And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's
faithful
companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
He did go so far as saying that "events in Crete" had delayed his meeting with England's public enemy Number 3.
That was some thing but not quite enough to win the Ukraine campaign.
He might have told you that events in Russia had delayed my gettin' the Japan Times. Copy for June 19th has just come. I suppose it was sittin' at Kieff to git through. One lap writer at that time allowed like, as if Franklin was gettin' you folks into the war. But it didn't look to me as if he thought it was an act of idealism. He didn't confuse it with savin' democracy.
In the meantime do LOOK at Belisha's Anglo-Saxon face, as reproduced in P. M. and other organs of similar nature.
That is what the American branch of Sulgrave Manor Association is asked to Unite with.
? #2 (October 26, 1941) U. S. (A47) BOOKS AND MUSIC
Mr. Churchill, EVEN Mr. Churchill hasn't had the brass to tell the American people WHY he wants 'em to die to save what.
He is fighting for the gold standard and MONOPOLY. Namely the power to starve the whole of mankind, and make it pay through the nose before it can eat the fruit of its own labor.
His gang, whether kike, gentile, or hybrid is not fit to govern. And the English OUGHT to be the only people ass enough, and brute enough to fight for him.
Now as to my personal habits, the few of you who know that I exist know that I have given most of my time to muggin' up kulchur, that I have writ a few books, and spent my spare time trying to learn musical composition, or else playin' tennis and floatin' round the gulf of Tigullio, in which act I make, so far as I know, a nuisance of myself to no one whatever.
And in the mornings I write letters to and read letters from the most intelligent of my contemporaries, and Mr. Churchill and that brute Rosefield, and their kike postal spies and obstructors, kikarian and/or others annoy me by cuttin' off my normal mental intercourse with my colleagues. But I am NOT going to starve, I am not going to starve mentally. The culture of the Occident came out of Europe and a LOT of it is still right here in Europe, and I don't mean archeology either.
So a few weeks ago Monotti sez: ever read Pea's Moscardino So I read it. and for the first time in your colloquitor's life he wuz tempted to TRANSLATE a novel, and did so. Ten years ago I had seen Enrico Pea passin' ' along the sea front and Gino [Saviotti] sez: It's a novelist. Having seen and known POLLON IDEN, some hundreds, or probably
? thousands I was not interested in its being a novelist. But the book must be good or I wouldn't be more convinced of the fact AFTER having translated it, than I was before. Of course, my act was impractical so far as you are concerned. I haven't the ghost of an idea how I am to get the manuscript to America or get it published. Pea has never made a cent out of the original. Well neither had Joyce nor Eliot when I started trying to git someone to print 'em.
What's it like ? Well if Tom Hardy had been born a lot later, and lived in the hills up back of Lunigiana, which is down along the coast here, and if Hardy hadn't writ what ole Fordie used to call that "sort of small town paper journalese," and if a lot of other things, includin' temperament, had been different, and so forth . . . that might have been something like Pea's writin'--which I repeat is good writing--and was back in 1921 when Moscardino was printed. Moscardino is the name of the kid who is tellin' about his granpop, a nickname, like Buck.
As soon as the barriers are down I shall be sendin' a copy along for the enlightenment of the American public.
In the meantime, if any one wants to learn how to write Italian let 'em read the first chapter of Forastiero, or the couple of pages on the bloke who had been 20 years in jail. This is just announcin' that Italy has a writer, and it is some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer. Like Confucius, knocked 'round and done all sorts of jobs. Writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture.
I sent in a hurry call from the Siena music week, but I reckon it was too late, not time to get retransmittal, but I wanted the clean and decent Americans to hear the Vivaldi Oratorio Juditha Triumphans; which makes ole pop Handel look like a cold poached egg what somebody dropped on the pavement.
? Of course it's not THAT kind of an oratorio, it is a musical whoop in two parts, to celebrate the retaking of Corfu from the Turks in 1715; and it was very timely and suitable as a bicentenary funeral wreath on red-head Vivaldi.
I got it once from the top centre, and once in a box hangin' over the orchestry, once for the whole and once for the details.
And I think it's O. K. brother. You'd have to hear it alternate with Johnnie Bach, say the Mathias, seven times over, at least I would, before I would think I was ready to say just HOW good it is.
There has been some good Vivaldi done for orchestra over Rome Radio, but I dunno whether it has been short-waved over to Amerika. There was some good Vivaldi done two years ago, when the Chigi organization had the sense to devote the whole of the Sienese fest to Vivaldi, but the Juditha is one up on that. Better than the Olympiade, as then presented. In fact I think it is better built up as a whole, and you don't have to be annoyed by ginks walkin' about and doin' stage actin'. Well some people like their music with that distraction. When you stop shootin' and stop pilin' up profit for kikes by conveying their guns to the god damn English who ought to be spanked and put to bed by their nurses, you might be able to come over and HEAR IT.
That would be a saner way of passin' the time than doublin' your taxes and being robbed by the American treasury. God, my god, you folks are DUMB! ! !
