I suffer under similar
difficulties
when I try to focus America.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
American continent is one long record of economic aggression.
That is one side of the picture.
Then he quite definitely and clearly mentioned the common man's desire to have a house of his own for his own family. That is what we believe national socialism stands for in Germany. It is what Italy stands for. It is quite emphatically what Communist Russia does NOT stand for, and would not stand for by program.
? Mr. Welles has made a distinctly anti-communist and anti-Muscovite statement. And yet Russia is hurled upon Europe with the official consent of the American government and the connivance of England. The past record of these three countries on the issue of economic aggression is not such as to tempt any among their old acquaintance.
Do his own work, and get his own provisions. That is what the Axis is askin' for. There were plenty of Italians down there in Africa working their farms. Houses were improvin'. For twenty years we have seen people gettin' better houses, have seen straw covered shacks being replaced by brick houses, built to hygenic specification, curved edges to floors where floor joins wall, so as not to leave dust space for tuberculosis baccillae. Every man his own vine and fig tree. Mr. Welles ought to have spent more time here in Italy, goin' 'round as I have to Sicily, Apulia, and the Abruzzi. He ought to read Dr. Dietrich on German homesteads. Homesteads you can't lose by mortgage. Mebbe you better MEET Europe.
Now what I believe, war or no war, not waitin' till the war ends, or even putting it second to any military contingency, I believe that every social reform put thru in the Axis countries ought to be DEFENDED. I believe the American people ought to defend those social measures. I will say, as readily as the next man, that a good deal of opposition to the New Deal was due to the worst possible motives. But I have not heard of the New Deal gettin' down to the debt problem. And Mr. Welles' statement that he wants to avoid economic aggression comes as a novelty. I hope he means it. But the idea has not affected Russian policy in the past. It is very hard to see how Mr. Welles expects to believe that Germany wasn't encircled.
As to the "patient toil of centuries," seems like the U. S. was trying to undo as much patient Italian toil as possible. And if he wants bygones to be bygones, he certainly isn't being effective about preventing there being any more bygones.
? Italy was resistin' absolute slavery, had been doin' so ever since that treaty made at Versailles.
#86 (May 15, 1943) U. S. (D2) ECONOMIC AGGRESSION
Mr. Sumner Welles' speech at Toledo was a serious matter. It is a great pity that even the majority of his listeners would have been unable to tell one at the end of it what he had said at the beginning. That is, it was a long and close exposition or argument. At the mercy of even minor misunderstandings. It is a pity that auditors do not more often examine the printed text of such a speech. The efficiency of the communication is further impaired when it falls to translators, for the minor shades fade out of language.
Who among the Toledo auditors now remembers whether Mr. Welles said that the subject "economic aggression" probably was, or whether it ought to be, in the minds of all of us. One Italian word translates next to, and after, I mean that is when a translation is verbally correct at one point, but does not take into account the whole paragraph.
Had I been making a daily or immediate comment I might [have] drawn rash conclusions, or no conclusions whatever. The man reporting on events of the day hasn't time to chew over a text and place it in a general scheme.
Probably few among you thought of correlating the Welles' speech with a talk made a week before by Mr. Agar, speaking from London on the BBC and allegedly connected with the American Embassy.
Had Mr. Welles been ready to make such a speech three years ago, this distressing war might have been quite well avoided.
? Mr. Welles appeared to be renouncing dollar diplomacy. If the U. S. had renounced the more aggressive features of dollar diplomacy a few weeks sooner, a good deal of bloodshed might have been spared us. Mr. Welles also spoke of misapprehensions, of incomplete knowledge, of heedlessness, inconsideration. I am perfectly ready to take Mr. Welles' speech at its face value. If the U. S. has been ill-informed or tardily informed of the conditions of Europe, there is no reason for you to remain VOLUNTARILY in that condition, but it is now extremely hard for the people inside ANY country to get accurate impressions of the state of mind of people inside any other.
It has been for years extremely hard to get news INTO America. I have long held that MORE disinterested observers, American observers, should be let loose on Europe. I mean people whose news and view is not limited by what they can sell to the advertisers of a particular paper or group of papers. Undeniably misunderstandings have arisen, and still arise, and will continue to arise until it is possible for people to talk without heat, and without attempting to read into other men's statement what the speaker or writer never intended to put there.
I mean there is the question of will, the question of good will, of being I; ready to hear what the other man says to you. It is not to be supposed even now that Mr. Welles would listen to me over a table. Or answer what I intended to say during the next five minutes. I have been trying to get news of Europe across the Atlantic for a number of years.
It is today my impression that Mr. Welles was speaking of a Germany which no longer exists. I know that for years the American people were incited against an Italy which was NOT the Italy that I live in.
Before all wars, before any war, there arises a tide of misrepresentation. That sort of thing did NOT begin in this century or the last one. In every country there are groups of people who aim at construction, who reform
? toil more or less consecutively to ameliorate living conditions. They are often considered impractical. Sometimes they get into office.
There are also in all countries destructive or heedless groups. Sometimes heedless, sometimes almost malevolent. Now to the outer world the American history of the past eighty years appears to be an uninterrupted record of economic aggression on the part of the U. S. The U. S. is the home town of the Rockefellers, Guggenheims, Morgans. The world has had on its newspaper stalls the works of Zischka (I suppose he is a Polish author). Anyhow he wrote the War for Oil, the War for Cotton, etc. We have heard of the wars for commodities, and the war for GOLD. We have heard much less of the secret war that the U. S. LOST in 1863, while the boys in blue and the boys in grey were obligingly dying and taking the spot light. Our Civil War was at that time a world record for carnage. And both sides were vanquished. The control of the national credit, control of the national currency, the national purchasing power, passed RIGHT away from the people, and right out of the control of the national, and responsible government.
