I started to warn you against
accepting
"shop-fronts.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
Whether Amer- icans have yet examined the Polish dossier, I cannot from this distance make out, but the facts are written and implied on thousands of pages of news-print.
"Forces" in America puffed up or helped to puff up the Poles.
They backed the gold-swine and the bank-swine.
There were surprises and they failed to conceal their astonishment.
When a little American horse- sense finally appeared, the "forces" were peeved.
We are not yet out of the woods.
There are still Anglomaniacs and usuro-maniacs in America who
like us to stick our hands into the fire. For England?
No! most certainly not for England. England has been worm-eaten since
1700. Her vitals were being gnawed over a century ago when Cobbett wanted to cure her. There is a whole literature of velleities, of attempts at English reform. Eight months ago I was thought loony for saying that France probably suffered less from the invasion of 1870 than had the English during the past 20 years from perfectly stinking misgovernment.
What have we in our recent American record that might serve to enlighten them? During the last year a marginal reform has been put into operation. Wallace, the goat of Roosevelt's administration, has got in the point of a gimlet. A trifling amount of money, called "stamps" and limited in its application, has been issued against easily available goods. But, in the wake of Lloyd George, this concession has been used as an implement of degradation. The people have been given back a little of their own purchas- ing power on condition they consent to be paupers and ask the bureaucracy for it.
You have to go back to the most rancid melodrama for a parallel. The wicked guardian, having robbed the orphan of her fortune, tells her it is her duty to be thankful for stale bread and a cot in the attic.
Lost in the Congressional Record for January 23, 1940 are these pas- sages:
"Whereas there has developed in the method of conducting the fi- nances of the U. S. the custom . . . of borrowing financial credit . . . thus increasing public indebtedness. "
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"Whereas the credit thus lent to the government is in reality based on . "
the real credit of the people, which belongs to them.
But until the reader has patience to read at least the few phrases of J.
AdamsthatI havebeenabletoquoteinmyCantos,I knowofnobriefwayof showing him how long sanity hasexisted in America (among a few people] and how thoroughly it has failed to percolate into the general conscious- ness. The people have finally fumbled at a general muzzy notion that at least some wars are economic. In the spring of 1939 one American editor had the nerve to print my statement that:
"War against Germany in our time would be war against an honest concept of money. "
Shortly before his death Robert Mond (brother of the late Alfred, Lord Melchett) sat on a sofa in Rome, which sofa is known to me, and said with hith well known lithf: "Napoleon wath a good man. It took uth 20 years to cwuth him. It will not take uth 20 years to cwuth Mutholini. (Took us 20 years to crush Napoleon, will not take us 20 to crush Mussolini. ) And the economic war hath commenthed. " This is a fact. Statement of it does not involve antisemitism. It in no way implicates the 300 just Jews known to me, or three million unknown. But it does prove a state of consciousness in one member of known set of English financiers.
There are known dynasties in Bank of England directorships: Goschen, Kleinwort, Brandt, etc. The Anglo-French combination is sometimes for brevity's sake written "Lazard. " After this war had started the Bank of England directors met and doubled their salaries, as proof of purity, patriot- ism etc. ? One old lady shareholder protested, but her protest in no way moved Montagu Norman. The American reader on his part might however start looking for the American representatives of these "forces. " The rela- tion of home office to branch office seems to me of minor importance. In
1863 the main offices were in London. It is there in the record. John Sherman wrote to Ikleheimer, Morton, and Ikleheimer wrote on to Roth- schild in London. The "capitalists," as they are called in the Hazard report, did indeed see to it that a great debt was made by our civil war, and used to control the volume of our American currency.
Over 20 years ago C. H. Douglas asserted potential plenty. The Loeb report, one of the best achievements of the New Deal, proved it. Whereon the rage of international usury knew no bounds. They argued: "If plenty exists, we cannot control it. Therefore it must not exist. Curtail crops! Maintain monopoly! War is the greatest sabotage of all possible. "
But the Germans wouldn't play ball. Even now, instead of smashing all
. .
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the French factories, they have to a great extent merely captured them. I beg you observe the record of loans for August 1939 from London to Poland, Greece, Turkey, Rumania. I ask you who has tried to extend the conflict.
I assert that from the start England was mucking round in Bulgaria, and only the genius of Mussolini and the good sense of King Boris prevented hell breaking loose in the Balkans.
Financiers make wars for the sake of creating great debts and for the sake of monopoly. They and their henchmen are advocates of destruction. They have manifestly advocated the destruction of Paris. If Paris were destroyed, suckers would borrow money and ask "credits" to rebuild it. Even "La Voix de la Paix," a French free anti-government radio voice was on June 15 displaying his ignorance of the nature of debt, money and credit.
9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I HAVE NEVER FATHOMED what a level-headed Japanese reader feels when he finds an Occidental slamming the said Occidental's government, or his president and the heads of departments.
It should be said by way of preface that a president is, in theory, a servant of the people, and that as long as he accepts office on that theory, his employers are licensed to grumble when he makes an ass of himself or talks nonsense. This may explain why "Woodie" Wilson so hated the American system and tried so hard to wreck it. It may explain why many of us consider Franklin Roosevelt a president and proved servant of Jewry rather than a respecter of American law and traditions.