Now as to criticism of the Juditha; I affirm that Vivaldi knew more about using the human voice than Johnnie Bach ever discovered. That may sound like heresy. Waaal, you decide after you have listened to both of 'em. And I affirm that Tony Vivaldi knocks the spots off of Handel. I got no doubt on that point whatsoever. Very nice bit for viola d'amore and naturally it pleases me on account of a kink I had before I knew
? Vivaldi had done it. I have a high opinion of Rossini and Mozart. I. e. , use of mandolin in serious orchestra. So has everyone who ain't stark ravin' goofy. But Mozart when he came down to Italy did NOT set the public crazy. And part of the reason was, as I conjecture, that the Italian had then had an earful of Tony Vivaldi. That is guess work. But there are things to set against Bach. In fact things Bach took hold of and rearranged; without as I think improvin' 'em.
I had a chance to hear both together two years ago in Siena, in a good orchestral concert, one up to Casella, the way that program was built. Man named Guarnieri conductin', been doing three years now in Siena, at this summer fest. And I would by god rather hear Guarnieri conductin' Vivaldi than hear Toscanini conductin' Beethoven in Salzburg. An idea which occurred to me, dunn' the Juditha performance.
I try to tell you that Italy is carryin' ON. La rivoluzione continua. This is the kind of thing Italians go on doing, despite that dirty mugged bleeder and betrayer of his allies, Winston babyface Churchill.
And his gangsters. Those blighters have never done one damn thing for civilization. They have rotted their country, and should not be allowed to rot anyone elses. They didn't start the process of corruption, but they have been, everyone of 'em for it, all day and every day, and for the 24 hour period.
Di Marzio is runnin' a paper. Vicari is runnin' a monthly devoted to the "narrative" nothin' but narrative or careful discussion of narrative, and how one should do it. Over in Barcelona, they are printin' a series, Poesia en la Mano, bilingual editions of everyone from Villon to Mallarme' and Rilke, and, I am told, your present colloquitor if they can git anyone to translate me.
? EUROPE is an organic body, its life continues, its life has components and nearly every damn thing that has made your lives worth livin' up to this moment, has had its ORIGINS right here in Europe.
Yes, we HAD some colonial architecture and 30 pages of Whitman (Walt Whitman, not Whitemann) and then Whistler, and Henry James left the country. In fact it warn't no bed of roses fer authors and painters. Though my generation allus thought we ought to plant something or other, and try to git a new crop of somethin' or other. The idea of the Returnin' Native was prevalent, except possibly to Thomas S. Eliot who saw from the start that you folks weren't episcopal enough to suit his episcopal temperament, and he somewhat looked down on my pagan and evangelical tendencies. Waaal, frankly, I allus though it would be a good thing to come back and put some sort of a college or university into shape to teach the young something. Not merely the god damn saw dust and subsitutes for learnin' and literature they git handed. However, ca hold up the whole course of civilization. If you wanna line up with bone heads, you will line up with bone heads.
And you will go on having conductors instead of composers and European authors who have resigned.
But don't get that Anglican attitude, of the old story, storm in the channel called by the English, the English channel--the straits between Calais and Dover--and the dirty old Times out with a headline "Continent isolated. "
Nobody here is layin' flowers on the tomb of Columbus, not this year. But don't go and run away with the idea that Europe is no longer here, or that books aren't being written. I mean bein' WRITTEN, and that we have no painters, or writers, or musicians.
I regret the personal correspondence of a small number of writers, who mostly don't write to each other. And I would like to see what Hillaire
? Hiler is paintin', and to git kumrad cumminkz's last set of verses. Or to go on get tin' Kitasono's Japanese magazine. But I ain't gittin' weak and pindlin' or goin' into a pronounced and delicate melancholy fer the extinction of all human intercourse.
#3 (November 4, 1941) U. S. (A51) THE GOLDEN WEDDING
The sight of elderly wedded couples dwelling in mutual devotion sometimes impells one to think of their early loves. In the present case the spectacle of Mr. Churchill's government wedded to Stalin's, and Mr. Roosevelt's in violable word mixed into it; in short, this triangual Darby and Joan of the three hebraicized governments leads one to look back at the forgotten incidents of their courtship.
In particular, the love feasts between our American Reds and Moscow in vite beautific contemplation. Our idealists loved Moscow while Mr. Churchill was still playing the bashful Swain. In fact he was scowling at Stalin, and from the incomprehension of his eternal love for the Moscovites he was being not only sulky, but insulting. So with true love. Never, Never, NEVER would he come and kiss the Russian Joan under the sickle and mistletoe.
Our own American Trade Unionists were more oncoming. They LIKED the bud of Russian promise. Ref. Worker's Library No. 3 bearing the dim and lavender date: Sept. 9, 1927.
Jay Lovestone (ne? possibly Liebstein) on the first page of amorous paean inscribes the luminous words "THE establishment of the 7-hour day in Russia. " Well that's far off enough and long enough before the Stakhelevites, and Mr. Lovestone is very hard on the American Federation of Labor. "Reactionary trade union bureaucrats" he call's 'em.
? And in that memorable day an' year our dewey-eyed workers (trade unionists and idealists) technical advisors they figger in the catalog, Brophy, R. W. [? ] Dunn, C. H. Douglas, Rex Tugwell, Stuart Chase, a lot, as you see, of brawny fellows who had used either the hammer or sickle in daily life, went over to visit the Kumrad. And apart from the general, as op posed to the specific nature of the answers, the kumrad didn't do so bad. The questions being rather more nebulous and UNspecific than the answers. How could the debonair murderer get down very near to brass tacks in his answers ?
