Pound

“Ezra Pound Speaking”

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R ADIO S PEECHES OF W ORLD W AR II

Edited by Leonard W. Doob

Series Foreword

The best reason for publishing Ezra Pound’s Italian broadcasts may be the simplest. Thousands of people have heard about them, scores have been affected by them, yet but a handful has ever heard or read them. Here they are.

There are other compelling reasons, the first having to do with the magnitude of their author. No other American—and only a few individuals throughout the world—has left such a strong mark on so many aspects of the twentieth century: from poetry to economics, from theater to philosophy, from politics to pedagogy, from Provençal to Chinese. If Pound was not always totally accepted, at least he was unavoidably there.

Those traits of mind and character that made Pound so inescapable are not only evident in the broadcasts but also present in ways that make them more fully understandable. Here is that same fearless plunge toward the heart of the matter—often heedless of consistencies—that marked his study of ancient and exotic languages and cultures. Here is that same urge to simplify and instruct that marked his unorthodox textbooks: ABC of Economics, ABC of Reading and the rest. Here is that flair for dramatic hyperbole which peppered the Cantos and produced such deliberately shocking titles as Jefferson and/or Mussolini. The broadcasts do not always show these traits at their best, but their blatant presence makes them useful clues in putting together the puzzle of that powerful enigma at their center.

Even if the shadow of Ezra Pound did not so broadly color this century, these broadcasts might still command a clinical respect for the way in which they interrelate so vitally with the rise of fascism in Europe and the accompanying extremes of feelings, with the cause and conduct of World War II as viewed from this special place by this very special commentator. To the historians who have counted this an almost anti-ideological war, the broad casts offer considerable counterpoint. Furthermore, they are the starting point for understanding two major cultural events of the postwar years: the trial of Ezra Pound and the literary prize controversies. The Bollingen Prize debate—by itself the politico-literary cause célèbre of the generation—while once totally preoccupying has to this day refused to lie at rest. Even this young Greenwood Press series, begun twenty-five years after the fact, offers two fresh and extensive treatments of the issue. Such insistent unrest shows clearly the need for this essential evidence now at hand.

The broadcasts do not show Pound at his best. War, bigotry, and totalitarianism are not sunny subjects. Yet giant figures need their full dimensions, and unpleasant subjects can and should be studied for the best of reasons. How indeed are we to lessen our chances for future encounters with shrinking horizons if we do not learn from episodes so recent, so strongly cast, and so richly charted ?

We applaud, then, the respect for a complete historic record which has allowed the Pound Literary Trustees to overcome an understandable reluctance toward seeing these scripts in print. We applaud this same impulse which has motivated the patience and stamina of Leonard Doob. There are, and there will always be, more motives behind an act like this than one can chronicle. From our point of view, however, this work provides a singular and extensive collection of data for the pursuit of that most bewildering of cultural equations: the balance between the creative force, the individual personality, and the social context. Seen in this light, Ezra Pound’s texts become a “Contribution in American Studies” at a profound and essential level.

ROBERT H. WALKER

February 1975

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book is the signature Ezra Pound almost always used at the start and sometimes at the end of each broadcast from Radio Rome in World War II. Pound himself had proposed to publish “300 Radio Speeches,” containing also the texts of his “Money Pamphlets,” newspaper articles published in Italian, and his translations from the Chinese: Ta Hio (The Great Digest) and Chung Yung (The Unwobbling Pivot).

Pound started to write for radio toward the end of 1940. The first scripts to be accepted were read in English by regular speakers of Radio Rome. In January 1941 he was able to record his own speeches, which were broadcast, on an average, twice a week. He wrote the texts at his home in Rapallo and on occasion in Rome where he traveled to record on discs a batch of 10 to 20 speeches. He wanted the discs to be transmitted in a particular order, but it is apparent from the discrepancies between his numbering system and the dates on which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recorded the speeches that the Italian officials did not always follow his plan, although in general the deviation was not great. He gathered news and information from Italian newspapers and whatever foreign papers he managed to obtain; from Italian broadcasts and any foreign station (especially the BBC) he could hear on his own radio; from conversations with friends, officials, and travelers; from letters of friends in America and other countries; and from his own library, which included back numbers of periodicals. He envied the BBC’s supply of news and feature materials, since he himself had “not one disc” (July 25, 1943).

After the Fascist government fell in July 1943, Pound left Rome and eventually submitted scripts and ideas to Mussolini’s Republic of Saló. No evidence exists to indicate that any of this material was ever broadcast to America in Pound’s name from Radio Milan while that station remained under the regime’s control.

The present collection consists of original manuscripts Pound prepared to read on Rome radio, divided into two parts:

Part 1 includes all of the available manuscripts (105) for the broadcasts recorded by the FCC: October 2, 1941, to December 7, 1941; January 29, 1942, to July 26, 1942; February 18, 1943, to July 25, 1943. These are the speeches that have been quoted by Pound’s critics, and they include those selected by American authorities who sought to press the charge of treason against him. The monitoring unit of the FCC, called the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, recorded every broadcast from Radio Rome, included among which were Pound’s speeches. There are egregious errors and omissions in these FCC transcripts because recording equipment in those days was crude, because atmospheric conditions interfered with the monitoring, and because, I assume, the transcribers sometimes did not recognize Pound’s references. The FCC versions of Pound’s speeches hitherto available, there fore, sometimes give a wrong impression. Poundians and others have noted that the French novelist Céline was transcribed as “Stalin.” Other mistakes can be observed, in many instances probably resulting from the vagaries of shortwave. One illustration: Pound’s sentence, “Even Lenin saw that the easiest way to debauch the capitalist system is to debauch its currency’ (April 13, 1943), became “Yet even seven saw that the easiest way to divorce the capitalist system is to divorce its currency.” To date, however, it has been impossible to locate five of Pound’s original manuscripts; hence the FCC versions in these instances, imperfect though they are, have been substituted in this volume. In a few instances gaps in the manuscripts themselves have been filled by sections of the FCC transcripts; these substitutions are clearly indicated.

Part 2 includes 10 speeches written before the FCC monitoring unit had been established, some read by Pound and some read by others, as well as speeches either not used or not monitored. They have been selected by Mary de Rachewiltz because in her opinion they represent a fair sample of Pound’s central ideas and themes.

The anonymous and pseudonymous scripts Pound also wrote are not included in this book because they merely repeat ideas already expressed in other speeches.

Most of the speeches in part 1 were intended for an audience in the United States, some for an audience in the United Kingdom, and some for both. It is known that Pound was heard in the United States by people other than the monitors of the FCC, and eventually in April 1942 the Department of Justice began an investigation through the FBI. There is no way of estimating how many persons listened to him regularly or how large his audience ever was. Certainly his broadcasts never attained great popularity. He himself in the broadcasts occasionally expressed jovial skepticism concerning the size of his audience: “I was wonderin’ if anybody listened to what I said on Rome Radio” (February 19, 1943).