What his pretended (and in fairness one must add his very probably intended) reforms have, in the main, amounted to is the spending of ten billion dollars of America's money for gold, paying 35 dollars an ounce for it instead of 20 dollars and 67 cents, thus putting four billion dollars of extra or unearned or unjust profits into the pockets of an anonymous lot of vendors of an almost useless and certainly unneeded metal. Hence, quite probably, the misery of the American farm population, and the mortgages on American farms.
Naturally the bleeders who sell gold are delighted with the administration. The American, who is American by race, birth, and long tradition, grits his teeth, turns tomato-red, curses, exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation and
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ends up (or at least my New England host last year ended up) by saying: "He is . . . is . . . etc. . . . a little Lord Fauntleroy. "
One of my adolescent memories is that of an ex-senator in Wall Street abusingTheodoreRoosevelt,butneverhaveI knovc^nAmericanhateof anyone equal to that I found in America last year directed against the executive. But I had no means of gauging hovi' v^idely this hatred was diffused. The Democrats whom I met seemed to dislike Mr. Roosevelt's politics, and especially his economics, even more than did the Republi- cans, but on the other hand he had friends.
WiththeAmericanmailnowcutdowntoairserviceI amnotgoingto pretend a knowledge of American feeling in July, 1940. In May, 1939, 1 had the pleasure of saying to the Polish Ambassador in Washington: "God help you if you trust England. " Several other remarks that I managed to get into print at that time, though they were not welcome, would now find a greater acceptance than they then did.
The German publication of documents has reinforced some of them. However, it may still be news in the Orient that already in June, 1939 it was known in Connecticut that Churchill, Eden and Co. meant to get into the government and start war.
I take it T\\e Japan Times expects news from me, and not prophecy, even if the news takes several weeks to reach Tokyo, and if I differentiate myself from certain types of journalist, let us say the Knickerbockers, D. Thomp- sons, Lippmanns, and Gunthers, by occasionally setting a contemporary act or fact in perspective with history. For example, the Berlin papers almost err when they describe the British firing on the French fleet as "without precedent. " In some senses the precedent is inexact. In 1812 the U. S. A. was not a recent ally of England. They were merely at peace with England. A British frigate got within close range {I think it was 50 yards) of an American frigate and opened fire.
"Democracy" is now currently defined in Europe as "a country gov- erned by Jews. " However, the British navy has never been Jewish. And indeed the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary translates the word sae-mann (which is now spelled seaman) simply as pirate.
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No one will make head or tail of the "apparent contradictions" of democrat- ic governments until there is a handy manual of the press of England, France and the U. S. A. No profession is less written about than the profes- sion of journalism. When the Russian revolutionaries got into the Czarist archives, they published a lot of papers (The Raffalovitch Papers) with the title "L'abominabie venalite de Ja presse. " Raffalovitch finally decided that the French press wasn't worth buying, as no one believed it. The luminous line in the 500 pages of his correspondence is: "I recommend we give him ten thousand roubles, as is paid to the Times and the Telegraph" (of London). The Morning Post before its lamented demise printed a set of my communications, but demurred at quoting this suggestion of Monsieur Raffalovitch.
The Regime Fascista recently told us that in 1930 a certain Meyer advised Jews not to bother with newspapers. He said, "get into the news agencies," that is where papers get news. America was fed by these agen- cies, and has therefore been a long time in discovering Europe. I mean Europe since 1920. 1 doubt if Mr. Rip van Wendell Willkie has yet heard of the Europe now here. At any rate he hadn't heard about our Europe a year ago, when writing for that last and lowest of all periodicals, The AilanXic Monthly.
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
***
It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary.
I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr. Morgenthau bought the ten billion of gold from, perhaps some Oriental will have the ingenuity and patience to start finding out. No one would be more delighted by full and detailed information on this point than would your present correspondent. I havebeenthrougheightvolumesofU. S. Treasuryreportsbuttheymerely say how much, never from whom.
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
The radio this morning (July 17) announced fusion of Oriental and Occidental cultures as part of the new Japanese program. Hardshell con- servatives will fear a general discoloration of culture, the sudden accept- ance of the faults of both cultures, such, indeed, as Fenollosa found im- minent years ago and withstood. A serious fusion means rigorous selection of the best works of both hemispheres and an historiography that shall give the most pregnant facts with greatest clarity of definition.
I can, I believe, claim something like seniority, or at any rate a long diligence in the search for the former. At fifteen I started an examination of international literature for my own needs. And from 1910 onward there is
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printedrecordofmyresults,howeverimperfect. I havehadalittlecol- laboration. Eliot hov^ever gave up his Sanskrit. Bunting learned to write a beautiful Persian hand. Aldington remained inside the language groups I had examined. Prof. Breasted thought my idea of a quarterly publication of such results of American research as attained value as literature, that is such as had more than specialist's philological interest, was "a dream floating above the heads of the people. " By which he meant the American University system wherein he held very high status as Assyriologist. I see no reason for Japan's taking over the stupidities and flat failures of Amer- ican scholarship. Tokyo has the liveliest magazine of young letters in the world (VOU). New York once had it, that was twenty years ago. Paris often had it before then. Editorial Yunque of Barcelona has just started a very good bilingual series of poets (Poesia en la Mano) beginning with J. R. Masoliver's excellent translations from Dante, Spanish text facing the origi- nal.
If I recommend eight volumes of my own essays and anthologies to the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai as a starting point, it is not, as might be sup- posed,fromimmodesty,butsimplybecauseI donotknowofanyother30 years or 40 years persistent effort to sort out the Occidental books most worth attention. There are encyclopedias, compilations giving names of ALL the known writings, etc. , but not attempts to show the best books in relation to each other.