After all Marx was pretty good at history and diagnosis. Nobody on the Axis side denies that Marx discovered several genuine faults in the usury system.
All we ask is a way to CURE 'em. And the torture chambers in most countries where Stalin's power has reached, and in a few embassies where he had been unable to get control of the total police force, rather indicate that the Boishie system never got UNIVERSAL approval from its victims.
However, when next dining with Rabbi Lehman, or Scholem Mosestha and the rest of the international bankers, spring a few pages of the kumrad's answers between the caviar and the pheasant and see if it don't enliven the dinner.
Sure Stalin approves of Marx and Engels wantin' to take ECONOMIC, political, cultural and organizational measures. And seem' as he put 'em in that order, you would expect me to fall for it ?
ECONOMIC first. Of course the Bolshies didn't. Any party that comes into power, probably puts ORGANIZATIONAL measures first, and the economics belong, alas to the almost inaccessible part of culture. So FEW people seem able to grasp simple economics without, as Senator Bankhead remarked, about three centuries delay.
? Three centuries, to get people to understand anything about anything havin' to do with money. An' it is now demonstrated on the corpus vilis of British reformers' hopes that very little economic reform gets into practice without precedent organizational and political measures of an almost earth shaking nature. A curious phrase about "reconstruct capitalist society" must belong to the translator. I don't want to pin that on Joseph, tho' mebbe that was part of his muddle. I am far less concerned with Joe's lacunae than with a few clear positive statements. Joe said he was aware that "a number of capitalist governments are controlled by big banks," notwithstanding the existence of "democratic" parliaments.
Not bad for a Georgian assassin. And possibly several decades ahead of the American public and professoriat. Not a single power in which the Cabinet can be formed in opposition to the will of the big financial magnates. I wonder: is that why they took Joe for a ride ?
"It is sufficient to exert financial pressure to cause Cabinet Ministers to fall from their posts as if they were stunned. "
Joey was talkin' of European cabinets; not of the so very different American DEMocracy (as they call it) etc. where, unless there is absolute surety that financial pressure won't be used, the blighters seldom or never get in. Joe SAID that the control of government by money-bags is inconceivable and absolutely excluded in the U. S. S. R. How different from the home life of our own DEMOCRACY (as they call it), etc. and how different from anything any British politician has ever encountered, and how different from any state of things that Churchill's group would desire.
"Narrow circle" said Joe of individuals connected in one way or another with the large banks and because of that they strive to conceal the part they play in this from the people.
? What a PERFECT ally for Churchill, Morgenthau, Lehman, and the present Anglo-Jewish regimes ! Well, the starry eyed Mr. Tugwell, and the cautious Mr. Chase and Jim Maurer and Brophy took it all down hook, line and sinker. Seven hour day and the rest of it. It was a stirring occasion. The only thing is that the idealist's ideals have got going so much faster and gone so much further. The Axis side of the present hard feelings.
Here the TRADE UNIONS, with their syndic. organization, and their recognized legal status whereby they propose, formulate, and GET what they want in Italy is really of so much MORE interest for any member of ANY trade union, or for any leader of labor who cares a hang about the welfare of the led that one only hopes the American trade unionist will someday read Por, or at least read something about Italian organizational measures.
The Stalin interview is a tough piece of reading, very hard to take hold of. That was probably the secret of his hold--plenty of people who KNOW Russia have been puzzled by the gap between their effective propaganda and their local failure in solving human problems. I believe the human material they had to work on explains part of the latter. I mean why they did NOT make a paradise, but mostly a sweat shop-- machines before men--men as material. But the other side, the devilish efficiency of their propaganda, is worth study.
And it seems to be a variant on the old political wheeze of sticking to general statements that each auditor interprets to mean what HE would mean IF he said it.
And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's faithful companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr. N. M. Butler. On June 3, 1941, year current, as delivered at the commencement of Columbia University, when Ole Nick was awaitin' another Waterloo, and as is common with his kind, he wasn't puttin' it in
? the first person singular. Nick wanted Americans to go fight for the British exploiters; so he said "THE WORLD" etc. In this case THE WORLD (meaning Nick and his pay masters). The World he sez, awaits another Waterloo. And on the fifth page it turns out he meant a defeat of Hitler! ! Which might be called "metonomy" or takin' a part for the "whole," and not the better whole either.
Now the WORLD, as any college president ought to know, before the trustees pay him his fat annual salary, is spherical in form, and is composed of MORE than one continent, and not wholly and totally enraptured with the big usury central.
However let Nick Butler speak for himself, as he has never failed to do in all his oleaginous lifetime.
Several pages of the old scamp's palaver contain statements by which no right thinking man would be offended. The slabs of print, the page undivided by paragraph divisions, tends to lull the reader or auditor into security.
Mr. Butler even disapproves (mildly, of course) of the "controlling desire for gain," alias our old enemy the profit motive. Of course he keeps off the specific MEANS of gain, exercised by his owners. He then pays a delicate compliment to Lord Holy Fox, without committing himself, in fact nothing could be more downy.
The FIRST Lord Halifax, unaided by his charming and formidable Lady, said there were three hundred years ago many things that riches cannot buy. Therefore the American boys should bleed for the present Lord Holy Fox. Now Ole Nick don't go as far back as all that, he stops back in the 17th Century; before Robert Cecil was so vigorous in defense of the British OPIUM interests in Shanghai.