After January 29, 1942, Pound was introduced by a statement he had drafted:

Rome Radio, acting in accordance with the fascist policy of intellectual freedom and free expression of opinion by those who are qualified to hold it, has offered Dr. Ezra Pound the use of the microphone twice a week. It is understood that he will not be asked to say anything whatsoever that goes against his conscience, or anything in compatible with his duties as a citizen of the United States of America.

Pound always referred to himself as an American.

With the exceptions already noted, therefore, the texts of the speeches come from Pound’s original manuscripts, which he typed and then often amended in his not always intelligible handwriting. Editing has been kept to a minimum. Elementary misspelling has been corrected. Punctuation and paragraphing have been altered in the interest of intelligibility. Since the scripts were to be read and heard, abbreviations and initials of persons have been spelled out. Pound’s penchant for achieving emphasis through capitalizing entire words has been retained. Brackets have been added when my colleagues and I were unsure of a word or phrase after studying the manuscript and after examining the FCC transcript for possible clues. The five PCC scripts have not been edited or amended. Words that cannot be de ciphered or are missing from the manuscripts or the FCC scripts are indicated by a 2-em dash.

The following information is provided at the outset of each speech:

1. To the left

a. Part 1 a consecutive numbering system based on the dates recorded by the FCC Part 2 the order is perforce arbitrary since the speeches have been selected for content and since no reliable dating or numbering system has been located.

b. In parentheses Part 1 the FCC date part 2 the estimated year in which the script was written.

2. To the right

a. When available, the target audience indicated by Pound and/or the FCC.

b. Part 1 Pound s own numbering system in parentheses actually he used three separate numbering systems that have been distinguished here by placing the letter A, B, or C before his number. Part 2: whatever number appears on the original manuscript is provided without relating that number to Pound’s different numbering systems.

3. To the left, second line

The title of the speech as given by Pound.

The book has four appendices that attempt, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to provide insight into Pound and his critics. I would have preferred to provide additional information, but too many facts were obscure to express reliable judgments. Neither the Italian archives, for ex ample, nor an examination of the papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University have revealed why Pound ceased broadcasting between July 26, 1942, and February 18, 1943.

The glossary and index to names at the end of the book are as complete as my collaborators and I could make them, but we have not been able to identify every name to which Pound referred. Admittedly we have often been able to provide only our best guesses.

This volume, in short, seeks to offer the speeches as Pound wrote them. For the first time all of his monitored speeches and some of his other scripts are brought conveniently together. No longer will Poundians or historians be dependent upon the FCC transcripts, pirated editions of the speeches, or hit-and-miss citations to learn what Pound said over Radio Rome.

Reproducing Pound’s admittedly controversial speeches over 30 years later requires justification. Why publish this volume ? Why have I agreed to function as editor ? Pound wrote these scripts; they are part of his legacy. He is so important in American and British literature of the twentieth century that whatever he wrote cannot be ignored. The speeches, more over, are valuable from a historical standpoint: they reveal what one man, broadcasting from an enemy radio station during World War II, believed his countrymen should hear. On the basis of what he said, moreover, Pound was arrested and accused of treason; he spent 13 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (a government institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.) as a result. Anyone who seeks to understand Pound or to write about him and his times cannot overlook these speeches. Although Pound’s reputation will forever rest on his poetry and other writings, and not upon these scripts, the broadcasts are part of his record. Actually, the speeches should be of interest of Poundians not only because, according to Mary de Rachewiltz, they reflect his earlier writings but also because they affected his subsequent poetry.

To the second question: why have I personally undertaken this editorial role ? Admittedly, I am not a Poundian in any sense, and I have read and understood very little of his poetry. I offer three reasons. First, Mary de Rachewiltz asked me originally to work with her in preparing a definitive edition because she thought my knowledge of propaganda and World War II would be helpful. During that war, I was actively engaged in psychological warfare against Italy, Germany, and Japan. I remember vaguely seeing some of the FCC transcripts of Pound’s speeches at the time and dismissing them as irrelevant to my own work. Then, secondly, I have been interested to see whether the technique of content analysis—which was useful to me during World War II and later in analyzing Goebbel’s diaries—would be helpful in comprehending this vast collection of words. The analysis of the 110 speeches, the reader will note in appendices, is pitched on a modest level and simply seeks to answer a straightforward question: in how many of the broadcasts did Pound make one or more references to particular themes, persons, and countries ? Finally, although I must add that my own attitudes and feelings have not been one bit changed after working with these speeches, it has been interesting to come to comprehend what Pound was trying to accomplish. His attack on the profits some men reap from wars reminded me of my experience during the summer of 1934 when I was employed by the Senate Committee then investigating “The Merchants of Death.”

My own conscience is at peace on a mundane level. Compensation to my research assistants has exhausted, nay exceeded, the funds allocated to me personally in my role as one of the Pound Literary Trustees. My share of the royalties from this book will not go to me. I am grateful to the Trustees of Pound’s Estate for giving Mary de Rachewiltz and me access to the original manuscripts. Others who have faithfully cooperated with us are James A. Fishback, who performed the content analysis of the 110 broadcasts; Ellen S. Schell, who worked diligently on the index and glossary; Maryrose Coiner, who prepared the data from the content analysis for the computer and provided us with printouts constituting the basis for the tables; Jane C. Olejarczyk, who heroically managed to prepare typed copies of the manuscripts; and Marjorie A. Sa’Adah, who pitched into the project whenever extra assistance was needed, which was often. Especially cordial gratitude is expressed to Olga Rudge who originally preserved Pound’s manuscripts and who conveyed to me a sensitive feeling for Pound’s philosophy and approach.

This volume could not have been prepared without the assistance and persistence of Mary de Rachewiltz. This is Pound’s book, however, and with her help I have simply facilitated its appearance.

Part I

110 FCC–Recorded Scripts #1 (October 2, 1941) U.S.(A43)

LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY

It’s a DITCH all right. Democracy has been LICKED in France. The frogs were chucked into war AGAINST the Will of the people. Democracy has been licked to a frazzle in England where it never did get a look in ANY—HOW. But even pseudo-democracy breaks down when a people is chucked into war against its will, and the Brits. never VOTED Winston into the premiership. In fact WHEN DID they have an election ?

Remember it is the government in England that decides WHEN to have an election. Think where we would be if Mr. Roosevelt could merely POSTPONE elections till he got ready to have one.

Well, democracy is in her last DITCH, and if she ain’t saved in America. NO ONE is going to save her in her parliamentary form.

As to UNITIN’ with England—taking on a lot of bad debts and new liabilities—one of the speakers on this radio was kind enough, that is, he showed respect enough for American intelligence (yes, even today, he showed respect for American intelligence) by saying only Britons were rootin’ for this FEDERATION.

On close examination the Brits themselves don’t seem to be so numerous in the movement toward merger.

Horeb Elisha [Hore-Belisha], well IS he English ? And Victor Sassoon, ALL for the merger.

