolyn Bellairs, for example, Carolyn Bellairs did NOT want Mr. Churchill. I dunno whether he, Bellairs, has yet joined Domvile in Jail. We do NOT git detailed news of your family squabbles. But I assume the Navy and the Army did contain at least a nucleus of men, with enough sense NOT to want Churchill.
? I assume that there was a tiny, and languid minority who did NOT acquiesce DEElightedly in a war, which was KNOWN to be going to have such consequences as the whole world now sees it havin'.
Revolution di PALAIS ? Is that it ? Do you think you can balayer the palais ? Do you think you can have a nice little revolution, in the colors of Mr. Watt's Hope Soap and Charity?
AH yes, but the MONEY. I am castin' about in my mind for some way you could CLEAN your own sewers.
Oh, but you say, we don't WANT to clean the sewers, we just want to dust out the draaaawin' room.
I comprehend you. But is that just what you can do?
I was for years all for a nice sensible bit of reform but Mr. Rothschild, and Mr. Sieff, and the rest of the British powers, Mond, Kataan, Sas soon, and the rest of 'em weren't very keen to nice reforms discussed in their papers.
They put in such blokes as Eden. They put OUT anybody who said anything sensible. Nice old gentlemen, who would edge up to the truth, talkin' about remonitization of silver, or some VERY mild infraction of the gold-bugs monopoly. They, the nice old members of the respectable knighthood, or elderly colonels, who remembered the end of the other war, they would get sent out to Karachi, to keep 'em from impeding the traffic (traffic in gold, and in loans at high interest) or at low interest, sometimes not more than 30 or 40% on the real money handled.
CAN YOU MEET one another ? Your air isn't free. Open organizations have been "put inside. " No chance of marching 'round swinging green banners; presenting petitions to the King, about Coventry. Nothing but SECRET organization. Ever hear of the Fenians?
? Or revolution in the PALACE ? Well, where do we go from here ? Art revolution ? Need three or four men even to make an ART movement function.
Can't do it in politics without at least some sort of COMMON ground, common agreement.
You do NOT believe in the total abolition of property--meaning of private ownership of your homes, and fir fields. Lord, who has any FIELDS left ? I dunno. Say your house and suburban garden. What about homesteads ? The air is NOT yours. The press is NOT yours. Communications by private automobile are said to be gettin' scarcer. In London you do not MEET, no man knows any other, at least not to any extent.
How can you defend your homesteads from Cripps ? Homesteads ? Your bed chamber, your kitchenette, and your telephone, all of 'em rented. God help you. You better start SOMETIME.
Ezra Pound speakin'.
Yaaas, SOME time, while Sir Stafford is goin' big out in India, agreein' on the TOTAL abolution of private property, him and the Aga Kahn, and the gaekwar of Baroda. Pardon me, the Tovarish of Baroda.
#19 (March 23, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B22) BUT HOW ? SECOND ITEM
It was not the present speaker, but an Englishman, I believe an absolutely loyal Englishman, a sort of Royalist, not Mr. Eliot, but at any rate a King's man, and so far as I recall a man who had no Fascist or Nazi sympathies, who on May 11th, 1939 uttered the statement I am about to repeat to you. Get the date, May eleventh, 1939.
? There is NO mystery whatsoever about the disappearance of Mr. Litvinov from the political scene. The Soviet Foreign Minister vacated his office because he failed to deliver "the goods" demanded by the masters of Wall Street and Moscow. New methods to secure these "goods" will now assuredly be given a trial.
What are these "goods? " Nothing other than Great Britain, captive and in chains. Great Britain stripped of her empire, above all Great Britain, ruined financially by the collapse of the Pound Sterling and the system called "barter trading" which is based upon that money.
There, gentle Briton, you have it. Your own heroes have told you. And your own true men you have heard NOT. You have not heard your own true speakers. You have lain down and died in the gutter because you would not hear your OWN friends; your own loyal speakers.
Now as I keep on tellin' you, my friends and/or acquaintances in England, were not of any one group. There were a few of 'em Fascists; but the most of 'em were IDIOTICALLY anti-fascist. They were most of 'em plum stupid about the Italian regime. I am not offerin' you the ideas of a sect, I am as the strength is vouchsafed to me trying to remind you or tell you of a few home truths, that you COULD have learned not only from me, but from dozens of Englishmen.
Seems like it must have been more like HUNDREDS of Englishmen, trying to tell you for the past twenty-two years.
Now WHY did you not listen ? Well, if that implies retrospect, bring it down to the true British question: W'ere do we g'ae frm ERE ? I ask you.
I ask you still more HOW do you [go] from here. I can't see that any other white race in Europe is going to be very anxious about Anglo Saxon survival belong to what is usually regarded as a branch of that
? race. Racially, English went to America along sometime after 1600, 1632-38, along up till 1700.
I think you lose by not thinking about this problem as RACIAL.
Yes, I know I went at it from the economic part of the picture. Brought up on American principles; no prejudice against any man for race, creed, or color.
Waaal, the chemist is not supposed to have prejudice against any particular chemical; in the laboratory some stink and some do not. Some explode and some do not--chemist's business--chemist in American sense, not the man in the drug store; say the chemical experimenter or chemical engineer is supposed to look at different chemical elements with a fair eye and mind.
So I don't reckon to go along my road as with prejudice. I have tried to see the thing straight.
Birth control, bad national health, neoMalthusian preachin', scarcity economics, all workin' Britain's downfall. Question is: Ain't you fallen down about FAR ENOUGH?
Can't you stop somewhere at least near the TOP of the dung heap, with out having the whole midden flop over on top of ye?
And HOW are you going to do it ? That is what I ask: HOW are you going to do it?