Victory for a moral ideal is not enough, according to Nicholas, because the "gain-seeking interest has control of so vast a proportion of
? mankind. " That is true enough, but it ain't reduced the moral ideal to ABSOLUTE impotence. This is what was worrying Butler; but he hadn't got down to bed rock. He said there was a time, back apparently when Mark Hanna was running the United State of America, when the moral ideal was to all appearances gainin' ground.
Of course if by that he means that some empires were GAINING territory, he might have said so, only he didn't. Ole Nicholas puts the rise of the triumph, real or apparent, the IDEAL, from the McKinley to the Wealsohn administration.
Note of HOpe and progress.
In 1910, the American Congress was unanimous for the moral principle (so long as no questions were asked about the privileges of the usury central). Nic complains that the moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations.
Which shows the state of DEEP ignorance in the WORLD; as distinct from Nicholas Butler's circle or pot.
And lookin' at dates, he must have been blurrin' this blurb the same week that a Chinaman, not of Wang Ching Wei's party, but of Chiang Kai-shek's party, and FAITHFUL to Chiang, saying what Hitler's justice in scuttling international affairs was such that the Chinese of the ANTI- JAP, anti-Wang party might accept Hitler's arbitrage.
Mr. Butler then seems to fall into incoherence. He talks of a PLEDGE as something to be kept; what price, England, Churchill, and Roosevelt ? He objects to having the savings of generations swept away; he asks what has become of the influence of and guidance of the great religions; Christian, Mosel, HEBREW, and Buddhist, and begorrah, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving out St. Ambrose and St. Antonio da Firenze, and graciously waivin' a hand to the captains of the mind, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German. And of course
? Abraham Lincoln, not quoting old Abe on the currency issue. And then barbarous brutality, without mention of Esthonia, Finland, or places occupied by the-- --Bustin of churches and museums. Wot price Louvain and Cyrenaica ? And all this "However dark the skies," etc. ends up with a historic parallel; the WORLD waitin' for a new Vaterloo; because Napolean BonypartY went into Russia, and if Hitler ain't licked in Europe, it will come in Asia or Africa. Well that is a bad slip, because Knox and Stimson, etc. are retching for to rape Africa. But at any rate you git a picture of Nicholas, and METONOMY or takin' a part for the HOLE. A figger of Rhetorik sez Sam Johnson, whereby one word is put for another.
Now if Butler, the old goof, wants me to give him a clean bill of health, he can use the enormous power conferred on him by his position, to get Columbia University to issue a series of volumes containing the GIST of the beliefs and knowledge of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln. NOT leaving out every phrase and paragraph which I, and men like me, consider vital to the understanding of American history.
#4 (November 6, 1941) U. S. (56)
THIS WAR ON YOUTH--ON A GENERATION
A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me. I don't mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears. Thus I have learned that Professor I. A. Richards, one of England's few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.
And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on. Wallace Stevens, J. G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.
? And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British. And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin' on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin' poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel. [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics. I don't quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.
Well, that's a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers. We need more communication between the five continents.
And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda. Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.
And that brings me to the question of AGE. Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ? That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.
Back in the other war W. B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.
And in one way or another--lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation--pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won't be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect. It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers. The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.
? Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda. Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear. Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.
HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ? Details of Roosenstein's "freedom of the seas," NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.
If Chile don't, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.
STARVE 'em out. Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?
Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another. Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax. First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.
RATIONING!
In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance. Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year. Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.
The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia. Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore. From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents. AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile
? and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.
Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ? Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937. In 1937 there was NO necessity of War. Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable. There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war. Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.
Don't say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution. That is a fairly conservative statement. He has NEVER been neutral. But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ? What is their business ? What is their civic record ? What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?
Have any of 'em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ? Which is basic in all economics.
Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.
The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.
If you start a ten years war ? Yes, IF you start a ten years war. None of these old swine will be there at the end of it. It won't be their world, it may be your ruin.
As to RUIN. What about Petrograd ? No military purpose in its destruction.
? Laval saved Paris. Churchill would have had 'em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France. What causes that ? Criminality ? Imbecility ? Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind's eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.
Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.
Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill. Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.
Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution. Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right. The remedy did NOT work. AND the revolution was betrayed. Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed. It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.
A lot of 'em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses. The fools got control. Now YOU are NOT communists. The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead. The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage. The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.
You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever. You don't even look at what is done by your governments. Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy. Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business. Very few analyze that want or carry their
? thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.
Our system was O. K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc. The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn't stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.
First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity
Amateur move.
COHABITATION with other men. POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city. Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed. Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.
AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth. I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers
What causes that ? Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it
Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw
? revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair. We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas. For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms. We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.
We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it Why do we NOT ?
Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?
For whom ?
It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.
#5 (December 7, 1941) U. S. & U. K. (A66) THOSE PARENTHESES
Europe callin', Pound speakin'. Ezry Pound speakin'. And I think I am perhaps still speakin' a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it. They say an Englishman's head's made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.
Of course I don't know what GOOD I am doin', I mean what IMME DIATE good. But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.
? Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15). Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England. I am content to say state of mind.