The very great labors of the Leo Frobenius Institute cover a different field. Your universities will of course take note of them.
The hang-together of art and the economic system is not yet very generally understood. I keep insisting that an "epic is a poem containing history. " That may explain why epic poets need to know economics. It does not touch the lyric writers so closely. However, a "fusion or union of cultures" implies a mutual regard for two historiographies. Here your universities can save their students a great deal of time by importing Brooks Adams' The Law of CiviJization and Decay and The New Empire.
I think, in fact, that you might start your study of our new historiogra- phy from those books, though to understand American cycles they must be amplified by brief compendia of the writing of the American founders, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, and by a narrative containing facts which I, personally, have found in Overholser, Woodward, Beard, Bowers, and not (oh very emphatically not) in the text books used in American beaneries.
I cannot condense four of the essential factors further than I have already done in my "Introductory Text-book" offered herewith.
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Introductory Text-book [In Four Chapters]
Chap. 1. "All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor and virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. "--John Adams.
Chap. 2. ". . . and if the national bills issued, be bottomed (as is indispens- able] on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no inter- est on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to everyone of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them. " --Thomas Jefferson (1816, letter to Crawford).
Chap. 3. ". . . and gave to the people of this Republic the greatest blessing THEY EVER HAD--THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS. "--Abraham Lincolu.
Chap. 4. "The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures. " Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Depart- ment, Section 8, p. 5. Done in the convention by the unanimous consent of the States, 7th September, 1787, and of the Independence of the United States the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names. --GeorgeWashington,PresidentandDeputyfromVirginia.
This "text" was followed by a half page of notes and bibliography. Thus:
The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignor- ance mentioned in my first quotation. Of the three preceding cita- tions, Lincoln's has become the text of Willis Overholser's recent History of Money in the U. S. ; the first citation was taken as opening text by Jerry Voorhis in his speech in the House of Representatives June 6, 1938; and the passage from Jefferson is the nucleus of my Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
Douglas' proposals are a subhead under the main idea in Lin- coln's sentence; Gesell's "invention" is a special case under Jeffer- son's general law. I have done my best to make simple summaries and clear definitions in various books and pamphlets and recommend as introductory study, apart from C. H. Douglas' Economic Democracy and Gesell's Natural Economic Order, Chris. HoUis' Two Nations, McNair Wilson's Promise to Pay, Larraiiaga's Gold, Glut and Govern- ment and M. Butchart's compendium of three centuries' thought, that is an anthology of what has been said, in Money. (Originally pub- lished by Nott. )
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There again I have nothing to retract. I left copies of the above work with a number of senators and congressmen last year in Washington, also with a few historians. The more they knew already, the more nearly saw the bearing of my four chapters. I doubt if anyone can further, or to advantage condense, the thought of John Adams than I have in Cantos 62/71, and I have made a start on Jefferson in my Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Both of which volumes can be explained. There is no reason for someone in Tokyo refraining from issuing a commentary, but I doubt if an adequate history of the U. S. can be written without including the essential ideas which I have there set together. The compendia of histoire morale contempomine made by Remy de Gourmont and Henry James, I have at least indicated in my Make it New.
At this point I would offer a word of warning to Japanese alumni of American, or other Occidental universities. With the exception of Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut in Frankfurt, our universities are not, they most emphatically are not, in the foreguard of Western thought. There is a time lag of 20, 40 or 60 years in what they teach in economics, history and literature. They may be more lively in departments of material science. At any rate most of their Japanese alumni were taught ideas belonging to Western decadence. And that decadence was nowhere more notable than in Western tendency to erect museums rather than temples.
Now the museum is all very well in its way. The juvenile student can see bits and pieces of what has been achieved in the past, which may keep him from narrow provincialism both of place and of time.
In the study of comparative literature, T. S. Eliot has acutely observed that, "existing masterworks constitute a plenum, whereof the divers parts have inter-related proportions and values. The relations of extant works are modified by new work that is really new. "
It is also true that the real writers of any epoch collaborate, sometimes consciously and voluntarily, sometimes unconsciously and even against their own will.
Yeats and I collaborated voluntarily. Yeats and F. M. (Hueffer) Ford involuntarily. Cummings is possibly unconscious of collaboration, etc. However, a museum is made up of fragments. An attempt to present the literature of a country or continent is bound to appear fragmentary or at least made up of heteroclite matter of different degrees of importance. Even more so when we come to translated literature. There is no uniform merit in translations, any more than in works. One nation may have an epic. An- other a set of plays. But one dimension is common to all masterworks,
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namely, they contain the quintessence of racial quality. I have seen Villon in Paris 500 years after his lines were written.
I have seen Boccaccio and Goldoni in Italy, and it is commonplace that "London is full of Dickens. " By which laconic phrases one means that the "news" printed by these authors is still the event of the day in their countries.
Whatever I have compiled either in essays or in anthologies has been in an attempt to set together maxima of achievement, that is, work in which at least some of the qualities of writing and concept have attained the highest known degree. And my results are I think largely confirmed by the findings of England's most distinguished resident critic, T. S. Eliot (born American). And to a certain extent I think Yeats and F. M. Ford would have agreed with us, however long it may take the literary bureaucracies and the book trade to admit it. In several cases even the book-trade has had to give way 20 or 25 years after the fact.