That's why many of Mr. Welles' foreign auditors will think there is a nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed.
Suddenly a coalition of the three most aggressive powers, economically aggressive powers on earth put forth not an official statement, but a statement by the most authoritative member of the State Department, to the effect that economic aggression is after all a factor in causing wars, and that to obtain a durable peace we must lay off it.
England, Mr. Welles tells us, is aggressive economically. The U. S. has in the past been aggressive, Russia has made up for lost time, and been extremely aggressive quite economically. It does sound to the European almost as if Legs Diamond, or Billy the Kid, or Jesse James had suddenly decided to change his habits. I mean economic aggression has
? been for so long considered the very breath of life of the American system, the bone of its bone, its inner and intimate fiber.
And then again, when a nation's INNER life is so palpably made up of the economic aggression of one class or group against the whole of the rest of the population, it is very difficult for any foreigner, or indeed for anyone not carried away by the political heat of the moment, to see why that particular nation should be entrusted with the latch key of any other.
I will return to this subject.
#87 (May 16, 1943) U. K. (C41) ADMINISTRATION
Along about St Valentines day Fraser, what's his name, Fraser of the Breetisch bard ots consorzium discovered administration. With the voice of a sour bellied mongrel, he told us that Germany couldn't bring in the New Order because Germany hadn't enough trained administrators to keep the Soviet hell out of Europe and stave off the baby-killers and bombers of hospitals, and administer a perfect civil system all over Europe.
Q. E. D.
To take up various points seriatim: 1) the rancid hate of the BBC and the inability of Brits in general to recognize other races as human is no card in the British hands. 2) If ever a nation produced efficient bureaucracy, it has been in Germany. 3) Just as if ever a race could colonize and bring civilization and the benefits thereof into colonized lands, that nation is Italy, and that race is the Latin race of this peninsula.
SO THAT.
? The reasons Germany's allies can not be pried off by the silly guff about uncertain allies rests precisely on the fact that Germany will need and want collaboration from men of good will, which the intelligent allies and several ex enemies recognize I may say that this line of propaganda was already spewed about in America before Eden and the Jews got the war going.
Secondly does Fraser, what's his name the London snarler, think that SOVIET Russia is indicated as the fountain of that perfect bureaucracy which will bring the amenities into all countries overrun by the Muscovites? According to the prayers of the Lamb of Canterbury and the other boot lickers of Britain?
Naturally Fraser being as much a coward as any other servant of Churchill and Jewry will not answer this query. The BBC never answers. And therein lies its damnation, and the damnation of those who tolerate its continuance. Mostly from sheer laziness.
Then again we hear the noble generals English of course Gibraltar the couchant lion, Prudential has the strength of Gibraltar and Gibraltar has the strength of Prudential; i. e. , the Prudential Life Insurance Co. And it is a pity that the noble traditions of the British Army (as distinct from the more obscure patches of English history) should be reduced to doing the dirty work for Moses Sieff and Baruch and the e? migre? Jews and others who have taken England's titular wealth over to Wall Street.
Generals, often notable for absence from battle fields, as the British Air Force has been absent from major engagements, but present when it comes to bombing civilians, with, until recently, little risk--that is Churchill's warfare. The bombing of civilians, for which his obscene name will stink into futurity.
It is not a man's war. No, bombing of hospital ships and of civilian quarters is not a man's war. And not even the lowest liar on the BBC has
? claimed that Germany started it. Plenty of sob stuff, but the facts on that line are too strong. Strong is the word. England is NOT making a glorious end. I know many Englishmen think the only way you CAN delouse is by losing the empire. But I am not sure the method is a wise one. I am not sure that the mere impoverishment and ruin of the middle and upper middle and upper English working class in the interest of Jewry, in the interest of loan capital that can migrate and that HAS migrated, is going to land you in that garden suburb desired by Joad, where he an 'Uxley, Julian not Aldous, can pass their senility, making model houses for an extinct population and arranging the post-bellum world according to the stipulation of the late Sir J. M. Barrie.
I still almost marvel at the lack of any trace of justice, any demand for justice, BILATERAL justice, in the Anglo American propaganda. Any recognition that anyone not in the Jew Roosevelt, Churchill, Maisky ring, should receive ANY justice whatsoever.
References to Japan are even more idiotic than those to Italy and to the main body of Europe. In matters of civic rights, India remains the untouchable, naturally. It will take more than a few Guards' Uniforms and busbys to cover the basic causes of wars. Of this war in particular. No, Mr. Bull, your heart ain't pure, not by a damn sight. And your brain never was clear by profession. But some of the Bulls must by now recognize that their war was an unjust one, that they ought not to have gone to war for the aims that underlay the hostilities. War on France, France that could have by now recovered, as she did after 1870. England, [the] worst foe to her allies and whose worst foes are allied to her now.
It is a choice between Europe and Jewry. That at least is clear and out in the open. And England is on the Jews' side, against the rest of humanity. And in a subservient position at that. It is not a glorious position, or even a glorious road to an exit from empire. And the way of life, the amenities, the Englishness of what gave England her prestige, will not
? be saved for you by Willie Bullitt, or Mr. Lemonface Welles, the silver tea urn, and the rest of it. The powery, the ghetto and Wall Street are NOT at war for the deer park, and the old line of London hatters and haberdashery shops. NOR for the traditions of the guards regiments. NOR for the Polytechnic and Dicken's Xmas Carol, and the garden suburb, the 100 towns of England resurgent. And every day you stick at it is a day FURTHER from freedom from debt. A day deeper in that servitude wherein your overlords had aimed to plunge Europe. How far have you lived your past life at the expense of Oriental cheap labor, of famines in the far Orient? One will never get those statistics.