I can't say my remarks were heeded. I thought I had got 'em simple enough. Words short and simple enough. In fact some people complained that several of 'em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).
He might have told you that events in Russia had delayed my gettin' the Japan Times. Copy for June 19th has just come. I suppose it was sittin' at Kieff to git through. One lap writer at that time allowed like, as if Franklin was gettin' you folks into the war. But it didn't look to me as if he thought it was an act of idealism. He didn't confuse it with savin' democracy.
In the meantime do LOOK at Belisha's Anglo-Saxon face, as reproduced in P. M. and other organs of similar nature.
That is what the American branch of Sulgrave Manor Association is asked to Unite with.
? #2 (October 26, 1941) U. S. (A47) BOOKS AND MUSIC
Mr. Churchill, EVEN Mr. Churchill hasn't had the brass to tell the American people WHY he wants 'em to die to save what.
He is fighting for the gold standard and MONOPOLY. Namely the power to starve the whole of mankind, and make it pay through the nose before it can eat the fruit of its own labor.
His gang, whether kike, gentile, or hybrid is not fit to govern. And the English OUGHT to be the only people ass enough, and brute enough to fight for him.
Now as to my personal habits, the few of you who know that I exist know that I have given most of my time to muggin' up kulchur, that I have writ a few books, and spent my spare time trying to learn musical composition, or else playin' tennis and floatin' round the gulf of Tigullio, in which act I make, so far as I know, a nuisance of myself to no one whatever.
And in the mornings I write letters to and read letters from the most intelligent of my contemporaries, and Mr. Churchill and that brute Rosefield, and their kike postal spies and obstructors, kikarian and/or others annoy me by cuttin' off my normal mental intercourse with my colleagues. But I am NOT going to starve, I am not going to starve mentally. The culture of the Occident came out of Europe and a LOT of it is still right here in Europe, and I don't mean archeology either.
So a few weeks ago Monotti sez: ever read Pea's Moscardino So I read it. and for the first time in your colloquitor's life he wuz tempted to TRANSLATE a novel, and did so. Ten years ago I had seen Enrico Pea passin' ' along the sea front and Gino [Saviotti] sez: It's a novelist. Having seen and known POLLON IDEN, some hundreds, or probably
? thousands I was not interested in its being a novelist. But the book must be good or I wouldn't be more convinced of the fact AFTER having translated it, than I was before. Of course, my act was impractical so far as you are concerned. I haven't the ghost of an idea how I am to get the manuscript to America or get it published. Pea has never made a cent out of the original. Well neither had Joyce nor Eliot when I started trying to git someone to print 'em.
What's it like ? Well if Tom Hardy had been born a lot later, and lived in the hills up back of Lunigiana, which is down along the coast here, and if Hardy hadn't writ what ole Fordie used to call that "sort of small town paper journalese," and if a lot of other things, includin' temperament, had been different, and so forth . . . that might have been something like Pea's writin'--which I repeat is good writing--and was back in 1921 when Moscardino was printed. Moscardino is the name of the kid who is tellin' about his granpop, a nickname, like Buck.
As soon as the barriers are down I shall be sendin' a copy along for the enlightenment of the American public.
In the meantime, if any one wants to learn how to write Italian let 'em read the first chapter of Forastiero, or the couple of pages on the bloke who had been 20 years in jail. This is just announcin' that Italy has a writer, and it is some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer. Like Confucius, knocked 'round and done all sorts of jobs. Writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture.
I sent in a hurry call from the Siena music week, but I reckon it was too late, not time to get retransmittal, but I wanted the clean and decent Americans to hear the Vivaldi Oratorio Juditha Triumphans; which makes ole pop Handel look like a cold poached egg what somebody dropped on the pavement.
? Of course it's not THAT kind of an oratorio, it is a musical whoop in two parts, to celebrate the retaking of Corfu from the Turks in 1715; and it was very timely and suitable as a bicentenary funeral wreath on red-head Vivaldi.
I got it once from the top centre, and once in a box hangin' over the orchestry, once for the whole and once for the details.
And I think it's O. K. brother. You'd have to hear it alternate with Johnnie Bach, say the Mathias, seven times over, at least I would, before I would think I was ready to say just HOW good it is.
There has been some good Vivaldi done for orchestra over Rome Radio, but I dunno whether it has been short-waved over to Amerika. There was some good Vivaldi done two years ago, when the Chigi organization had the sense to devote the whole of the Sienese fest to Vivaldi, but the Juditha is one up on that. Better than the Olympiade, as then presented. In fact I think it is better built up as a whole, and you don't have to be annoyed by ginks walkin' about and doin' stage actin'. Well some people like their music with that distraction. When you stop shootin' and stop pilin' up profit for kikes by conveying their guns to the god damn English who ought to be spanked and put to bed by their nurses, you might be able to come over and HEAR IT.
That would be a saner way of passin' the time than doublin' your taxes and being robbed by the American treasury. God, my god, you folks are DUMB! ! !