I am therefore recommending my own finding re comparative litera- ture. I am recommending Brooks Adams and subsequent "new" economists in the field of history. I have elsewhere cited various other compendia. Germany is talking of Karl von Stein and of Ruhland instead of Marx. The thought of an epoch does not present itself in all departments. La Tour du Pin, Fabre, Frazer, Burbank, may seem names picked up at hazard. Strictly scientific names are world-known--it is only when you get to the border- line between material (practical) science and culture that the vital writers may lie hidden for half a century before coming into their own. In the fields of history or economics the vital writers may be half absorbed and super- seded before being known to more than three hundred readers. After which they crop up again later as "sources," the "source" for practical purposes having very little importance save for retrospective scholars, very little, that is, in proportion to the immense importance of getting the right solu- tion, whether for an anti-tubercular serum, or for an economic (monetary) process.
John Adams remarked that "very few people have the chance to choose their system of government. " It is extremely difficult to make a thorough reform of studies that have become fixed or waterlogged through a century or more of university habit. There is, on the other hand, a grand chance of effecting an up-to-date system, if you deliberately set out to present a relatively unexplored foreign culture, and can do so without superstitions, at any rate looking clearly at definite facts either established or provable, and not caring a hang whether these facts have been acceptable to the controllers of the educational [videlicet mis-educational or obfuscatory)
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system in the countries which you elect to investigate.
If Japan can produce a better, that is clearer and more incisive, set of
brochures showing the real thought of the founders of America's social form, than now exists in America, so much the greater your glory. The best and most revolutionary book on Botticelli was brought out by one of your citizens. It was, or at least appeared to me to be, extremely original in its treatment of Botticelli's details as comparable with Oriental treatments. The impartial and alien eye really saw what the familiar native eye had taken for granted. So much for suggested imports to Japan. When it comes to exports, we in the Occident wonder whether a Japanese history exists; or at any rate we fear that no translation of your history exists that will tell us as much of Japan as the tong-kien-kang-mou in De Moyriac de Mailla's version tells us of China. You can't order such works over night. De Mailla's French makes literature of even rather dull passages. Klaproth's Nippon o Dai Itsi Ran does not. It is merely well printed. We want to know more about you. There is a gap between Kagekiyo and the new dredger-plus plywood veneers.
What I really know of Japan I have got from Fenollosa's notes on the Noh and from a handful of "very much over-civilized" young men to whom the Noh was familiar. I cannot suppose this to be a "working knowledge" but I believe it to be a much more "real" knowledge than I should have got by starting at the "practical end" and omitting the fragments vouch-safed to me.
In struggling against enormous odds (meaning financial odds) for a mutual understanding between Japan and the Occident, there is still the danger that a Japanese educated in the U. S. A. might occasionally believe a statement printed in English or American newspapers without first looking carefully at the date line, and name of the agency supplying said news. It cannot be too firmly understood that "some" agencies and newspapers exist mainly, or even wholly, for the purpose of causing the stock markets to wobble, their "political" purposes being a mere cover for this means to putrid profit. I personally feel that some of you might get your European news via the U. S. A. even if as many of your students have gone to Germany
(have they? ) as to the U. S. A. Re which possibility I register the simple statement made to me two years ago by an American publisher. (Parenth- esis: my friends often urge me to be "reasonable. ") The publisher said: "Facts unfavorable to Germany and Italy are news; facts favorable to Italy and Germany are propaganda. "
Against which I set a revealing statement made by Otto Dietrich (Ter- ramare pamphlets no. 13): "The Fiihrer will never create an office unless
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thoroughly convinced of the suitability of the person selected for it. " Perhaps the spiritual descendents and unconscious followers of Con- fucius do him more honor than physical descendents who spend their time
borrowing money.
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
It is impossible to explain contemporary Europe to Japan without a long economic preface, possibly a longer preface than the average reader has patience for. One can roughly indicate the cycle of Occidental infamies since the founding of the Bank of England about 1696 A. D. , via the suppres- sion of paper money in England's American colonies, Cobbett's struggles against the ruin of agriculture in England, industrialization, the ruin of land owners by financial chicane, etc. Suffice it to say that by 1935 we were all fed up with the fall of empires, kingdoms, etc. It was all "old stuff. " Governments had flopped, Austria was, later, a minor collapse, but for over a century and a quarter no man had laid hands on a Rothschild. That item was NEWS with a big "N," but not one European journalist in a hundred had sense to know it, and not one in a thousand could print his perception if he had one. Three hundred million or whatever golden schillings or whatever had gone into Skoda gun works, to make trouble, via Vienna. The reply was the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich.
In one sense history, not merely ideological history, is built out of phrases. It is built out of crystallizations of words into very brief groups, say five, six, or a dozen words. These words become fact. And it is impossible to exaggerate their force, because they cannot come into existence save as proof of a state of understanding. I mean clear understanding, not mere confused apprehension or suspicion.
Hjaimar Schacht made history in 1938: "GeJd, dem keine Ver- brauchsgiiter gegeniiberstehen, ist ja nichts als bedriicktes Papier. " Money that isn't issued against commerciable goods is mere printed paper.
Of course you have to know quite a bit of economics to understand why this sentence is history. Aristotle left certain terms undefined, or at any rate failed to "educate" the Occident and give it a clear (when I say clear, I mean clear) understanding of certain properties of money. Some people contin- ued to think of money as "a universally accepted commodity delivered in measured amounts. " By 640 A. D. the Tang dynasty had got round to using paper money, that is, "an admonition or memorandum of how much the
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187
holder of a certain kind of piece of paper ought to receive in the common market. " The inscription of the Tang notes is essentially the same as that on the ten lire notes in Italy today.
like us to stick our hands into the fire. For England?