The Jew is behind you, but you cannot blame it all on the Jew, though you are the Jew's most damned accomplice. Above all you can not blame [it] at all on the small Jew; for he is in most cases as damned a fool and as witless a victim as you are, [he is] the shock troop, the below the starvation line; starvation line, below which there is NO morality. Only the instinct for survival at the cost of whatever baseness, more often heedlessness than planned iniquity; milked by his damned kahal just as you are. Truly, you had great possessions.
And while the BBC was evoking or reconstructing Carlyle, for propaganda purposes they might have included that item from Froude's life of their hero. Carlyle stood opposite the Rothschild great house at Hyde Park Corner, looked at it a little and said: "I do not mean that I want King John back again, but if you ask me which mode of treating these people was nearest to the will of the Almighty about them, to build them palaces like that or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers. "
Naturally Monty Norman and Sieff won't have that sort of thing going over the British air. But think what a free radio might mean to England. Carlyle was a historian. Never till you kill off your Churchills and Edens, will you get your history without bandages.
? #88 (May 18, 1943) U. S. (D3) ECONOMIC OPPRESSION
I am going on with my comment of Sumner Welles' speech at Toledo. As I said last time, I think Mr. Welles' view of Europe is a bit out of date.
I suffer under similar difficulties when I try to focus America. I have protested against the interruption of communications. I wish more Americans had been hard-headed enough to stay over here in Europe and try to speak to America. I wish that during the twenty and more sad years that followed the Versailles Treaty more Americans had had the patience to learn what was going on in Europe, instead of which, even the better class of journalists were told to HOLD down, hold down on even the rather superficial stuff they usually sent you, let alone on the stuff deliberately colored to suit the real or supposed prejudice of the American newspaper readers.
Now Italy was an open book. I have seen violently prejudiced partisans come to Italy and be much disappointed at not finding food for their polemics. Very few impartial witnesses visited these shores, or at any rate very few who made use of the pen and the typewriter. Serious correspondents, in particular one English correspondent of a highly esteemed British paper, now extinct, complained of the way his reports were doctored. He said to me: "I have to watch every sentence. If they find a single phrase that they can twist or cut out and use as a headline, they do it. "
American views of Europe have, I think none of you will deny it--that is, you won't deny it if you stop and think over it--American views of Europe have been influenced, if not colandered thru British newsprint, and British magazine or weekly paper publications. Germany invited the young to come over. Various people went into Germany and tried to report on factors of German life OTHER than those which Mr. Welles brought into his foreground. After the first flush of pure idealism, days of John Read and Linc Steffens, Russia notably ceased to invite careful
? inspection. Even Mr. William Bullitt began to have doubts as to the humanity of Russian state administration.
Now admittin' that I may have old fashioned views, admittin' that I may at this moment be speaking to an America that no longer exists, to a type of American that is almost as extinct as the bison or buffalo, would it occur to any of you that Mr. Welles might be inveighing against a Germany that is no longer the country he visited? He said nothin' about the homestead reforms. There WAS the militarist Germany of the Kaiser, there was the Germany of Mr. Stinnes and Thyssen, but there also IS the Germany of the young fellows who now come down to Rapallo for holidays. God knows they have probably earned 'em. No, no I have NOT spoken of Germany in the past. I tried to speak of the Italy that I live in. I tried to convey a knowledge of specific facts, which if not sufficient to prove my particular estimate of the DIRECTION of Italy were at least components that should have been taken into consideration by those responsible for the U. S. relations with Italy.
In EVERY country there are two or more forces; one dispersive or shiftless and, at least in a happy era, another constructive. ANY constructive or positive idea is now labeled propaganda. There is an enormous prejudice vs. what is called propaganda. Yet almost any valid and serious statement IS propaganda in the best sense of the term, The modern world has been fed narcotic. The deadly propaganda IS precisely the shiftless, is precisely the stuff that has built up the prejudice against ALL order, and all coherence.
It is the easiest propaganda to write, and to distribute. It does not have to preach at all. It says nichivo, it says, what does it matter, it says let's be funny, let's jitterbug. It is hard to be heard against it. Any tendency to discount it, anybody who makes any attempt to withstand it, gets called a blue nose. Liberty is not a right but a duty. Now what do you know about Italians who can read that on a wall? Nothin'.
? A new concept of civics has been built up in Europe. The old mercantilist life went on, violently and unscrupulously. You won't look at the record. You won't count the cost of having your ideas after a TIME lag. Mazzini never got into the American curriculum.
The incidence of this war into a whole series of wars has had very little publicity. I wish to God I could meet Mr. Welles or any other American who wanted to get the thing straight. Mussolini and Hitler are not enemies of the people. You sabotage a constructive effort, the effort both of and for a new generation, by the process of going on with OLD wars. Yes, economic aggression OUGHT to be checked. I don't believe it can be wiped out all at once, but it might be reduced to a minor tension, to a tension compatible with making trade agreements, such as both Germany and Mr. Welles advertise.
BUT there is the twin brother, or perhaps it would be better to say the PAST tense, the aorist, or continuing past tense, of economic aggression. Namely, ECONOMIC OPPRESSION. What about economic oppression?
Economic aggression IS the prelude to economic oppression.
Now what is the U. S. record for economic oppression of weaker nations? What is the U. S. record, or even Mr. Welles' own record in the matter of economic OPPRESSION of, specifically Italy? . Somewhere, and some time, we should go into this matter, if Mr. Welles or anyone else in the U. S. A. wants to clear up the tangle of political ideology, and of geopolitical tensions. Or if Mr. Agar be so inclined. Let them put their cards on the table.