Now as to criticism of the Juditha; I affirm that Vivaldi knew more about using the human voice than Johnnie Bach ever discovered. That may sound like heresy. Waaal, you decide after you have listened to both of 'em. And I affirm that Tony Vivaldi knocks the spots off of Handel. I got no doubt on that point whatsoever. Very nice bit for viola d'amore and naturally it pleases me on account of a kink I had before I knew
? Vivaldi had done it. I have a high opinion of Rossini and Mozart. I. e. , use of mandolin in serious orchestra. So has everyone who ain't stark ravin' goofy. But Mozart when he came down to Italy did NOT set the public crazy. And part of the reason was, as I conjecture, that the Italian had then had an earful of Tony Vivaldi. That is guess work. But there are things to set against Bach. In fact things Bach took hold of and rearranged; without as I think improvin' 'em.
I had a chance to hear both together two years ago in Siena, in a good orchestral concert, one up to Casella, the way that program was built. Man named Guarnieri conductin', been doing three years now in Siena, at this summer fest. And I would by god rather hear Guarnieri conductin' Vivaldi than hear Toscanini conductin' Beethoven in Salzburg. An idea which occurred to me, dunn' the Juditha performance.
I try to tell you that Italy is carryin' ON. La rivoluzione continua. This is the kind of thing Italians go on doing, despite that dirty mugged bleeder and betrayer of his allies, Winston babyface Churchill.
And his gangsters. Those blighters have never done one damn thing for civilization. They have rotted their country, and should not be allowed to rot anyone elses. They didn't start the process of corruption, but they have been, everyone of 'em for it, all day and every day, and for the 24 hour period.
Di Marzio is runnin' a paper. Vicari is runnin' a monthly devoted to the "narrative" nothin' but narrative or careful discussion of narrative, and how one should do it. Over in Barcelona, they are printin' a series, Poesia en la Mano, bilingual editions of everyone from Villon to Mallarme' and Rilke, and, I am told, your present colloquitor if they can git anyone to translate me.
? EUROPE is an organic body, its life continues, its life has components and nearly every damn thing that has made your lives worth livin' up to this moment, has had its ORIGINS right here in Europe.
Yes, we HAD some colonial architecture and 30 pages of Whitman (Walt Whitman, not Whitemann) and then Whistler, and Henry James left the country. In fact it warn't no bed of roses fer authors and painters. Though my generation allus thought we ought to plant something or other, and try to git a new crop of somethin' or other. The idea of the Returnin' Native was prevalent, except possibly to Thomas S. Eliot who saw from the start that you folks weren't episcopal enough to suit his episcopal temperament, and he somewhat looked down on my pagan and evangelical tendencies. Waaal, frankly, I allus though it would be a good thing to come back and put some sort of a college or university into shape to teach the young something. Not merely the god damn saw dust and subsitutes for learnin' and literature they git handed. However, ca hold up the whole course of civilization. If you wanna line up with bone heads, you will line up with bone heads.
And you will go on having conductors instead of composers and European authors who have resigned.
But don't get that Anglican attitude, of the old story, storm in the channel called by the English, the English channel--the straits between Calais and Dover--and the dirty old Times out with a headline "Continent isolated. "
Nobody here is layin' flowers on the tomb of Columbus, not this year. But don't go and run away with the idea that Europe is no longer here, or that books aren't being written. I mean bein' WRITTEN, and that we have no painters, or writers, or musicians.
I regret the personal correspondence of a small number of writers, who mostly don't write to each other. And I would like to see what Hillaire
? Hiler is paintin', and to git kumrad cumminkz's last set of verses. Or to go on get tin' Kitasono's Japanese magazine. But I ain't gittin' weak and pindlin' or goin' into a pronounced and delicate melancholy fer the extinction of all human intercourse.
#3 (November 4, 1941) U. S. (A51) THE GOLDEN WEDDING
The sight of elderly wedded couples dwelling in mutual devotion sometimes impells one to think of their early loves. In the present case the spectacle of Mr. Churchill's government wedded to Stalin's, and Mr. Roosevelt's in violable word mixed into it; in short, this triangual Darby and Joan of the three hebraicized governments leads one to look back at the forgotten incidents of their courtship.
In particular, the love feasts between our American Reds and Moscow in vite beautific contemplation. Our idealists loved Moscow while Mr. Churchill was still playing the bashful Swain. In fact he was scowling at Stalin, and from the incomprehension of his eternal love for the Moscovites he was being not only sulky, but insulting. So with true love. Never, Never, NEVER would he come and kiss the Russian Joan under the sickle and mistletoe.
Our own American Trade Unionists were more oncoming. They LIKED the bud of Russian promise. Ref. Worker's Library No. 3 bearing the dim and lavender date: Sept. 9, 1927.
Jay Lovestone (ne? possibly Liebstein) on the first page of amorous paean inscribes the luminous words "THE establishment of the 7-hour day in Russia. " Well that's far off enough and long enough before the Stakhelevites, and Mr. Lovestone is very hard on the American Federation of Labor. "Reactionary trade union bureaucrats" he call's 'em.
? And in that memorable day an' year our dewey-eyed workers (trade unionists and idealists) technical advisors they figger in the catalog, Brophy, R. W. [? ] Dunn, C. H. Douglas, Rex Tugwell, Stuart Chase, a lot, as you see, of brawny fellows who had used either the hammer or sickle in daily life, went over to visit the Kumrad. And apart from the general, as op posed to the specific nature of the answers, the kumrad didn't do so bad. The questions being rather more nebulous and UNspecific than the answers. How could the debonair murderer get down very near to brass tacks in his answers ?