No! most certainly not for England. England has been worm-eaten since
1700. Her vitals were being gnawed over a century ago when Cobbett wanted to cure her. There is a whole literature of velleities, of attempts at English reform. Eight months ago I was thought loony for saying that France probably suffered less from the invasion of 1870 than had the English during the past 20 years from perfectly stinking misgovernment.
What have we in our recent American record that might serve to enlighten them? During the last year a marginal reform has been put into operation. Wallace, the goat of Roosevelt's administration, has got in the point of a gimlet. A trifling amount of money, called "stamps" and limited in its application, has been issued against easily available goods. But, in the wake of Lloyd George, this concession has been used as an implement of degradation. The people have been given back a little of their own purchas- ing power on condition they consent to be paupers and ask the bureaucracy for it.
You have to go back to the most rancid melodrama for a parallel. The wicked guardian, having robbed the orphan of her fortune, tells her it is her duty to be thankful for stale bread and a cot in the attic.
Lost in the Congressional Record for January 23, 1940 are these pas- sages:
"Whereas there has developed in the method of conducting the fi- nances of the U. S. the custom . . . of borrowing financial credit . . . thus increasing public indebtedness. "
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"Whereas the credit thus lent to the government is in reality based on . "
the real credit of the people, which belongs to them.
But until the reader has patience to read at least the few phrases of J.
AdamsthatI havebeenabletoquoteinmyCantos,I knowofnobriefwayof showing him how long sanity hasexisted in America (among a few people] and how thoroughly it has failed to percolate into the general conscious- ness. The people have finally fumbled at a general muzzy notion that at least some wars are economic. In the spring of 1939 one American editor had the nerve to print my statement that:
"War against Germany in our time would be war against an honest concept of money. "
Shortly before his death Robert Mond (brother of the late Alfred, Lord Melchett) sat on a sofa in Rome, which sofa is known to me, and said with hith well known lithf: "Napoleon wath a good man. It took uth 20 years to cwuth him. It will not take uth 20 years to cwuth Mutholini. (Took us 20 years to crush Napoleon, will not take us 20 to crush Mussolini. ) And the economic war hath commenthed. " This is a fact. Statement of it does not involve antisemitism. It in no way implicates the 300 just Jews known to me, or three million unknown. But it does prove a state of consciousness in one member of known set of English financiers.
There are known dynasties in Bank of England directorships: Goschen, Kleinwort, Brandt, etc. The Anglo-French combination is sometimes for brevity's sake written "Lazard. " After this war had started the Bank of England directors met and doubled their salaries, as proof of purity, patriot- ism etc. ? One old lady shareholder protested, but her protest in no way moved Montagu Norman. The American reader on his part might however start looking for the American representatives of these "forces. " The rela- tion of home office to branch office seems to me of minor importance. In
1863 the main offices were in London. It is there in the record. John Sherman wrote to Ikleheimer, Morton, and Ikleheimer wrote on to Roth- schild in London. The "capitalists," as they are called in the Hazard report, did indeed see to it that a great debt was made by our civil war, and used to control the volume of our American currency.
Over 20 years ago C. H. Douglas asserted potential plenty. The Loeb report, one of the best achievements of the New Deal, proved it. Whereon the rage of international usury knew no bounds. They argued: "If plenty exists, we cannot control it. Therefore it must not exist. Curtail crops! Maintain monopoly! War is the greatest sabotage of all possible. "
But the Germans wouldn't play ball. Even now, instead of smashing all
. .
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the French factories, they have to a great extent merely captured them. I beg you observe the record of loans for August 1939 from London to Poland, Greece, Turkey, Rumania. I ask you who has tried to extend the conflict.
I assert that from the start England was mucking round in Bulgaria, and only the genius of Mussolini and the good sense of King Boris prevented hell breaking loose in the Balkans.
Financiers make wars for the sake of creating great debts and for the sake of monopoly. They and their henchmen are advocates of destruction. They have manifestly advocated the destruction of Paris. If Paris were destroyed, suckers would borrow money and ask "credits" to rebuild it. Even "La Voix de la Paix," a French free anti-government radio voice was on June 15 displaying his ignorance of the nature of debt, money and credit.
9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I HAVE NEVER FATHOMED what a level-headed Japanese reader feels when he finds an Occidental slamming the said Occidental's government, or his president and the heads of departments.
It should be said by way of preface that a president is, in theory, a servant of the people, and that as long as he accepts office on that theory, his employers are licensed to grumble when he makes an ass of himself or talks nonsense. This may explain why "Woodie" Wilson so hated the American system and tried so hard to wreck it. It may explain why many of us consider Franklin Roosevelt a president and proved servant of Jewry rather than a respecter of American law and traditions.
What his pretended (and in fairness one must add his very probably intended) reforms have, in the main, amounted to is the spending of ten billion dollars of America's money for gold, paying 35 dollars an ounce for it instead of 20 dollars and 67 cents, thus putting four billion dollars of extra or unearned or unjust profits into the pockets of an anonymous lot of vendors of an almost useless and certainly unneeded metal. Hence, quite probably, the misery of the American farm population, and the mortgages on American farms.