Twenty percent capital to be paid by the English.

Twenty percent PAID capital to be paid by the United States of America. The balance of 60% UNPAID to remain in the hands of the promoters, probably as PREFERRED stock, with board of directors ready to grant special bonuses to their friends at ANY and every moment.

Well, is Vic Sassoon, that Jew pseudo-parsee, head of the Shanghai rackets, opium, brothels in probability and so forth, night life of Shanghai ? IS he YOUR idea of David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick ?

And Mr. Streit ? And of course there are MILLIONS behind it. Any one of 86 Jew millionaires can start a publishing firm and any one of the 4,000 hired troops in the British Embassy can print all the crap he likes.

I dunno where the rugged American INDIVIDUAL is going to git FUNDS to combat ’em.

BUT, on the other hand, you can annex Canada without taking on liabilities. You can annex Newfoundland, and Jamaica and all the rest of it without either paying England OR paying Sir Victor.

Why this sixty percent cut to promoters who will do NOTHING for you ? Yes, I know there is all the Sulgrave Manor association, all the glamour of cousinship; but it WAS cousinship with John Bull, in the old days, not with BULLesha, or Bullstein.

And Bulistein is apparently itchin’ to drop off the B and remain simple ULLstein, by means of the merger.

The MILITARY situation ? Conducing to UNION ? The number of troops that can be supported, and fed, and supplied by ONE line of railway from ArcAngel—from Vladivostock or via Teheran—is considerably less than the TWELVE Million which the Russians set out with.

That Slavic fatalism which induced these troops to die in large numbers has in this war appeared quite ALIEN to the sensibilities of the fighting force put in the field by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Belisha.

I don’t see even Winston inventing an echelon system. I mean Tommy Atkins won’t shoot Tommy Atkins in the back on SYSTEM. He would feel something after doing it once.

Doubtless Belisha’s bright eye, and invigorating etc. will one day suggest that the Aussies could shoot the Sepoys and as the Pathans enjoy shooting anything, and would enjoy shooting Australians especially if invited to do so. And doubtless there could be found an even super-Slavic fatalism some where among the thousand alien races crushed by the Anglo-Jew empire. But it mightn’t take a very active military form. It might just sit down with a hand loom in face of the carnage.

But in ANY case it’s a question of QUANTITY. And WHAT support does the United States GET from Anglo-Judaea ? Just WHOM have the British supported in this so bloody series of swindles ?

They have EVERY reason NOT to waste their forces in enforcing American trade in the Orient. They have every reason to leave America to pin up the diapers of their baby.

Except of course the feeling that the United States MIGHT take a leaf out of THEIR book, and grab this or that, as they have grabbed French possessions, and shot off the remaining French combatants.

In Persia it becomes a question of QUANTITY. Walla walla, etc. Twelve Million Russians did NOT stop Von Rundstedt and Baron Keitel. They have not stopped ONE German army.

Nor have they reduced the German forces to a figure ANYwhere near the number of troops that England could maintain with SIX railways over the Caucasus.

So THAT is not exactly where the strategists expect YOU to help England win any wars. Whatever Growler, Mr. McGrump, sez on the B.B.C. liary [lie-ary].

Now when I was a kid Admiral DEWEY ... that sounds like Napoleon at Moscow ?

Yes, that sounds to ME like the story about the “Fifth element MUD, said Napoleon.”

There are millions of Chinamen. Many of them living on very short rations in the INTERIOR and about as much interested in Chiang Kai-Chek as they are in the White Socks and the Phillies. If there still are any Phillies. You could get more enthusiasm out of those Chinks for a Hot Dog Championship on the Northside than you could for Chiang’s FOREIGN party in China.

A LOT of China is NOT pro-Kai-Chek. A lot of China is NOT FOR that gang of foreign investors. Then, of course, you might rescue the de Gaulle interests. Namely you might go die in the GLORIOUS cause of the Bank of the Paris Union, AGAINST General Pétain, the victor of Verdun.

Do you think the French people would thank you ? Listen to the FRENCH radio, that is NOT paid by London; and ASK me.

Yes, the Vichy radio is twisty, it is trying to hold onto France, and double cross the Axis, and hold ONTO FRANCE, and hold or get every inch of French soil, and hang onto every French sou it can lay eye or hold on.

BUT it is NOT working for the famille de Gaulle.

AND it knows that Winston wanted Paris razed to the ground, as was Rotterdam, and as Leningrad either is being or has been.

And Pierre Laval was about all that stopped Winston from attaining that so desired result. Because “we as lenders of money” would be able to intervene and LEND money for reconstruction.

A lovely ambition. But will any born Frenchman thank you for exercising that at this moment, will any FRENCHMAN thank you for exercising that kind of ambition ?

The French peasant wants his field for himself. He has a healthy MISTRUST of all mortgages.

As to the DATA whereon the American government bases its “judgment” (I believe they still call it judgment). Roosevelt is reported in the Herald Tribune of New York on August 17 as being in complete agreement with Churchill and saying Russia could fight all winter.

Mebbe he meant that Siberia could remain outside German protection during that period. 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.

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.

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 (né 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.

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.

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).

Now I hold NO Catholic has ever been or ever will be puzzled by what I said in those Cantos. I have, however, never asked for sympathy when misunderstood. I go on trying to make my meanin’ clear and then clearer. And in the LONG run people who listen to me (very few do, but members of that small and SElect minority) do know more in the long run, than those who listen to Mr. H.G. chubby Wells and the liberal stooges.

What I am gitting at is, a friend said to me the other day that he was glad I had the politics I have got, but that HE didn’t understand how I, as a North American, United Stateser could have it.

Well that looks simple to me. Things OFTEN DO look simple to me. On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin’ from the twig downward, you get into a muddle.

My politics seem to me SIMPLE. My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended. I don’t cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin’ from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis.

I wish Brother Hoover had spilled his facts about the stinking and rotten Treaty of Versailles while he was still in the White House. But I am glad he has done so now. Tho’ he could also confess his OWN errors and aid even now to acceleratin’ the United States of America welfare.

Anyhow, I have, in principle, NO objection to the U.S. absorbin’ Canada and the whole NORTH American continent.

The rot of the British Empire is from inside, and if the whole of that syphilitic organization, headed by Montagu Skinner Norman, makes war on Canada, or Alberta, I see no reason for Canada not making war on the Jews in London. Whether they are born Jews, or have taken to Jewry by predilection.

What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin’ ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles, with a new two dozen Danzigs. Namely the United States bein’ left with war baby bases in Aberdeen, Singapore, Dakar, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean! All draggin’ the tail of their coat, and making dead mathematically sure of another war for Dupont, Vickers, Mond, Melchett, Beit, Ellermann in ten or fifteen years after the present one (present war). And to that end Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lehman are working, day and night, not to mention the Warburgs. And precisely on the subject of Warburgs, I wish Herb Hoover would say MORE about the stink of Versailles.