After all Marx was pretty good at history and diagnosis. Nobody on the Axis side denies that Marx discovered several genuine faults in the usury system.
All we ask is a way to CURE 'em. And the torture chambers in most countries where Stalin's power has reached, and in a few embassies where he had been unable to get control of the total police force, rather indicate that the Boishie system never got UNIVERSAL approval from its victims.
However, when next dining with Rabbi Lehman, or Scholem Mosestha and the rest of the international bankers, spring a few pages of the kumrad's answers between the caviar and the pheasant and see if it don't enliven the dinner.
Sure Stalin approves of Marx and Engels wantin' to take ECONOMIC, political, cultural and organizational measures. And seem' as he put 'em in that order, you would expect me to fall for it ?
ECONOMIC first. Of course the Bolshies didn't. Any party that comes into power, probably puts ORGANIZATIONAL measures first, and the economics belong, alas to the almost inaccessible part of culture. So FEW people seem able to grasp simple economics without, as Senator Bankhead remarked, about three centuries delay.
? Three centuries, to get people to understand anything about anything havin' to do with money. An' it is now demonstrated on the corpus vilis of British reformers' hopes that very little economic reform gets into practice without precedent organizational and political measures of an almost earth shaking nature. A curious phrase about "reconstruct capitalist society" must belong to the translator. I don't want to pin that on Joseph, tho' mebbe that was part of his muddle. I am far less concerned with Joe's lacunae than with a few clear positive statements. Joe said he was aware that "a number of capitalist governments are controlled by big banks," notwithstanding the existence of "democratic" parliaments.
Not bad for a Georgian assassin. And possibly several decades ahead of the American public and professoriat. Not a single power in which the Cabinet can be formed in opposition to the will of the big financial magnates. I wonder: is that why they took Joe for a ride ?
"It is sufficient to exert financial pressure to cause Cabinet Ministers to fall from their posts as if they were stunned. "
Joey was talkin' of European cabinets; not of the so very different American DEMocracy (as they call it) etc. where, unless there is absolute surety that financial pressure won't be used, the blighters seldom or never get in. Joe SAID that the control of government by money-bags is inconceivable and absolutely excluded in the U. S. S. R. How different from the home life of our own DEMOCRACY (as they call it), etc. and how different from anything any British politician has ever encountered, and how different from any state of things that Churchill's group would desire.
"Narrow circle" said Joe of individuals connected in one way or another with the large banks and because of that they strive to conceal the part they play in this from the people.
? What a PERFECT ally for Churchill, Morgenthau, Lehman, and the present Anglo-Jewish regimes ! Well, the starry eyed Mr. Tugwell, and the cautious Mr. Chase and Jim Maurer and Brophy took it all down hook, line and sinker. Seven hour day and the rest of it. It was a stirring occasion. The only thing is that the idealist's ideals have got going so much faster and gone so much further. The Axis side of the present hard feelings.
Here the TRADE UNIONS, with their syndic. organization, and their recognized legal status whereby they propose, formulate, and GET what they want in Italy is really of so much MORE interest for any member of ANY trade union, or for any leader of labor who cares a hang about the welfare of the led that one only hopes the American trade unionist will someday read Por, or at least read something about Italian organizational measures.
The Stalin interview is a tough piece of reading, very hard to take hold of. That was probably the secret of his hold--plenty of people who KNOW Russia have been puzzled by the gap between their effective propaganda and their local failure in solving human problems. I believe the human material they had to work on explains part of the latter. I mean why they did NOT make a paradise, but mostly a sweat shop-- machines before men--men as material. But the other side, the devilish efficiency of their propaganda, is worth study.
And it seems to be a variant on the old political wheeze of sticking to general statements that each auditor interprets to mean what HE would mean IF he said it.
And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's faithful companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr. N. M. Butler. On June 3, 1941, year current, as delivered at the commencement of Columbia University, when Ole Nick was awaitin' another Waterloo, and as is common with his kind, he wasn't puttin' it in
? the first person singular. Nick wanted Americans to go fight for the British exploiters; so he said "THE WORLD" etc. In this case THE WORLD (meaning Nick and his pay masters). The World he sez, awaits another Waterloo. And on the fifth page it turns out he meant a defeat of Hitler! ! Which might be called "metonomy" or takin' a part for the "whole," and not the better whole either.
Now the WORLD, as any college president ought to know, before the trustees pay him his fat annual salary, is spherical in form, and is composed of MORE than one continent, and not wholly and totally enraptured with the big usury central.
However let Nick Butler speak for himself, as he has never failed to do in all his oleaginous lifetime.
Several pages of the old scamp's palaver contain statements by which no right thinking man would be offended. The slabs of print, the page undivided by paragraph divisions, tends to lull the reader or auditor into security.
Mr. Butler even disapproves (mildly, of course) of the "controlling desire for gain," alias our old enemy the profit motive. Of course he keeps off the specific MEANS of gain, exercised by his owners. He then pays a delicate compliment to Lord Holy Fox, without committing himself, in fact nothing could be more downy.
The FIRST Lord Halifax, unaided by his charming and formidable Lady, said there were three hundred years ago many things that riches cannot buy. Therefore the American boys should bleed for the present Lord Holy Fox. Now Ole Nick don't go as far back as all that, he stops back in the 17th Century; before Robert Cecil was so vigorous in defense of the British OPIUM interests in Shanghai.