There are other matters of detail: Does the destruction of the world's historic monuments constitute economic aggression? Does the scattering of explosive pens and pencils, to be picked up by three and five year old children, constitute economic aggression? Are these parts of a coherent
? program or do they occur in some world whereto Mr. Welles has been denied access? Are we to suppose that NO one is responsible for the marks of the non-aggressive style in Mr. Welles' cosmos?
#89 (May 22, 1943) U. S. (D4) IN THE WOODSHED
Before paintin' the picture of the nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed, I think we ought to be clear about Mr. Welles' intentions.
He was talkin' of economic aggression at Toledo, Ohio. That was ten days or a fortnight ago, so I suppose the American people have already forgotten it. Our U. S. A. memory is brief, it is fleeting. Hardly a man is now alive who can remember what Sumner said at Toledo. "Bitter experience of two wars, destroyin' so much which is beyond price, and which has taken the patient toil of centuries to create. " Sounds like as if he was talking of utterly irreplaceable historic monuments, which aren't really objects of warfare. NOT essential objects of warfare. They don't sink any merchantmen.
I want Mr. Welles or someone in authority to sort out TWO kinds of acts. Those having to do with this war, and those intended to embitter mankind, and make way for the next general massacre.
Who wanted the conflict, who has extended the conflict, who has embittered the conflict, for fear that the desire for peace might break out? I mean out might become effective too soon for the war makers' comfort.
A young Italian returned from America, knowing the race tracks, and stock exchange and various lines of hard business says to me:
Aw what is the use of your talking. Take a fellow gettin' four hundred dollars a month, and his wife two hundred and fifty, what do
? they want with peace? They might have been gettin' twenty eight dollar between 'em. TELL them, there will be a crisis in ten years' time, and what of it?
That is undoubtedly the hinterland of several districts of the American mind at this moment. Bitter experience of two wars. Well, I remember the old Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, settin' 'round the lobby of the old Mint in Philadelphia. Down there on Chestnut Street with the front of a classic temple. Before it went up to near Columbia Avenue, next to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, to be just one more factory among factories. But nobody talked THEN about the war that the United States LOST.
That is, I tell you, and I go on a tellin' you THAT WAR that the U. S. lost in 1863, and that was followed by the assassination of Lincoln. THAT war is the war that you ought to be winning. Right now.
NOT after, not next to, not waitin' till this war has destroyed the best mosaics in Europe, and shot up a few hundred more or ten thousand more school children, for the [sake] of getting' a bonus. That was the war FOR economic aggression, the war conducin' to economic oppression. And it got very little publicity, or rather it has had waning and paling publicity. Calhoun said something about it. Lincoln knew that it was in process. He said something about the internal enemy.
Now I think the U. S. has been hooked into sabotaging the clean forces of Europe, just as the North was hooked into hostilities against the States that stood out for state rights. I think Mr. Welles himself has been hooked by propaganda. God knows he had a chance to see things in Europe that perhaps I had not. I mean he had high and official contacts, but he didn't set 'round for so long. He came the last time, on a mission. He learned, I mean he must have learned a number of things about England, that were not confided to me, for example. And yet, I don't think he has the full picture. I never much thought, until his speech at
? Toledo, that he was over here to get the full picture. The German capitalists whom he was a cursin' seem to me to be the very people who went OUT of power in Germany. I mean I think that part of his speech is out of date.
If you are trying to be fair, whatever facts you can heap up, I mean facts not mere rumors, to support Mr. Welles' thesis, you got to, I mean you should if you aim at justice, you should take count of another set of facts which I see as standing to total opposition to those Mr. Welles drug into his foreground.
Every social amelioration, every clause of the homestead laws in Germany, every act in Italy put thru [with] the intention of getting a better life for the mass of the people, ought to be sacred.
I mean that part of the Nazi revolution and of the Fascist revolution. Fascist revolution started it first, every part of that new social order, which is the continuation of the strife for the rights of man, of OUR own four revolutions, ought to be sacred. We ought to defend it, just as we ought to defend habeas corpus, and our right to life, liberty and the rest of it. No real liberty without economic liberty. And NO maintainable liberty that does not recognize that the free man has DUTIES. That was the bed rock of Mazzini's sainthood, or the key to his quite impractical historic opposition.
And when I cite "Liberty is not a right but a duty," as I did the other day to a young undersecretary, he opened up; he had been wondering what sort of an animal he had in front of him. And he said: "Yes, THAT is the real Mussolini. "
It is NO use puttin' up false horizons. War is too serious. If war has a use, it might be that it destroys false horizons. It never destroys ENOUGH false horizons, and in the heat of the conflict other stage sets are rigged up. Meet Europe, meet Mr. Europe. Something has happened
? in Europe since Kruger was considered a Titan. But there is the question of TIME in these things, the question of times.
People in Italy ask WHY Mr. Welles chose that particular date to tell us about non-aggression. I can't look into his inner mind. There is in Europe a distinct memory of Mr. Welles as photographed in a French government office with several French politicians, in front of a MAP. Well now, many Europeans took that map at that TIME as indication of a distinct plan, or at least daydream of . . . eh . . . eh . . . of aggression. Of course Mr. Welles may reply that the map didn't mean, or perhaps that it didn't STOP at . . . economic aggression. We do need a clear terminology. To Europe, at that time, that map looked awfully aggressive.
Would Mr. Welles specify? At the time he said he just hadn't noticed the map, it was just part of French government scenery.
How, Sumner?
#90 (May 23, 1943) U. K. (D6) SOBERLY
The moment is serious, just as serious for you as it is for anyone else. For twenty years you have fought against shadows. And now a real danger affronts you. In fact several enemies confront you. Quite solid dangers. You have been stirred up against a Germany that did not exist. For two decades your press has conducted a campaign of defamation against Italy. The campaign of lies does no good to anyone. You included. One expects you to be a bit up in the bottle. Perhaps it will be easier, or more nearly possible for you to hear in such a moment than when you are in the doldrums.