God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don’t want to see more evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface. And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one.

And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin’ the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris. And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion. Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even a Jewish medal. Why the heck the Chinese and laps don’t combine and drive that dirt out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient.

And in any case I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism. We are gittin’ on for the centenary of the opium war, that never did any good to the lads of Lancashire or of Sussex, and that brought no prosperity in Dorset or Gloucester.

Hardy’s England, aye, aye sir, where is it ? Did Rothschild save it ? He did not. Did the Goldsmid save it ? He did not. Does Churchill endeavor to save it ? He does NOT. I repeat the rot and stink of England, and the danger to her empire is inside, and has been: from the time of Cobbett.

And NO number of Rabbis and bank touts in Wall Street and in Washington can do one damn thing for England, save let her alone. And a damn pity they didn’t start doin’ sooner. That is a pity for England.

And a peace with American war bases all over the whole of the planet would be no more a real peace than Versailles was. And as to all visible signs Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew’s hands than Wilson was in 1919. I am against havin’ him mixin’ into ANY post-war matters whatever. This objectin’ being academic.

An’ I think it would be well for ALL men, from China to Capetown to SEE as soon as possible what Franklin is up to. Let him keep his paws on the North American continent. Even if it means DIMinished gun sales for all his pals, and for all gold-bugs.

Eight years ago he was sayin’ “nothin to fear but fear.” Well what has become of THAT Roosevelt ? What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis ? He got his face into a paper called Life, eight or ten photographs. Jim Farley would have been less nuisance in the White House than snob Delano, who objected to Farley NOT on moral or ethical grounds, but PURELY as snobism; didn’t want a mere henchman to succeed him.

And as to American labor. When will American labor start lookin’ into the currency question ? “Question,” of course there ought not to be any INTERROGATIVE element in it. Even a hod carrier OUGHT to be able to learn why interest payin’ debt is NOT so good a basis for money as is productive labor.

But will they ? Will the American hod carrier and skilled engineer (includin’ Mr. Hoover) ever git round to the currency issue ? (I call it issue, not question.)

And will the American big employer or financier, except Baruch, ever start studyin’ the solution of HIS problem, which is a corporate solution, in the sense of that word now current in Europe ?

A CORPORATE problem, or issue, which does NOT mean starving the workman, or breakin’ him up by scab mobs.

Lord knows I don’t SEE how America can have fascism without years of previous trainin’. Looks to me, even now as if the currency problem was the place to start savin’ America. As I have been sayin’ for some time back, call it ten years or call it twenty. At this moment it looks like as if John Lewis would take just as long to git round about feedin’ my books to his troops, as it would take the Harvard faculty to git Mr. William G. Morse’s permission to use ’em in Harvard (Economics Department).

Both sides will have to come to it.

On Arbour Day, Pearl Arbour Day, at 12 o’clock noon I retired from the capital of the old Roman Empire to Rapallo to seek wisdom from the ancients.

I wanted to figure things out. I had a perfectly good alibi, if I wanted to play things safe. I was and am officially occupied with a new translation of the Ta S’eu of Confucius. I have in Rapallo the text of Confucius, and of Mencius, the text of the world’s finest anthology, namely that which Confucius compiled from earlier authors, and I have in reach the text of a book which bears on its front page the title Li Ki (which the head of the Chinese Department in our Congressional Library tells me proper minded Chi Sinologues now think is pronounced Lee Gee). And I have six volumes of the late Dr. Morrison’s Dictionary, not the most up to date dictionary of Chinese Ideograms, but nevertheless good enough.

That is, I have WORK thaaar for some years, if I don’t die before I git to the middle.

The Odes are to me very difficult. They are of extreme beauty. Thousands of poets have looked at those odes and despaired. There are points at which some simple ideogram (that is, Chinese picture word) is so used as to be eternal, insofar as our human sense of eternity can reach. There is one of the sunrise that I despair of ever getting translated.

There was to face this, the SITUATION. That is to say the United States had been for months ILLEGALLY at war, through what I considered to be the criminal acts of a President whose mental condition was NOT, as far as I could see, all that could or should be desired of a man in so responsible a position or office.

He had, so far as evidence available to me showed, broken his promises to the electorate; he had to my mind violated his oath of office. He had to my mind violated the oath of allegiance to the United States Constitution which even the ordinary American citizen is expected to take every time he gets a new passport.

It was obviously a mere question of hours, between that day and hour, and the time when the United States of America would be legally at war with the Axis.

I spent a month tryin’ to figure things out, well did I, perhaps I concluded sooner. At any rate I had a month clear to make up my mind about some things. I had Confucius and Mencius, both of whom had been up against similar problems. Both of whom had seen empires fallin’. Both of whom had seen deeper into the causes of human confusion than most men even think of lookin’.

Then there was my old dad in bed with a broken hip; Lord knows who is going to mend it or whether it will mend. So—I read him a few pages of Aristotle in the Loeb Classical Library, English version, to take his mind off it. Also to keep my own work in progress.

Because for some time I have had in mind the need of comparing the terminology of Chinese and Greek philosphy, and also comparing that with the terminology of mediaevil Catholic theology.

No. For a man cut off from all his NORMAL contacts with the non-European world, I can’t say I was destitute—mentally—there was plenty lyin’ there for me to be busy about, if I had wanted to “contract OUT.” If I had wanted to go into a funk hole, I had a nice sizeable funk hole. About as good as an endowed professorship in one of our otiose or veiled, shall we say veiled universities, or even Oxford or Cambridge. Plenty of muckers down there settin’ pretty, and drawin’ 5000 dollars or ten thousand a year for not tellin’. I reckon it is Mencius who thought that “the true sage seeks not repose.”

It is not a claustral motto. I began figurin’ out that a COMPLETE severance of communication between the calm and sentient men is not to be desired.

I have before now pointed out that England was CUT off from the current of European thought during and BY the Napoleonic Wars, and that she never got ketched up again, not during all the damned nasty and 19th century. Always laggin’ behind. Perhaps she allus WAS laggin’ behind. I have pointed out the difference of up-to-dateness between Voltaire and Mr. Samuel Johnson.

At any rate it is NO GOOD.

The United States has been MISinformed. The United States has been led down the garden path, and may be down under the daisies. All thru shuttin’ out news.

There is no end to the amount of shuttin’ out news that the sons of Blood who started this war, and wanted this war, and monkeyed round to git a war started and monkeyed round to keep the war goin’, and spreadin’. There is NO end to the shuttin’ out and perversions of news that these blighters ain’t up to, and that they haven’t, and aren’t still trying to com pass. Whatever happens it is NOT going to do the United States any good to be as cut off from all news, and all NEWS of CONTEMPORARY thought like the damn fools and utterly decadent Britons have got themselves cut off from.

As you can HEAR from the British Blurb Corporation any Monday and Tuesday evening, and any Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening that you choose to listen in to their phenomenal hogwash.