Naturally the bleeders who sell gold are delighted with the administration. The American, who is American by race, birth, and long tradition, grits his teeth, turns tomato-red, curses, exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation and
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ends up (or at least my New England host last year ended up) by saying: "He is . . . is . . . etc. . . . a little Lord Fauntleroy. "
One of my adolescent memories is that of an ex-senator in Wall Street abusingTheodoreRoosevelt,butneverhaveI knovc^nAmericanhateof anyone equal to that I found in America last year directed against the executive. But I had no means of gauging hovi' v^idely this hatred was diffused. The Democrats whom I met seemed to dislike Mr. Roosevelt's politics, and especially his economics, even more than did the Republi- cans, but on the other hand he had friends.
WiththeAmericanmailnowcutdowntoairserviceI amnotgoingto pretend a knowledge of American feeling in July, 1940. In May, 1939, 1 had the pleasure of saying to the Polish Ambassador in Washington: "God help you if you trust England. " Several other remarks that I managed to get into print at that time, though they were not welcome, would now find a greater acceptance than they then did.
The German publication of documents has reinforced some of them. However, it may still be news in the Orient that already in June, 1939 it was known in Connecticut that Churchill, Eden and Co. meant to get into the government and start war.
I take it T\\e Japan Times expects news from me, and not prophecy, even if the news takes several weeks to reach Tokyo, and if I differentiate myself from certain types of journalist, let us say the Knickerbockers, D. Thomp- sons, Lippmanns, and Gunthers, by occasionally setting a contemporary act or fact in perspective with history. For example, the Berlin papers almost err when they describe the British firing on the French fleet as "without precedent. " In some senses the precedent is inexact. In 1812 the U. S. A. was not a recent ally of England. They were merely at peace with England. A British frigate got within close range {I think it was 50 yards) of an American frigate and opened fire.
"Democracy" is now currently defined in Europe as "a country gov- erned by Jews. " However, the British navy has never been Jewish. And indeed the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary translates the word sae-mann (which is now spelled seaman) simply as pirate.
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No one will make head or tail of the "apparent contradictions" of democrat- ic governments until there is a handy manual of the press of England, France and the U. S. A. No profession is less written about than the profes- sion of journalism. When the Russian revolutionaries got into the Czarist archives, they published a lot of papers (The Raffalovitch Papers) with the title "L'abominabie venalite de Ja presse. " Raffalovitch finally decided that the French press wasn't worth buying, as no one believed it. The luminous line in the 500 pages of his correspondence is: "I recommend we give him ten thousand roubles, as is paid to the Times and the Telegraph" (of London). The Morning Post before its lamented demise printed a set of my communications, but demurred at quoting this suggestion of Monsieur Raffalovitch.
The Regime Fascista recently told us that in 1930 a certain Meyer advised Jews not to bother with newspapers. He said, "get into the news agencies," that is where papers get news. America was fed by these agen- cies, and has therefore been a long time in discovering Europe. I mean Europe since 1920. 1 doubt if Mr. Rip van Wendell Willkie has yet heard of the Europe now here. At any rate he hadn't heard about our Europe a year ago, when writing for that last and lowest of all periodicals, The AilanXic Monthly.
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
***
It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary.
I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr. Morgenthau bought the ten billion of gold from, perhaps some Oriental will have the ingenuity and patience to start finding out. No one would be more delighted by full and detailed information on this point than would your present correspondent. I havebeenthrougheightvolumesofU. S. Treasuryreportsbuttheymerely say how much, never from whom.
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
The radio this morning (July 17) announced fusion of Oriental and Occidental cultures as part of the new Japanese program. Hardshell con- servatives will fear a general discoloration of culture, the sudden accept- ance of the faults of both cultures, such, indeed, as Fenollosa found im- minent years ago and withstood. A serious fusion means rigorous selection of the best works of both hemispheres and an historiography that shall give the most pregnant facts with greatest clarity of definition.
I can, I believe, claim something like seniority, or at any rate a long diligence in the search for the former. At fifteen I started an examination of international literature for my own needs. And from 1910 onward there is
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printedrecordofmyresults,howeverimperfect. I havehadalittlecol- laboration. Eliot hov^ever gave up his Sanskrit. Bunting learned to write a beautiful Persian hand. Aldington remained inside the language groups I had examined. Prof. Breasted thought my idea of a quarterly publication of such results of American research as attained value as literature, that is such as had more than specialist's philological interest, was "a dream floating above the heads of the people. " By which he meant the American University system wherein he held very high status as Assyriologist. I see no reason for Japan's taking over the stupidities and flat failures of Amer- ican scholarship. Tokyo has the liveliest magazine of young letters in the world (VOU). New York once had it, that was twenty years ago. Paris often had it before then. Editorial Yunque of Barcelona has just started a very good bilingual series of poets (Poesia en la Mano) beginning with J. R. Masoliver's excellent translations from Dante, Spanish text facing the origi- nal.
If I recommend eight volumes of my own essays and anthologies to the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai as a starting point, it is not, as might be sup- posed,fromimmodesty,butsimplybecauseI donotknowofanyother30 years or 40 years persistent effort to sort out the Occidental books most worth attention. There are encyclopedias, compilations giving names of ALL the known writings, etc. , but not attempts to show the best books in relation to each other.
The very great labors of the Leo Frobenius Institute cover a different field. Your universities will of course take note of them.