Then he quite definitely and clearly mentioned the common man's desire to have a house of his own for his own family. That is what we believe national socialism stands for in Germany. It is what Italy stands for. It is quite emphatically what Communist Russia does NOT stand for, and would not stand for by program.
? Mr. Welles has made a distinctly anti-communist and anti-Muscovite statement. And yet Russia is hurled upon Europe with the official consent of the American government and the connivance of England. The past record of these three countries on the issue of economic aggression is not such as to tempt any among their old acquaintance.
Do his own work, and get his own provisions. That is what the Axis is askin' for. There were plenty of Italians down there in Africa working their farms. Houses were improvin'. For twenty years we have seen people gettin' better houses, have seen straw covered shacks being replaced by brick houses, built to hygenic specification, curved edges to floors where floor joins wall, so as not to leave dust space for tuberculosis baccillae. Every man his own vine and fig tree. Mr. Welles ought to have spent more time here in Italy, goin' 'round as I have to Sicily, Apulia, and the Abruzzi. He ought to read Dr. Dietrich on German homesteads. Homesteads you can't lose by mortgage. Mebbe you better MEET Europe.
Now what I believe, war or no war, not waitin' till the war ends, or even putting it second to any military contingency, I believe that every social reform put thru in the Axis countries ought to be DEFENDED. I believe the American people ought to defend those social measures. I will say, as readily as the next man, that a good deal of opposition to the New Deal was due to the worst possible motives. But I have not heard of the New Deal gettin' down to the debt problem. And Mr. Welles' statement that he wants to avoid economic aggression comes as a novelty. I hope he means it. But the idea has not affected Russian policy in the past. It is very hard to see how Mr. Welles expects to believe that Germany wasn't encircled.
As to the "patient toil of centuries," seems like the U. S. was trying to undo as much patient Italian toil as possible. And if he wants bygones to be bygones, he certainly isn't being effective about preventing there being any more bygones.
? Italy was resistin' absolute slavery, had been doin' so ever since that treaty made at Versailles.
#86 (May 15, 1943) U. S. (D2) ECONOMIC AGGRESSION
Mr. Sumner Welles' speech at Toledo was a serious matter. It is a great pity that even the majority of his listeners would have been unable to tell one at the end of it what he had said at the beginning. That is, it was a long and close exposition or argument. At the mercy of even minor misunderstandings. It is a pity that auditors do not more often examine the printed text of such a speech. The efficiency of the communication is further impaired when it falls to translators, for the minor shades fade out of language.
Who among the Toledo auditors now remembers whether Mr. Welles said that the subject "economic aggression" probably was, or whether it ought to be, in the minds of all of us. One Italian word translates next to, and after, I mean that is when a translation is verbally correct at one point, but does not take into account the whole paragraph.
Had I been making a daily or immediate comment I might [have] drawn rash conclusions, or no conclusions whatever. The man reporting on events of the day hasn't time to chew over a text and place it in a general scheme.
Probably few among you thought of correlating the Welles' speech with a talk made a week before by Mr. Agar, speaking from London on the BBC and allegedly connected with the American Embassy.
Had Mr. Welles been ready to make such a speech three years ago, this distressing war might have been quite well avoided.
? Mr. Welles appeared to be renouncing dollar diplomacy. If the U. S. had renounced the more aggressive features of dollar diplomacy a few weeks sooner, a good deal of bloodshed might have been spared us. Mr. Welles also spoke of misapprehensions, of incomplete knowledge, of heedlessness, inconsideration. I am perfectly ready to take Mr. Welles' speech at its face value. If the U. S. has been ill-informed or tardily informed of the conditions of Europe, there is no reason for you to remain VOLUNTARILY in that condition, but it is now extremely hard for the people inside ANY country to get accurate impressions of the state of mind of people inside any other.
It has been for years extremely hard to get news INTO America. I have long held that MORE disinterested observers, American observers, should be let loose on Europe. I mean people whose news and view is not limited by what they can sell to the advertisers of a particular paper or group of papers. Undeniably misunderstandings have arisen, and still arise, and will continue to arise until it is possible for people to talk without heat, and without attempting to read into other men's statement what the speaker or writer never intended to put there.
I mean there is the question of will, the question of good will, of being I; ready to hear what the other man says to you. It is not to be supposed even now that Mr. Welles would listen to me over a table. Or answer what I intended to say during the next five minutes. I have been trying to get news of Europe across the Atlantic for a number of years.
It is today my impression that Mr. Welles was speaking of a Germany which no longer exists. I know that for years the American people were incited against an Italy which was NOT the Italy that I live in.
Before all wars, before any war, there arises a tide of misrepresentation. That sort of thing did NOT begin in this century or the last one. In every country there are groups of people who aim at construction, who reform
? toil more or less consecutively to ameliorate living conditions. They are often considered impractical. Sometimes they get into office.
There are also in all countries destructive or heedless groups. Sometimes heedless, sometimes almost malevolent. Now to the outer world the American history of the past eighty years appears to be an uninterrupted record of economic aggression on the part of the U. S. The U. S. is the home town of the Rockefellers, Guggenheims, Morgans. The world has had on its newspaper stalls the works of Zischka (I suppose he is a Polish author). Anyhow he wrote the War for Oil, the War for Cotton, etc. We have heard of the wars for commodities, and the war for GOLD. We have heard much less of the secret war that the U. S. LOST in 1863, while the boys in blue and the boys in grey were obligingly dying and taking the spot light. Our Civil War was at that time a world record for carnage. And both sides were vanquished. The control of the national credit, control of the national currency, the national purchasing power, passed RIGHT away from the people, and right out of the control of the national, and responsible government.
That's why many of Mr. Welles' foreign auditors will think there is a nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed.