That’s where they’ve got to. And for their bein’ there neither I nor any man I shake hands with, is to blame in any way whatsoever. Every English friend I got in the world, has done his damnest to keep England from makin’ such a thunderin’ and abysmal ass of herself.

As for my American friends, Senator Borah is dead, not that I knew him much save by letter; but I can still feel his hand on my shoulder as just before he was getting into an elevator in the Senate building, and I can still hear him sayin’:

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what a man like you would find to DO here.”

That was a few days sooner, mebbe the first time I met him. Neither he, nor William J. Bryan lived to hear Senator Wallace tellin’ the world there would be no peace till the nations of the world knocked under and bowed down to the GOLD standard. Bowed down like drunken and abject fools and said, let gold rule humanity, let all human exchange of goods be bottle necked and ask permission from a few bloodthirsty kikes who OWN gold. Bow down and say monopoly is God over all men; and this from a man, said to be, or to HAVE BEEN, interested in farmers, and farmer’s welfare. This after all the lies from the London gold ring, this after 20 years of evasion, this in fact after 20 years’ attempt to conceal from the English people that they were being asked to go out and DIE for gold, for the monopoly of the owners and brokers; owners of gold mines, brokers, and owners of gold.

Back in December I had never expected such a confession from anyone as high in office.

Yaaas, I knew that was what the war was about: gold, usury and monopoly. I had said as much when I was last in America. I had then said: IF a war is pushed onto us. So now we have got pushed out of Guam, and Wake, and I suppose out of the Philippines, and a 30 years war is in process ? Is it ? Is a 30 years war what the American citizen thinks will do most good to the United States of America ?

Or has someone been MiSinformed ? and IF so, who misinformed him ? Accordin’ to the reports of the American press now available to the aver age European, someone in charge of American destiny miscalculated somethin’ or other.

An “inquiry” is in progress, at least as they print here. It bein’ my private belief that I could have avoided a war with Japan, if anybody had had the unlikely idea of sending me out there, with any sort of official powers.

The Japanese have a past. Of course when I talk to ’em now, they are apt to remind me that they have ALSO a presertt.

They have not mentioned the future in our conversations.

The last American journalist I saw, and that was the night before Arbour Day, told me the Japs would never etc., etc.

A nation evolves by process of history. Japan to me consists in part of what I learned from a sort of half trunk full of the late Ernest Fenollosa’s papers. Anybody who has read the plays entitled Kumasaka and Kagekiyo, would have AVOIDED the sort of bilge printed in Time and the American press, and the sort of fetid imbecility I heard a few nights ago from the British Broadcasting Company.

There are certain depths of ignorance that can be fatal to a man or a nation. When these are conjoined with malice and baseness of spirit, it seems almost useless to mention them.

A BBC commentator somewhere about January 8 was telling his presumably music hall audience that the Japs were jackals, and that they had just recently, I think he said, within living men’s lifetime, emerged from barbarism. I don’t know what patriotic end you think, or he thinks, or the British authorities think (if that is the verb), is served by such fetid ignorance.

A glance at Japanese sword guards, a glance at Jimmy Whistler’s remarks about Hokusai, or, as I indicated a minute ago, a familiarity with the Awoi no Uye, Kumasaka, Nishikigi, or Funa-Benkei. These are Japanese classical plays, and would convince any man with more sense than a pea hen, of the degree of Japanese civilization; let alone what they conserved when China was, as Fenollosa tells us, incapable of preserving her own cultural heritage.

China lettin’ Confucius go OUT of the schools, for example.

And you needn’t sniff, the Bostonians kulturbund needn’t sniff and say the British Broadcasting Company, the Bloody Boobs Corporation, is over in vulgar London, such things couldn’t happen in Boston.

Almost equal imbecility was attained by Time weekly magazine in November of 1941.

Someone had apparently blundered, as Lord Tennyson wrote of the charge at Balaclava. And blundered, we think, considerably worse. Waaal now who blundered. A commission has been appointed—possibly to white wash who blundered. I don’t know that it is in the citizen’s duty to white wash who blundered.

I think the United States and even her British Allies might do well to keep more in touch with continental opinion.

I don’t think anybody is going to whitewash who blundered into the alli ance with Russia.

I think there are some crimes that nothing will whitewash.

I don’t think an alliance with Stalin’s Russia is lucky. I don’t think the crime of even going thru the motions of invitin’ Russia into slaughter and kill all eastern Europe is a NECESSARY part of the program; program of defense, program of offense. I don’t think this horror was NECESSARY.

I don’t think it is the function, even of the Commander-in-Chief of the United States American Army, to dictate the citizens’ politics;

NOT to the point of invitin’ Bolshevik Russia to kill off the whole east half of Europe!

I don’t think it is a lucky move. EVEN if Eden hopes to doublecross Russia, which nothing indicates that he does hope.

The day Hitler went into Russia, England had her chance to pull out. She had her chance to say, let bygones be bygones. If you can stop the Moscovite horror, we will let bygones be bygones. We will try to see at least HALF of your argument.

Instead of which Hank Wallace comes out—no peace till the world accepts the gold standard.

Quem Deus vult perdere.

Does look like there was a weakness of mind in some quarters. Whom God would destroy, he first sends to the bug house.

The prospect of a 30 years war is not one to arouse mirth and hilarity even in a flighty, chicken headed and irresponsible people such as the United States of Americans.

You are in it, and Lord knows, who is a goin’ to git you out. The late Lord Rothermere, whose culture was nothin’, as you might say, to write home about, finally decided that the English public was wholly unteachable. I don’t know whether you can learn ANYTHING from history, I don’t know whether you are even yet in the state of mind where you want to learn any thing from history or from any other source whatsoever.

A way to get yourselves OUT, might be discoverable, it might be more discoverable if you first had the faint inkling of a curiosity as to how you got yourselves IN.

Now whether you can learn anything from the disasters of England, I do not know. But I would about lay it down as an axiom that empires do not get knocked apart from outside until they are plum gone to rot in the middle.

The laws of right government have been known since the days of Yao and Shun, ole Chinese emperors, and from the time of Shun to King Wen was a 1000 years, and from Wen to Confucius 500.

And they say when the policies of Shun and of Wan were set together (compared), they were as the two halves of a seal, or it might be of a tally stick.

And for nigh onto 4000 years I think no one has dodged the facts of these policies. And from the time of Confucius every dynasty in China that has lasted 300 years has been founded on the law of Confucius, a man or a group, seem’ the horse sense of government, as learned by Confucius, I mean he learned it looking at history, talking of Shun and Wan and after him whenever a great man learned it he started or upheld some sort of imperial order.

And for that reason I am distinctly unimpressed by the bombastic lies of Mr. Winston Churchill or the dirt of Mr. Anthony Eden.

And if the United States was going to have a foreign alliance, I would have preferred it to be with some other kind of a government than Eden and Churchill. There are worse things than a biff on the jaw. Get slugged on the jaw, you can mebbe get up and fight, but a long term of syphilis weakens the constitution.