Victory for a moral ideal is not enough, according to Nicholas, because the "gain-seeking interest has control of so vast a proportion of
? mankind. " That is true enough, but it ain't reduced the moral ideal to ABSOLUTE impotence. This is what was worrying Butler; but he hadn't got down to bed rock. He said there was a time, back apparently when Mark Hanna was running the United State of America, when the moral ideal was to all appearances gainin' ground.
Of course if by that he means that some empires were GAINING territory, he might have said so, only he didn't. Ole Nicholas puts the rise of the triumph, real or apparent, the IDEAL, from the McKinley to the Wealsohn administration.
Note of HOpe and progress.
In 1910, the American Congress was unanimous for the moral principle (so long as no questions were asked about the privileges of the usury central). Nic complains that the moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations.
Which shows the state of DEEP ignorance in the WORLD; as distinct from Nicholas Butler's circle or pot.
And lookin' at dates, he must have been blurrin' this blurb the same week that a Chinaman, not of Wang Ching Wei's party, but of Chiang Kai-shek's party, and FAITHFUL to Chiang, saying what Hitler's justice in scuttling international affairs was such that the Chinese of the ANTI- JAP, anti-Wang party might accept Hitler's arbitrage.
Mr. Butler then seems to fall into incoherence. He talks of a PLEDGE as something to be kept; what price, England, Churchill, and Roosevelt ? He objects to having the savings of generations swept away; he asks what has become of the influence of and guidance of the great religions; Christian, Mosel, HEBREW, and Buddhist, and begorrah, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving out St. Ambrose and St. Antonio da Firenze, and graciously waivin' a hand to the captains of the mind, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German. And of course
? Abraham Lincoln, not quoting old Abe on the currency issue. And then barbarous brutality, without mention of Esthonia, Finland, or places occupied by the-- --Bustin of churches and museums. Wot price Louvain and Cyrenaica ? And all this "However dark the skies," etc. ends up with a historic parallel; the WORLD waitin' for a new Vaterloo; because Napolean BonypartY went into Russia, and if Hitler ain't licked in Europe, it will come in Asia or Africa. Well that is a bad slip, because Knox and Stimson, etc. are retching for to rape Africa. But at any rate you git a picture of Nicholas, and METONOMY or takin' a part for the HOLE. A figger of Rhetorik sez Sam Johnson, whereby one word is put for another.
Now if Butler, the old goof, wants me to give him a clean bill of health, he can use the enormous power conferred on him by his position, to get Columbia University to issue a series of volumes containing the GIST of the beliefs and knowledge of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln. NOT leaving out every phrase and paragraph which I, and men like me, consider vital to the understanding of American history.
#4 (November 6, 1941) U. S. (56)
THIS WAR ON YOUTH--ON A GENERATION
A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me. I don't mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears. Thus I have learned that Professor I. A. Richards, one of England's few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.
And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on. Wallace Stevens, J. G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.
? And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British. And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin' on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin' poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel. [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics. I don't quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.
Well, that's a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers. We need more communication between the five continents.
And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda. Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.
And that brings me to the question of AGE. Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ? That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.
Back in the other war W. B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.
And in one way or another--lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation--pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won't be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect. It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers. The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.
? Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda. Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear. Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.
HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ? Details of Roosenstein's "freedom of the seas," NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.
If Chile don't, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.
STARVE 'em out. Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?
Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another. Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax. First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.
RATIONING!
In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance. Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year. Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.
The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia. Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore. From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents. AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile
? and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.
Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ? Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937. In 1937 there was NO necessity of War. Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable. There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war. Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.
Don't say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution. That is a fairly conservative statement. He has NEVER been neutral. But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ? What is their business ? What is their civic record ? What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?
Have any of 'em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ? Which is basic in all economics.
Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.
The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.
If you start a ten years war ? Yes, IF you start a ten years war. None of these old swine will be there at the end of it. It won't be their world, it may be your ruin.
As to RUIN. What about Petrograd ? No military purpose in its destruction.
? Laval saved Paris. Churchill would have had 'em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France. What causes that ? Criminality ? Imbecility ? Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind's eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.
Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.
Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill. Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.
Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution. Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right. The remedy did NOT work. AND the revolution was betrayed. Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed. It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.
A lot of 'em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses. The fools got control. Now YOU are NOT communists. The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead. The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage. The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.
You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever. You don't even look at what is done by your governments. Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy. Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business. Very few analyze that want or carry their
? thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.
Our system was O. K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc. The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn't stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.
First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity
Amateur move.
COHABITATION with other men. POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city. Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed. Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.
AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth. I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers
What causes that ? Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it
Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw
? revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair. We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas. For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms. We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.
We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it Why do we NOT ?
Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?
For whom ?
It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.
#5 (December 7, 1941) U. S. & U. K. (A66) THOSE PARENTHESES
Europe callin', Pound speakin'. Ezry Pound speakin'. And I think I am perhaps still speakin' a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it. They say an Englishman's head's made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.
Of course I don't know what GOOD I am doin', I mean what IMME DIATE good. But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.
? Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15). Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England. I am content to say state of mind.
I can't say my remarks were heeded. I thought I had got 'em simple enough. Words short and simple enough. In fact some people complained that several of 'em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).