Suddenly a coalition of the three most aggressive powers, economically aggressive powers on earth put forth not an official statement, but a statement by the most authoritative member of the State Department, to the effect that economic aggression is after all a factor in causing wars, and that to obtain a durable peace we must lay off it.
England, Mr. Welles tells us, is aggressive economically. The U. S. has in the past been aggressive, Russia has made up for lost time, and been extremely aggressive quite economically. It does sound to the European almost as if Legs Diamond, or Billy the Kid, or Jesse James had suddenly decided to change his habits. I mean economic aggression has
? been for so long considered the very breath of life of the American system, the bone of its bone, its inner and intimate fiber.
And then again, when a nation's INNER life is so palpably made up of the economic aggression of one class or group against the whole of the rest of the population, it is very difficult for any foreigner, or indeed for anyone not carried away by the political heat of the moment, to see why that particular nation should be entrusted with the latch key of any other.
I will return to this subject.
#87 (May 16, 1943) U. K. (C41) ADMINISTRATION
Along about St Valentines day Fraser, what's his name, Fraser of the Breetisch bard ots consorzium discovered administration. With the voice of a sour bellied mongrel, he told us that Germany couldn't bring in the New Order because Germany hadn't enough trained administrators to keep the Soviet hell out of Europe and stave off the baby-killers and bombers of hospitals, and administer a perfect civil system all over Europe.
Q. E. D.
To take up various points seriatim: 1) the rancid hate of the BBC and the inability of Brits in general to recognize other races as human is no card in the British hands. 2) If ever a nation produced efficient bureaucracy, it has been in Germany. 3) Just as if ever a race could colonize and bring civilization and the benefits thereof into colonized lands, that nation is Italy, and that race is the Latin race of this peninsula.
SO THAT.
? The reasons Germany's allies can not be pried off by the silly guff about uncertain allies rests precisely on the fact that Germany will need and want collaboration from men of good will, which the intelligent allies and several ex enemies recognize I may say that this line of propaganda was already spewed about in America before Eden and the Jews got the war going.
Secondly does Fraser, what's his name the London snarler, think that SOVIET Russia is indicated as the fountain of that perfect bureaucracy which will bring the amenities into all countries overrun by the Muscovites? According to the prayers of the Lamb of Canterbury and the other boot lickers of Britain?
Naturally Fraser being as much a coward as any other servant of Churchill and Jewry will not answer this query. The BBC never answers. And therein lies its damnation, and the damnation of those who tolerate its continuance. Mostly from sheer laziness.
Then again we hear the noble generals English of course Gibraltar the couchant lion, Prudential has the strength of Gibraltar and Gibraltar has the strength of Prudential; i. e. , the Prudential Life Insurance Co. And it is a pity that the noble traditions of the British Army (as distinct from the more obscure patches of English history) should be reduced to doing the dirty work for Moses Sieff and Baruch and the e? migre? Jews and others who have taken England's titular wealth over to Wall Street.
Generals, often notable for absence from battle fields, as the British Air Force has been absent from major engagements, but present when it comes to bombing civilians, with, until recently, little risk--that is Churchill's warfare. The bombing of civilians, for which his obscene name will stink into futurity.
It is not a man's war. No, bombing of hospital ships and of civilian quarters is not a man's war. And not even the lowest liar on the BBC has
? claimed that Germany started it. Plenty of sob stuff, but the facts on that line are too strong. Strong is the word. England is NOT making a glorious end. I know many Englishmen think the only way you CAN delouse is by losing the empire. But I am not sure the method is a wise one. I am not sure that the mere impoverishment and ruin of the middle and upper middle and upper English working class in the interest of Jewry, in the interest of loan capital that can migrate and that HAS migrated, is going to land you in that garden suburb desired by Joad, where he an 'Uxley, Julian not Aldous, can pass their senility, making model houses for an extinct population and arranging the post-bellum world according to the stipulation of the late Sir J. M. Barrie.
I still almost marvel at the lack of any trace of justice, any demand for justice, BILATERAL justice, in the Anglo American propaganda. Any recognition that anyone not in the Jew Roosevelt, Churchill, Maisky ring, should receive ANY justice whatsoever.
References to Japan are even more idiotic than those to Italy and to the main body of Europe. In matters of civic rights, India remains the untouchable, naturally. It will take more than a few Guards' Uniforms and busbys to cover the basic causes of wars. Of this war in particular. No, Mr. Bull, your heart ain't pure, not by a damn sight. And your brain never was clear by profession. But some of the Bulls must by now recognize that their war was an unjust one, that they ought not to have gone to war for the aims that underlay the hostilities. War on France, France that could have by now recovered, as she did after 1870. England, [the] worst foe to her allies and whose worst foes are allied to her now.
It is a choice between Europe and Jewry. That at least is clear and out in the open. And England is on the Jews' side, against the rest of humanity. And in a subservient position at that. It is not a glorious position, or even a glorious road to an exit from empire. And the way of life, the amenities, the Englishness of what gave England her prestige, will not
? be saved for you by Willie Bullitt, or Mr. Lemonface Welles, the silver tea urn, and the rest of it. The powery, the ghetto and Wall Street are NOT at war for the deer park, and the old line of London hatters and haberdashery shops. NOR for the traditions of the guards regiments. NOR for the Polytechnic and Dicken's Xmas Carol, and the garden suburb, the 100 towns of England resurgent. And every day you stick at it is a day FURTHER from freedom from debt. A day deeper in that servitude wherein your overlords had aimed to plunge Europe. How far have you lived your past life at the expense of Oriental cheap labor, of famines in the far Orient? One will never get those statistics.