No, the United States has, politically and economically speaking, had economic political syphilis for the past 80 years. Ever since 1863. And England has had economic syphilis for 240 years, so now she is a moultin’ and droppin’, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, and Australia. Seems like it is tertiary.

Well, as Lord Rothermere said: they are unteachable. I don’t know how much more they reckon to drop before they get ready for physic. I have said on this radio before now that along about 1695 or 94 the Bank of England was put together, and in 1750 they shut down on the Pennsylvania colony money, and the system of lending paper out to the farmers. And in 1776 the natural consequences of that dirty London policy of starvin’ and cheatin’ became, as they say, more apparent. And a year or two later Johnnie Adams said to the British commander: They were havin’ a parley, sez John Adams. “I don’t care what capacity I am received in, receive me in any capacity you like except that of a British subject.” So the first large scale effect of the London cheatin’, and money monopoly was the loss of the American colonies. The Chinese have a method of countin’ cycles of 80 years. I don’t know that there is much in it, but it seems to work sometimes. Eighty years, from the bank to the American Revolution. About 80 years from startin the American government to the great betrayal of 1863. Think it over And from 63 to the present OUR rise as a state thru three or four major, but POSITIVE convulsions, like Jefferson’s revolt against Hamilton’s dirtiness, the Jackson-Van Buren war for the liberation of the American Treasury. Lincoln’s sayin’, “gave to this people the greatest blessin’ they ever had, their own paper to pay their own debt.” And then the assassination of Lincoln.

And then another 80 years: to the END, and absolute collapse of the American system of government.

Can we revive it ?

Has the country got the guts for the climb ? Is there, as I am sayin’ this, the faintest stirring of a desire INside the United States for any healthy new structure ? Or are we the gadarine swine taken with collective hysteria ? Are there ten men in America ready calmly to go back over the events of the past few years, in America and in England ? Is there the faintest stirring of American curiosity as to how a sane government could be built up ? Or at any rate any nucleus or group ready to go back and learn how we were built up from the beginning ?

Adams, Jefferson, and Van Buren to read and digest. You can’t talk it over with me; because none of you can get to a radio. You can’t print stuff like this in your papers, cause the newspapers are NOT there to inform the people. You have got to talk to each other, you have got to write letters one to another.

The texts and the guides you have got, that is, in a way you have got ’em, sprawled out, in big sets of unhandy volumes. Our publishers don’t print handy compendiums. Your professors don’t analyze, that is, not very much. I don’t know what has become of Claude Bowers. He did a bit of digging about. You have a half-dozen historians but not all of ’em, by any means, able to take out the facts and show how they hitch together.

I dunno how you think you are going to assist in a war by a money system which, as Jefferson already saw, “charges the public TWO dollars for every dollar spent by the government,” just automatically and independent of any particular grafting and swindling.

Thirty years war, 30 years paradise for Army contractors, may not be what you voted for. In fact, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt on that score is manifestly what they called him here the other day: the boy that fell down on his assignment. And when you think, if you do think, of the BILLIONS that have been lifted by the Morgenthau treasury policy during the past nine years of peace time. God knows.

God knows what it will be during warfare, or by the end, shall we say, thirty years ? Well, you are now IN, and nobody in Europe can now get you out. Inspired (shall we say) by the principle of self-determination of peoples, oppressed peoples ? Illustratin’ it by the determination to keep Mr. Aguinaldo out of his native Manila you have chucked away our national cultural heritage.

Relatively speakin’ that heritage was the determination of our forebears to set up and maintain in the North American continent a government better than any other.

The determination to govern ourselves INternally, better than any other nation on earth. The idea of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, to keep out of foreign shindies.

Well, you have chucked that idea, or ideal onto the dung heap. And you have insulted the most highly tempered people on earth. With unspeakable vulgarity you have insulted the most finely tempered people on earth, threatenin’ ’em with starvation, threatenin’ ’em with encirclement and tellin’ ’em they were too low down to fight.

You are at war for the duration of the Tenno’s pleasure. Nothin’ in the Western World; nothin’ in the whole of our Occident can help you to dodge that. Nothin’ can help you dodge it.

I could go along on this line for some time, but mebbe I said enough for one evenin’.

Well perhaps I won’t stick to my title very closely, but to start off with, when I was in New York a while back I saw Katharine Cornell in a play, that was a bit soft, and the little sermon she gave from the stage, not quite part of the piece sounded THEN a bit sentimental. I have no doubt that vague language is used on both sides of the present discussion. We can’t all be stylists.

I am chasm’ the METHOD of war scares, the method used for gettin’ people worked into hysteria. And part of it, is attackin’ one wrong, appealin’ to the soft heart and then by false dilemma offering the hearer a bit of sheer buncombe, i.e., offering him an alternative and doing a hat trick to make him think it is the ONLY alternative; false dilemma, you call that in a logic class.

Thus with the stink of Russia NO ONE with any thought in Europe or North or South America believes in the abolition of ownership of every thing.

East Europe and North America believe in the homestead, from A to Z, and from bedrock to roof tree the American people believe in the homestead.

The members of the floating population, to which the top crust has been REDUCED, are beliefless, they got no belief, they want this, that or tother, tinsel and limelight. The young, I ain’t the first to notice it, the young WANT this, that, or tother, often they want something different over two weeks. The stronger ones CIT it. After they git to be fifty, a few of ’em try to see what all the fuss was about.

Lord knows j’ai roulÃ©e ma bosse. I wanted metropolitan life, etc. But you can’t run a whole state or nation on the predilections of a few writers and artists. WHEN they ripen, as take the case of William Shakespeare, they git to hear of the homestead.

The WHOLE and total best of civilization, Chinese or Western, is based on the homestead. It is not based on nomadic tribes, and destructions.

Being DISGUSTED as 98% of all decent men were with the results of usuriocracy, money lenders’ decivilization, money lenders’ RUIN of the good life in the Occident and everywhere else they could get their dirty hooks onto, a lot of us fell for ANY alternative, jumpin’ the part we didn’t look at very closely, never stoppin’ to ask: DO we believe Marx and Lenin ? Hence PART of the red and pink beano. When their hair begins to lose its adolescent hue, a few men begin to think of a SYSTEM, a working system, a base and BASIS for human living together. And the answer comes out the same, a house GOOD enough for the ordinary folk to go on livin’ in from one generation to the fourth and fifth generation. And you get relief classically in the Wanderjahre. Run around and look at the world [ the kikes and Frank Roosevelt and Hill Billy Hull and Welles are doin’ their worst to clamp down on. DON’T want any witnesses, any free and independent witnesses, to tell what IS goin’ on elsewhere. In the ole days it was the fatheads with privilege; or mediocre writers and architects and artists that did not WANT criticism. [FCC transcript: Every decent idea was to go around, see the best, and then come home and do better. That is the way the good life is built. The so-called stifling air of the provinces et cetera was due to fear, due to shunning comparisons. While, if every American would get up tomorrow morning and ask himself what he really wants, there would be an end to the Roosevelt hysteria. That is to say, it would not spread like a pest throughout the American nation.] If the citizen, after having asked himself that, would then go on to the ole Rights of Man, and say how much of it can I git without doing dirt to my neighbor, the good life would approach very rapidly, more rapidly than it usually does; if we can trust to the human record.

