#10: February 17, 1942 — “SALE AND MANUFACTURE OF WAR”

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, and once a year read a still older one.  That might give you a perspective.

Unless you know at least as much about the past 20 years of Italian history as is contained in old— —volume on “Italian Socio-Economic Policy,” you will not be able to observe how much of old programs has been recently endorsed by Barney Baruch.  Nor will you be able to see the price of confidence was— —article in October Fortune, A.A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State.

Well, when I was in Washington, a member of the Cabinet told me that so far as he knew Barney was a patriotic gentleman.

Baruch now came out for a constituted price, a price in accord with— —, a price that would guarantee just recompense to everyone who collaborates in a final product.

I will be ready to consider Baruch’s a patriot when he comes out seriously for abolition of the national debt.  He is far in— —that lives in the new economics.

Now Berle’s article is very nice in the second half.  It— —.

#5: December 7, 1941 — “THOSE PARENTHESES”

Europe callin’, Pound speakin’.  Ezry Pound speakin’.  And I think I am perhaps still speakin’ a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it.  They say an Englishman’s head’s made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon.  Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.

Of course I don’t know what GOOD I am doin’, I mean what IMME DIATE good.  But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.

Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15).  Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England.  I am content to say state of mind.

I can’t say my remarks were heeded.  I thought I had got ’em simple enough.  Words short and simple enough.  In fact some people complained that several of ’em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).

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.