The Jew is behind you, but you cannot blame it all on the Jew, though you are the Jew's most damned accomplice. Above all you can not blame [it] at all on the small Jew; for he is in most cases as damned a fool and as witless a victim as you are, [he is] the shock troop, the below the starvation line; starvation line, below which there is NO morality. Only the instinct for survival at the cost of whatever baseness, more often heedlessness than planned iniquity; milked by his damned kahal just as you are. Truly, you had great possessions.
And while the BBC was evoking or reconstructing Carlyle, for propaganda purposes they might have included that item from Froude's life of their hero. Carlyle stood opposite the Rothschild great house at Hyde Park Corner, looked at it a little and said: "I do not mean that I want King John back again, but if you ask me which mode of treating these people was nearest to the will of the Almighty about them, to build them palaces like that or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers. "
Naturally Monty Norman and Sieff won't have that sort of thing going over the British air. But think what a free radio might mean to England. Carlyle was a historian. Never till you kill off your Churchills and Edens, will you get your history without bandages.
? #88 (May 18, 1943) U. S. (D3) ECONOMIC OPPRESSION
I am going on with my comment of Sumner Welles' speech at Toledo. As I said last time, I think Mr. Welles' view of Europe is a bit out of date.
I suffer under similar difficulties when I try to focus America. I have protested against the interruption of communications. I wish more Americans had been hard-headed enough to stay over here in Europe and try to speak to America. I wish that during the twenty and more sad years that followed the Versailles Treaty more Americans had had the patience to learn what was going on in Europe, instead of which, even the better class of journalists were told to HOLD down, hold down on even the rather superficial stuff they usually sent you, let alone on the stuff deliberately colored to suit the real or supposed prejudice of the American newspaper readers.
Now Italy was an open book. I have seen violently prejudiced partisans come to Italy and be much disappointed at not finding food for their polemics. Very few impartial witnesses visited these shores, or at any rate very few who made use of the pen and the typewriter. Serious correspondents, in particular one English correspondent of a highly esteemed British paper, now extinct, complained of the way his reports were doctored. He said to me: "I have to watch every sentence. If they find a single phrase that they can twist or cut out and use as a headline, they do it. "
American views of Europe have, I think none of you will deny it--that is, you won't deny it if you stop and think over it--American views of Europe have been influenced, if not colandered thru British newsprint, and British magazine or weekly paper publications. Germany invited the young to come over. Various people went into Germany and tried to report on factors of German life OTHER than those which Mr. Welles brought into his foreground. After the first flush of pure idealism, days of John Read and Linc Steffens, Russia notably ceased to invite careful
? inspection. Even Mr. William Bullitt began to have doubts as to the humanity of Russian state administration.
Now admittin' that I may have old fashioned views, admittin' that I may at this moment be speaking to an America that no longer exists, to a type of American that is almost as extinct as the bison or buffalo, would it occur to any of you that Mr. Welles might be inveighing against a Germany that is no longer the country he visited? He said nothin' about the homestead reforms. There WAS the militarist Germany of the Kaiser, there was the Germany of Mr. Stinnes and Thyssen, but there also IS the Germany of the young fellows who now come down to Rapallo for holidays. God knows they have probably earned 'em. No, no I have NOT spoken of Germany in the past. I tried to speak of the Italy that I live in. I tried to convey a knowledge of specific facts, which if not sufficient to prove my particular estimate of the DIRECTION of Italy were at least components that should have been taken into consideration by those responsible for the U. S. relations with Italy.
In EVERY country there are two or more forces; one dispersive or shiftless and, at least in a happy era, another constructive. ANY constructive or positive idea is now labeled propaganda. There is an enormous prejudice vs. what is called propaganda. Yet almost any valid and serious statement IS propaganda in the best sense of the term, The modern world has been fed narcotic. The deadly propaganda IS precisely the shiftless, is precisely the stuff that has built up the prejudice against ALL order, and all coherence.
It is the easiest propaganda to write, and to distribute. It does not have to preach at all. It says nichivo, it says, what does it matter, it says let's be funny, let's jitterbug. It is hard to be heard against it. Any tendency to discount it, anybody who makes any attempt to withstand it, gets called a blue nose. Liberty is not a right but a duty. Now what do you know about Italians who can read that on a wall? Nothin'.
? A new concept of civics has been built up in Europe. The old mercantilist life went on, violently and unscrupulously. You won't look at the record. You won't count the cost of having your ideas after a TIME lag. Mazzini never got into the American curriculum.
The incidence of this war into a whole series of wars has had very little publicity. I wish to God I could meet Mr. Welles or any other American who wanted to get the thing straight. Mussolini and Hitler are not enemies of the people. You sabotage a constructive effort, the effort both of and for a new generation, by the process of going on with OLD wars. Yes, economic aggression OUGHT to be checked. I don't believe it can be wiped out all at once, but it might be reduced to a minor tension, to a tension compatible with making trade agreements, such as both Germany and Mr. Welles advertise.
BUT there is the twin brother, or perhaps it would be better to say the PAST tense, the aorist, or continuing past tense, of economic aggression. Namely, ECONOMIC OPPRESSION. What about economic oppression?
Economic aggression IS the prelude to economic oppression.
Now what is the U. S. record for economic oppression of weaker nations? What is the U. S. record, or even Mr. Welles' own record in the matter of economic OPPRESSION of, specifically Italy? . Somewhere, and some time, we should go into this matter, if Mr. Welles or anyone else in the U. S. A. wants to clear up the tangle of political ideology, and of geopolitical tensions. Or if Mr. Agar be so inclined. Let them put their cards on the table.
There are other matters of detail: Does the destruction of the world's historic monuments constitute economic aggression? Does the scattering of explosive pens and pencils, to be picked up by three and five year old children, constitute economic aggression? Are these parts of a coherent
? program or do they occur in some world whereto Mr. Welles has been denied access? Are we to suppose that NO one is responsible for the marks of the non-aggressive style in Mr. Welles' cosmos?