Yes, I know what the decent English are resistin’ and what they were even ready to fight to resist. And if they had any clear headedness, that would be dandy. They want their cultural heritage, they think the English once had nice manners.

Well I was talkin’ to a friend of mine, and she was born with a name sacr’d to every man who cares for poetry written in English, Rossetti. And she said, “The worst manners come from people trying to be nasty to people whom they consider inferior. Matter of class. And the Nazis have wiped out that feeling, and wiped out bad manners in Germany.”

The New Europe goes ON NOW doing what American democracy, in the clean sense of that word, started doin’ when it made a DECLARATION of Independence, but failed to define all the words used, or compromised on the wording, struck out Jefferson’s original sentences about abolition of slavery, and for the sake of a vote, omitted to specify that “equal” means equal in the courts of law, no man having privilege over any other, to be let off certain penalties cause he was the son of his papa, or had been to a university.

I told my rare and precious readers ten years ago that there was an ANTI snob movement in Italy. Of course no one paid any attention to that sentence, so I repeat it.

Some things you are learning 30 years late, some things 20 and ten years. And in others you swallow goof like Mr. Donovan, Colonel Donovan, or you merely get hooked with press lies contradicted two days or ten days later. I have a weakness for newspaper writers, ever since a fellow named Monsier turned up in London in 1915 or some such, and later when there weren’t any new book writers, I took to my newspaper colleague, who of course allus looked down on the outsider, but a few of ’em were kindly and tolerant, regardin’ me as an amateur, who didn’t menace their pay cheque. And I finally took to noticin’ the waves of credulity that pass over ’em. They know that most of what they can print is all horse. But they believe certain unprinted rumors. Sure, we were set to invade Dakar. Well, I don’t deny it. Sometimes their tips are straight. But we do almightily need a better system of communication. We need a greater honesty ? Naturally, and I don’t mean merely about stealing and graft. I mean inside the individual head. A greater resistance to these waves of hoakum.

Do you want the destruction of the people of Iceland ? Is Finland a menace to anyone save a few kike owners of nickel mines ? Do the Beits and Sassoons and their delegates represent the best English tradition ?

If the United States is to steal and embezzle, wouldn’t it be wiser to stick to French, English, and Dutch dependencies in the American hemisphere ? And wouldn’t it be honester to get same by purchase, even if it meant fewer IMMEDIATE profits to the tinned meat and armament rackets ?

I am readin’ you now another Canto for diverse reasons. It contains things or at least hints at things that you will have to know sooner or later. Berle or no Berle, war or no war.

And as I stated last time, I am feedin’ you the footnotes first in case there is any possible word that might not be easily comprehended. The Decennio, and decennio exposition was the exhibition in Rome at the end of the first ten years of the Fascist regime. Mussolini’s fascist regime. They set up the office of the old Popolo d’Italia, very like what had been the New Age Office in London. Except that Orage’s office contained a couple of drawings by Max Beerbohm which have never been published.

John Marmaduke is a pseudonym, the rest of the names in the Canto are real. The MacMillan Commission sat after the other war to look into the sins of the British Financial system.

Antoninus Pius, a Roman emperor; lex Rhodi the law of Rhodes, well I say that in the Canto. The Latin phrase: Aurum est commune sepulchrum, gold the common sepulchre. Parallels: Troy the common grave, I think it is a part of a line by Propertius. But it don’t matter who it is quoted from. And the Greek: helandros, kai heleptolis kai helarxe [usary destroyer of] men and cities and governments. HELARXE more or less twisted from a line of Aeschylus; about Helen of Troy destroyer of men, and cities. Geryon, Geryone; allegorical beast in Dante’s hell, symbol of fraud and all dirtiness. Hic Geryon est, is a Latin tag meaning, with the other phrase, Hic hyperu sura: this is extra strong usury. Super usury. All right, now I am going on with Canto 46.

XLVI

And if you will say that this tale teaches ...

a lesson, or that the Reverend Eliot

has found a more natural language ... you who think

you will

get through hell in a hurry ...

That day there was cloud over Zoagli

And for three days snow cloud over the sea

Banked like a line of mountains.

Snow fell. Or rain fell stolid, a wall of lines

So that you could see where the air stopped open

and where the rain fell beside it

Or the snow fell beside it. Seventeen

Years on this case, nineteen years, ninety years

on this case

An’ the fuzzy bloke sez (legs no pants ever wd. fit) ’IF

that is so, any government worth a damn can

pay dividends?’

The major chewed it a bit and sez: ’Y—es, eh ...

You mean instead of collectin’ taxes?’ ’

Instead of collecting taxes.’ That office?

Didja see the Decennio?

?

Decennio exposition, reconstructed office of II Popolo,

Waal, ours waz like that, minus the Mills bomb an’ the teapot,

heavy lipped chap at the desk,

One half green eye and one brown one, nineteen

Years on this case, CRIME

Ov two CENturies, 5 millions bein’ killed off

to 1919, and before that

Debts of the South to New York, that is to the

banks of the city, two hundred million,

war, I don’t think (or have it your own way ...)

about slavery?

Five million being killed off... couple of Max’s drawings,

one of Balfour and a camel, an’

one w’ich fer oBviOus reasons haz

never been published, ole Johnny Bull with a ’ankerchief.

It has never been published..

’He ain’t got an opinion.’

Sez Orage about G.B.S. sez Orage about Mr. Xtertn.

Sez Orage about Mr. Wells, ’he wont HAVE an opinion

trouble iz that you mean it, you never will be a journalist.

19 years on this case, suburban garden,

’Greeks!’ sez John Marmaduke ’a couple of art tricks!

What else? never could set up a NATION!’

Wouldn’t convert me, dwn’t HAVE me converted,

’Said “I know I didn’t ask you, your father sent you here

“to be trained. I know what I’d feel.

“send my son to England and have him come back a christian!

“what wd. I feel?” ’Suburban garden

Said Abdul Baha: “I said ’let us speak of religion.’

“Camel driver said: I must milk my camel.

“So when he had milked his camel I said ’let us speak of religion.’

And the camel driver said: It is time to drink milk.

Will you have some?’ For politeness I tried to join him.

Have you ever tasted milk from a camel?

I was unable to drink camel’s milk. I have never been able.

So he drank all of the milk, and I said: let us speak of religion.

’I have drunk my milk. I must dance.’ said the driver.