The hang-together of art and the economic system is not yet very generally understood. I keep insisting that an "epic is a poem containing history. " That may explain why epic poets need to know economics. It does not touch the lyric writers so closely. However, a "fusion or union of cultures" implies a mutual regard for two historiographies. Here your universities can save their students a great deal of time by importing Brooks Adams' The Law of CiviJization and Decay and The New Empire.
I think, in fact, that you might start your study of our new historiogra- phy from those books, though to understand American cycles they must be amplified by brief compendia of the writing of the American founders, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, and by a narrative containing facts which I, personally, have found in Overholser, Woodward, Beard, Bowers, and not (oh very emphatically not) in the text books used in American beaneries.
I cannot condense four of the essential factors further than I have already done in my "Introductory Text-book" offered herewith.
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Introductory Text-book [In Four Chapters]
Chap. 1. "All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor and virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. "--John Adams.
Chap. 2. ". . . and if the national bills issued, be bottomed (as is indispens- able] on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no inter- est on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to everyone of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them. " --Thomas Jefferson (1816, letter to Crawford).
Chap. 3. ". . . and gave to the people of this Republic the greatest blessing THEY EVER HAD--THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS. "--Abraham Lincolu.
Chap. 4. "The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures. " Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Depart- ment, Section 8, p. 5. Done in the convention by the unanimous consent of the States, 7th September, 1787, and of the Independence of the United States the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names. --GeorgeWashington,PresidentandDeputyfromVirginia.
This "text" was followed by a half page of notes and bibliography. Thus:
The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignor- ance mentioned in my first quotation. Of the three preceding cita- tions, Lincoln's has become the text of Willis Overholser's recent History of Money in the U. S. ; the first citation was taken as opening text by Jerry Voorhis in his speech in the House of Representatives June 6, 1938; and the passage from Jefferson is the nucleus of my Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
Douglas' proposals are a subhead under the main idea in Lin- coln's sentence; Gesell's "invention" is a special case under Jeffer- son's general law. I have done my best to make simple summaries and clear definitions in various books and pamphlets and recommend as introductory study, apart from C. H. Douglas' Economic Democracy and Gesell's Natural Economic Order, Chris. HoUis' Two Nations, McNair Wilson's Promise to Pay, Larraiiaga's Gold, Glut and Govern- ment and M. Butchart's compendium of three centuries' thought, that is an anthology of what has been said, in Money. (Originally pub- lished by Nott. )
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There again I have nothing to retract. I left copies of the above work with a number of senators and congressmen last year in Washington, also with a few historians. The more they knew already, the more nearly saw the bearing of my four chapters. I doubt if anyone can further, or to advantage condense, the thought of John Adams than I have in Cantos 62/71, and I have made a start on Jefferson in my Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Both of which volumes can be explained. There is no reason for someone in Tokyo refraining from issuing a commentary, but I doubt if an adequate history of the U. S. can be written without including the essential ideas which I have there set together. The compendia of histoire morale contempomine made by Remy de Gourmont and Henry James, I have at least indicated in my Make it New.
At this point I would offer a word of warning to Japanese alumni of American, or other Occidental universities. With the exception of Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut in Frankfurt, our universities are not, they most emphatically are not, in the foreguard of Western thought. There is a time lag of 20, 40 or 60 years in what they teach in economics, history and literature. They may be more lively in departments of material science. At any rate most of their Japanese alumni were taught ideas belonging to Western decadence. And that decadence was nowhere more notable than in Western tendency to erect museums rather than temples.
Now the museum is all very well in its way. The juvenile student can see bits and pieces of what has been achieved in the past, which may keep him from narrow provincialism both of place and of time.
In the study of comparative literature, T. S. Eliot has acutely observed that, "existing masterworks constitute a plenum, whereof the divers parts have inter-related proportions and values. The relations of extant works are modified by new work that is really new. "
It is also true that the real writers of any epoch collaborate, sometimes consciously and voluntarily, sometimes unconsciously and even against their own will.
Yeats and I collaborated voluntarily. Yeats and F. M. (Hueffer) Ford involuntarily. Cummings is possibly unconscious of collaboration, etc. However, a museum is made up of fragments. An attempt to present the literature of a country or continent is bound to appear fragmentary or at least made up of heteroclite matter of different degrees of importance. Even more so when we come to translated literature. There is no uniform merit in translations, any more than in works. One nation may have an epic. An- other a set of plays. But one dimension is common to all masterworks,
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namely, they contain the quintessence of racial quality. I have seen Villon in Paris 500 years after his lines were written.
I have seen Boccaccio and Goldoni in Italy, and it is commonplace that "London is full of Dickens. " By which laconic phrases one means that the "news" printed by these authors is still the event of the day in their countries.
Whatever I have compiled either in essays or in anthologies has been in an attempt to set together maxima of achievement, that is, work in which at least some of the qualities of writing and concept have attained the highest known degree. And my results are I think largely confirmed by the findings of England's most distinguished resident critic, T. S. Eliot (born American). And to a certain extent I think Yeats and F. M. Ford would have agreed with us, however long it may take the literary bureaucracies and the book trade to admit it. In several cases even the book-trade has had to give way 20 or 25 years after the fact.