#89 (May 22, 1943) U. S. (D4) IN THE WOODSHED
Before paintin' the picture of the nigger in Mr. Welles' woodshed, I think we ought to be clear about Mr. Welles' intentions.
He was talkin' of economic aggression at Toledo, Ohio. That was ten days or a fortnight ago, so I suppose the American people have already forgotten it. Our U. S. A. memory is brief, it is fleeting. Hardly a man is now alive who can remember what Sumner said at Toledo. "Bitter experience of two wars, destroyin' so much which is beyond price, and which has taken the patient toil of centuries to create. " Sounds like as if he was talking of utterly irreplaceable historic monuments, which aren't really objects of warfare. NOT essential objects of warfare. They don't sink any merchantmen.
I want Mr. Welles or someone in authority to sort out TWO kinds of acts. Those having to do with this war, and those intended to embitter mankind, and make way for the next general massacre.
Who wanted the conflict, who has extended the conflict, who has embittered the conflict, for fear that the desire for peace might break out? I mean out might become effective too soon for the war makers' comfort.
A young Italian returned from America, knowing the race tracks, and stock exchange and various lines of hard business says to me:
Aw what is the use of your talking. Take a fellow gettin' four hundred dollars a month, and his wife two hundred and fifty, what do
? they want with peace? They might have been gettin' twenty eight dollar between 'em. TELL them, there will be a crisis in ten years' time, and what of it?
That is undoubtedly the hinterland of several districts of the American mind at this moment. Bitter experience of two wars. Well, I remember the old Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, settin' 'round the lobby of the old Mint in Philadelphia. Down there on Chestnut Street with the front of a classic temple. Before it went up to near Columbia Avenue, next to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, to be just one more factory among factories. But nobody talked THEN about the war that the United States LOST.
That is, I tell you, and I go on a tellin' you THAT WAR that the U. S. lost in 1863, and that was followed by the assassination of Lincoln. THAT war is the war that you ought to be winning. Right now.
NOT after, not next to, not waitin' till this war has destroyed the best mosaics in Europe, and shot up a few hundred more or ten thousand more school children, for the [sake] of getting' a bonus. That was the war FOR economic aggression, the war conducin' to economic oppression. And it got very little publicity, or rather it has had waning and paling publicity. Calhoun said something about it. Lincoln knew that it was in process. He said something about the internal enemy.
Now I think the U. S. has been hooked into sabotaging the clean forces of Europe, just as the North was hooked into hostilities against the States that stood out for state rights. I think Mr. Welles himself has been hooked by propaganda. God knows he had a chance to see things in Europe that perhaps I had not. I mean he had high and official contacts, but he didn't set 'round for so long. He came the last time, on a mission. He learned, I mean he must have learned a number of things about England, that were not confided to me, for example. And yet, I don't think he has the full picture. I never much thought, until his speech at
? Toledo, that he was over here to get the full picture. The German capitalists whom he was a cursin' seem to me to be the very people who went OUT of power in Germany. I mean I think that part of his speech is out of date.
If you are trying to be fair, whatever facts you can heap up, I mean facts not mere rumors, to support Mr. Welles' thesis, you got to, I mean you should if you aim at justice, you should take count of another set of facts which I see as standing to total opposition to those Mr. Welles drug into his foreground.
Every social amelioration, every clause of the homestead laws in Germany, every act in Italy put thru [with] the intention of getting a better life for the mass of the people, ought to be sacred.
I mean that part of the Nazi revolution and of the Fascist revolution. Fascist revolution started it first, every part of that new social order, which is the continuation of the strife for the rights of man, of OUR own four revolutions, ought to be sacred. We ought to defend it, just as we ought to defend habeas corpus, and our right to life, liberty and the rest of it. No real liberty without economic liberty. And NO maintainable liberty that does not recognize that the free man has DUTIES. That was the bed rock of Mazzini's sainthood, or the key to his quite impractical historic opposition.
And when I cite "Liberty is not a right but a duty," as I did the other day to a young undersecretary, he opened up; he had been wondering what sort of an animal he had in front of him. And he said: "Yes, THAT is the real Mussolini. "
It is NO use puttin' up false horizons. War is too serious. If war has a use, it might be that it destroys false horizons. It never destroys ENOUGH false horizons, and in the heat of the conflict other stage sets are rigged up. Meet Europe, meet Mr. Europe. Something has happened
? in Europe since Kruger was considered a Titan. But there is the question of TIME in these things, the question of times.
People in Italy ask WHY Mr. Welles chose that particular date to tell us about non-aggression. I can't look into his inner mind. There is in Europe a distinct memory of Mr. Welles as photographed in a French government office with several French politicians, in front of a MAP. Well now, many Europeans took that map at that TIME as indication of a distinct plan, or at least daydream of . . . eh . . . eh . . . of aggression. Of course Mr. Welles may reply that the map didn't mean, or perhaps that it didn't STOP at . . . economic aggression. We do need a clear terminology. To Europe, at that time, that map looked awfully aggressive.
Would Mr. Welles specify? At the time he said he just hadn't noticed the map, it was just part of French government scenery.
How, Sumner?
#90 (May 23, 1943) U. K. (D6) SOBERLY
The moment is serious, just as serious for you as it is for anyone else. For twenty years you have fought against shadows. And now a real danger affronts you. In fact several enemies confront you. Quite solid dangers. You have been stirred up against a Germany that did not exist. For two decades your press has conducted a campaign of defamation against Italy. The campaign of lies does no good to anyone. You included. One expects you to be a bit up in the bottle. Perhaps it will be easier, or more nearly possible for you to hear in such a moment than when you are in the doldrums.