You certainly are NOT going to do it by abolition of all ARYAN ownership, and the mortgaging of all England to a half hundred Kikes in New York. That is NOT going to give you a new British order.
CAN you understand, can any of you understand, that a few of you must club together, and at least try to find out what you BELIEVE?
? You do NOT believe in the abolition of ownership ? You do NOT believe that you should be ruled from abroad by Kuhn, Loeb, and Warburg, of the dregs of the ex-ghettoes of Europe, now planted on the neck of the American people.
Have you any hold on the country ? Let us say on the Land?
I see it is increasingly difficult for any two men to meet outside London. Who meets INSIDE London ? Do they still disagree about EVERYTHING ? Do three social credit parties instantly arise wherever two social creditors gather together?
Is there ANY common bond, apart from hysteria induced by your jews- papers? Or the common interests of men who hire their "seats. "
I mean SEATS in the Commons. Difference between those seats and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange is that in New York the men BUY their seats, and in Westminster the members rent 'em. The New York Stock Exchange system has an advantage; it may even be more democratic. I never heard democracy discussed in this connection.
But a man BUYS his seat on Change, openly and the price is known, I believe in most cases.
Whereas a member of Parliament is a renter, he is said to pay in an in definite sum per year, to DEFRAY.
Defray is, I think, the word used, defray party expenses. Contribute to the funds of the party.
That is democracy. Is it ? It has never been the American IDEAL of representative government.
I have murmured on the ambient air, now and then a few soft words about my own splay footed country. Real representation when the place
? was more or less agricultural. Method of geographic division O. K. when many people were engaged in growing the crops of one sort or another, and the seaboard in tradin', and fishin'.
Rough sections still kept in the United States but no one havin' any say now, but the banks and the Warburgs. People who FEED the lot always voted down by the RULERS. Naive blokes, populist, subject to caricature. All lead up to GUILD organization.
Which does NOT appeal to abject NON-producers. Does not appeal to exploiters, that is the rub. Early socialists were boneheaded; didn't dig down into problem of money.
I dunno how far you now KNOW what the same men took twenty years tellin' you, and that your press took those same twenty years keepin' from you.
Even supposin' you do NOW begin to see something, how are you going to GIT OUT of your present trilemma ? If SOME Englishmen could see where England's course was leading back before this war started more of them ought by now to be seeing it, seeing that Singapore is no longer called by that name. What was the Sassoonery is now Shonanko. How do you save your homes ? Revolution behind the scenes in the palace ? A group of officers of the Army ? Or guild formation ? Movement coming up from the mines or the land?
You can NOT eat minerals, and then HEROES ? The reformers all used to take it so easy. The new bright world was to be arranged over the tea cups. Why DIDN'T you settle it over the tea cups ? DID any one care for England enough to rattle the teaspoons, or risk cracking a saucer ? AND now your politicians talk of CONDUCT of the war. Don't you realize that the only men with brains enough to conduct a war are the men who foresaw what the war would be; the men who tried to keep you OUT of it, and who would now try to CONDUCT you out if it ? You
? have NOT made it a war of honor. You could have made a hopeless stand, a forlorn despair of an expedition into Poland, and been defeated with honor. Of course it would not have been right at bottom, because the guarantee to Poland was faked. It was not to or FOR Poland. But even so, you could have made a gesture and been defeated with honor.
Can you not see that the outrage of the bombardment of Paris is but one of a series of attempts to make real peace impossible, and to prepare for the war after this one ? Needless hate--sewing the SEEDS of hate for to morrow. Does it mean nothing to you that in this war you have inflicted more and worse wounds on your Allies than on the people you said were your enemies ? Can these things go on forever without some glimmer of light reaching the British mind, to show the real causes of the conflict-- the real forces IN conflict ? Usury against peasantry, usury against farmland, usury against every man who does a day's work, physical or with his mind.
Ah, against consciousless exploitation, against monopoly, against bank deals and swindles. Against EVERY race in Europe that takes the responsibility for being a nation and administering openly, as a government in the eyes of the people.
Against the crawling slime of a secret rule, a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE rule, that takes NO responsibility for the welfare of races, and nations, but eats like a cancer into the heart and soul of all nations. Even that where of its central staff is composed.
#20 (March 26, 1942) U. S. (B23) McARTHUR
It is a privilege to fight against gentlemen. And the European radio station seems to me to have been as ready to show respect to General McArthur, as they are, and RIGHTLY are, to show absolute and utter contempt and loathing for the war profiteers, and the gang of
? unmitigated newts, and vermin who have thrown the world into war in the hope of establishing a gold and money lending monopoly, and blotting out the good life in five continents. They have done this from their lust for secret and irresponsible power.
And the place to fight these syphilis bugs is NOT on the frontiers, but in the centre of your own nations.
This more than bubonic plague passes over all frontiers as Dante already perceived. It rots the heart, and the soul of the nations. It is silent, ceaseless in its action. And the PLACE to resist it is for every man LOCALLY--the means to resist it are LOCAL.
And by that fact they are hard to bring into coherence. The embezzler, working behind false laws, can mobilize quickly; the farmer, worker and peasant can not.
The embezzler sets up his papers, dailies and weeklies. That curse of God Willkie was puffed up by the Weeklies. The plague does not stop with the dailies. It sets up publishing houses, it grinds down all private liberty--economic--I mean, fewer and fewer men or groups have the MONEY to run a paper. Every cranny is infested. Every college campus has a book store. LOOK to these bookstores. Look to the LAST vestiges of approximate freedom of the press, even the scholastic press, that gets out small editions. Communicate, Communicate, and CO MUN ICATE.
A plot was outlined years ago to blot out classical scholarship, to blot out the historic sense. It went about on soft paws, making no noise, it was DEADLY.