We did not speak of religion.” Thus Abdul Baha

Third vice-gerent of the First Abdul or Whatever Baha,

the Sage, the Uniter, the founder of a religion,

in a garden at Uberton, Gubberton, or mebbe it was some

other damned suburb, but at any rate a suburban suburb

amid a flutter of teacups, said Mr Marmaduke:

“Never will understand us. They lie. I mean personally

“They are mendacious, but if the tribe gets together

“the tribal word will be kept, hence perpetual misunderstanding.

“Englishman goes there, lives honest, word is reliable,

“ten years, they believe him, then he signs terms for his

government.

“and naturally, the treaty is broken, Mohammedans,

“Nomads, will never understand how we do this.”

17 years on this case, and we not the first lot!

Said Paterson:

Hath benefit of interest on all

the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing

Semi-private inducement Said

Mr Roth-schild, hell knows which Roth-schild

1861, ’64 or there sometime, “very few people

“will understand this. Those who do will be occupied

“getting profits. The general public will probably not

“see it’s against their interest.”

Seventeen years on the case; here

Gents, is/are the confession.

“Can we take this into court?

’Will any jury convict on this evidence?

1694 anno domini, on through the ages of usury

On, right on, into hair-cloth, right on into rotten building,

Right on into London houses, ground rents, foetid brick work,

Will any jury convict ’um? The Foundation of Regius Professors

Was made to spread lies and teach Whiggery, will any

JURY convict ’um?

The Macmillan Commission about two hundred and forty years

LATE

with great difficulty got back to Paterson’s

The bank makes it ex nihil

Denied by five thousand professors, will any

Jury convict ’um? This case, and with it

the first part, draws to a conclusion,

of the first phase of this opus, Mr Marx, Karl, did not

foresee this conclusion, you have seen a good deal of

the evidence, not knowing it evidence, is monumentum

look about you, look, if you can, at St Peter’s

Look at the Manchester slums, look at Brazilian coffee

or Chilean nitrates. This case is the first case

Si requieres monumentum?

This case is not the last case or the whole case, we ask a

REVISION, we ask for enlightenment in a case

moving concurrent, but this case is the first case:

Bank creates it ex nihil. Creates it to meet a need,

Hic est hyper-usura. Mr. Jefferson met it:

No man hath natural right to exercise profession

of lender, save him who hath it to lend.

Replevin, estopple, what wangle which wangle, VanBuren met it.

Before that was tea dumped into harbour, before that was a

great deal still in the school books, placed there

NOT as evidence. Placed there to distract idle minds,

Murder, starvation and bloodshed, seventy four red revolutions

Ten empires fell on this grease spot.

’I rule the Earth’ said Antoninus ’but LAW rules the sea’

meaning, we take it, lex Rhodi, the Law Maritime

of sea lawyers.

usura and sea insurance

wherefrom no State was erected greater than Athens.

Wanting TAXES to build St Peter’s, thought Luther beneath

civil notice,

1527. Thereafter art thickened. Thereafter design went to hell,

Thereafter barocco, thereafter stone-cutting desisted.

’Hic nefas’ (narrator) ’commune sepulchrum.’

19 years on this case/first case. I have set down part of

The Evidence. Part/commune sepulchrum

Aurum est commune sepulchrum. Usura, commune sepulchrum.

helandros kai heleptolis kai helarxe.

Hic Geryon est. Hic hyperusura.

FIVE million youths without jobs

FOUR million adult illiterates

15 million ’vocational misfits’, that is with small chance for jobs

NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial

accidents

One hundred thousand violent crimes. The Eunited States ov

America

3rd year of the reign of F. Roosevelt, signed F. Delano, his uncle.

CASE for the prosecution. That is one case, minor case

in the series/Eunited States of America, a.d. 1935

England a worse case, France under a foetor of regents.

’Mr Cummings wants Farley’s job’ headline in current paper.

E.P. speaking. That’s the end of Canto 46.

This challenge is a chance to— —about the sale and manufacture of war. This war is part of a profit. The present phase of that profit began at the end of the 17th Century. By 1750 a corrupt and avaricious government in England, working for British monopolies, was shutting down on the Pennsylvania colony’s issue of money, paper money, money issued against land, work and the industrious and sane nature of the Pennsylvania colonists.

I have given between 70 and 100 talks on the radio and if I come back to the microphone 100 or 200 times more, I could start every talk with that statement. Until you see this war as an incident in a series, you cannot understand it or judge it or qualify yourselves as judges of the rights and wrongs of the present act in the story.

Will men of my generation in America stop to consider what is not printed ? Will Americans between the age of 50 and 60 look back honestly over their own reading over what they have read during the past 50 years ? Note the vague dissatisfaction, the sense of bafflement, especially for the man who reads after working hours.

Now take the current issues of supposedly serious magazines, magazines that are certainly authoritative in a twisted sense, authoritative and influential. I believe one of them nominated Willkie and by now perhaps that fact needs no comment whatever. I’ve been accused in these talks but, if anyone has seriously answered any of my statements, they have been unable to do so in any form that reaches me. Well, I ask my compatriots of my own age to note that the very high percentage of articles printed in

American magazines contains a joker, that is a silent point, a basically false assumption. I don’t mean they all contain the same false assumption. I point k out that there is no public medium in the United States for serious discussion.

Every [one?] of these publications has subjects which its policy forbids it to mention or to mention without falsification. And I ask the men in my generation to consider the effects, the cumulative effect of this state of things which does not date from September, 1941, but has been going on ever since we can remember.

The progressive falsification of America has been going on for 80 years at least and we have lived through half of it. I mean as conscious leaders, we have had 40 years of ill-intentional and of semi-conscious befuddlement to contend with and it is time to come to the cumulative effect of that profit.

Baruch, Berle, Best?—to take three names starred in American publicity, one pronouncement and two headlined articles are before me. All of these men writing and speaking with authority of a sort official positions, dominant in national affairs and with such views that no man under 40 can possibly untangle their cobwebs.

In normal times, qualified readers wouldn’t try. They would let it go at that. They would be busy on constructive work. The old are indifferent, the experienced are indifferent and a cautious son of a New York editor, now in his 70th year, I mean the son in his 70th year, remembered his father’s— —. He shrugged his shoulders, or did when I saw him last autumn, who is he to impede human carnage ? The folly of all mankind ain’t nothing, but human imbecility gives us an idea of the infinite. And in a way, as he said, do nothing about it.

Well, there is still time to learn something about it, still time to fight against a peace that can be no peace, still time to fight against widespread efforts to prevent the end of the slaughter, which efforts are being made. I mean people are now trying to prevent the war from ending. People have already planned for a peace like the last, a mere parenthesis, a mere slow-up of munition sales, a mere disequilibrium that will keep the world on tenterhooks between the end of this war and the start of the next one.

You cannot sit in Ohio and judge the Balkans. You cannot judge China from Omaha. You could read, and perhaps some American will some day make a vow to read one old paper or magazine once a month, by all means say three or six months old, an