I am therefore recommending my own finding re comparative litera- ture. I am recommending Brooks Adams and subsequent "new" economists in the field of history. I have elsewhere cited various other compendia. Germany is talking of Karl von Stein and of Ruhland instead of Marx. The thought of an epoch does not present itself in all departments. La Tour du Pin, Fabre, Frazer, Burbank, may seem names picked up at hazard. Strictly scientific names are world-known--it is only when you get to the border- line between material (practical) science and culture that the vital writers may lie hidden for half a century before coming into their own. In the fields of history or economics the vital writers may be half absorbed and super- seded before being known to more than three hundred readers. After which they crop up again later as "sources," the "source" for practical purposes having very little importance save for retrospective scholars, very little, that is, in proportion to the immense importance of getting the right solu- tion, whether for an anti-tubercular serum, or for an economic (monetary) process.
John Adams remarked that "very few people have the chance to choose their system of government. " It is extremely difficult to make a thorough reform of studies that have become fixed or waterlogged through a century or more of university habit. There is, on the other hand, a grand chance of effecting an up-to-date system, if you deliberately set out to present a relatively unexplored foreign culture, and can do so without superstitions, at any rate looking clearly at definite facts either established or provable, and not caring a hang whether these facts have been acceptable to the controllers of the educational [videlicet mis-educational or obfuscatory)
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system in the countries which you elect to investigate.
If Japan can produce a better, that is clearer and more incisive, set of
brochures showing the real thought of the founders of America's social form, than now exists in America, so much the greater your glory. The best and most revolutionary book on Botticelli was brought out by one of your citizens. It was, or at least appeared to me to be, extremely original in its treatment of Botticelli's details as comparable with Oriental treatments. The impartial and alien eye really saw what the familiar native eye had taken for granted. So much for suggested imports to Japan. When it comes to exports, we in the Occident wonder whether a Japanese history exists; or at any rate we fear that no translation of your history exists that will tell us as much of Japan as the tong-kien-kang-mou in De Moyriac de Mailla's version tells us of China. You can't order such works over night. De Mailla's French makes literature of even rather dull passages. Klaproth's Nippon o Dai Itsi Ran does not. It is merely well printed. We want to know more about you. There is a gap between Kagekiyo and the new dredger-plus plywood veneers.
What I really know of Japan I have got from Fenollosa's notes on the Noh and from a handful of "very much over-civilized" young men to whom the Noh was familiar. I cannot suppose this to be a "working knowledge" but I believe it to be a much more "real" knowledge than I should have got by starting at the "practical end" and omitting the fragments vouch-safed to me.
In struggling against enormous odds (meaning financial odds) for a mutual understanding between Japan and the Occident, there is still the danger that a Japanese educated in the U. S. A. might occasionally believe a statement printed in English or American newspapers without first looking carefully at the date line, and name of the agency supplying said news. It cannot be too firmly understood that "some" agencies and newspapers exist mainly, or even wholly, for the purpose of causing the stock markets to wobble, their "political" purposes being a mere cover for this means to putrid profit. I personally feel that some of you might get your European news via the U. S. A. even if as many of your students have gone to Germany
(have they? ) as to the U. S. A. Re which possibility I register the simple statement made to me two years ago by an American publisher. (Parenth- esis: my friends often urge me to be "reasonable. ") The publisher said: "Facts unfavorable to Germany and Italy are news; facts favorable to Italy and Germany are propaganda. "
Against which I set a revealing statement made by Otto Dietrich (Ter- ramare pamphlets no. 13): "The Fiihrer will never create an office unless
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thoroughly convinced of the suitability of the person selected for it. " Perhaps the spiritual descendents and unconscious followers of Con- fucius do him more honor than physical descendents who spend their time
borrowing money.
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
It is impossible to explain contemporary Europe to Japan without a long economic preface, possibly a longer preface than the average reader has patience for. One can roughly indicate the cycle of Occidental infamies since the founding of the Bank of England about 1696 A. D. , via the suppres- sion of paper money in England's American colonies, Cobbett's struggles against the ruin of agriculture in England, industrialization, the ruin of land owners by financial chicane, etc. Suffice it to say that by 1935 we were all fed up with the fall of empires, kingdoms, etc. It was all "old stuff. " Governments had flopped, Austria was, later, a minor collapse, but for over a century and a quarter no man had laid hands on a Rothschild. That item was NEWS with a big "N," but not one European journalist in a hundred had sense to know it, and not one in a thousand could print his perception if he had one. Three hundred million or whatever golden schillings or whatever had gone into Skoda gun works, to make trouble, via Vienna. The reply was the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich.
In one sense history, not merely ideological history, is built out of phrases. It is built out of crystallizations of words into very brief groups, say five, six, or a dozen words. These words become fact. And it is impossible to exaggerate their force, because they cannot come into existence save as proof of a state of understanding. I mean clear understanding, not mere confused apprehension or suspicion.
Hjaimar Schacht made history in 1938: "GeJd, dem keine Ver- brauchsgiiter gegeniiberstehen, ist ja nichts als bedriicktes Papier. " Money that isn't issued against commerciable goods is mere printed paper.
Of course you have to know quite a bit of economics to understand why this sentence is history. Aristotle left certain terms undefined, or at any rate failed to "educate" the Occident and give it a clear (when I say clear, I mean clear) understanding of certain properties of money. Some people contin- ued to think of money as "a universally accepted commodity delivered in measured amounts. " By 640 A. D. the Tang dynasty had got round to using paper money, that is, "an admonition or memorandum of how much the
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187
holder of a certain kind of piece of paper ought to receive in the common market. " The inscription of the Tang notes is essentially the same as that on the ten lire notes in Italy today.
