A particularly obnoxious American talk-show host recently suggested that the “homeless and bums, including poets” be either jailed or placed in mental asylums, of which more should be built. This got me to thinking. Hadn’t heard about any American poets lately. So inspired, I decided to resurrect one of its greatest. See the end of this article for details.
The poet addressees the very idea of America entering into the war with contempt:
“Talk of America enterin’ war is sheer dirt…It forges and falsifies the WHOLE aim and purpose of the American national foundation. The colonists went to the stern and rock bound to get away from dirt, and start fresh…There has even come up the term “Un-American”…to define ANY man, woman or child who isn’t ready to chuck away and destroy every last vestige of the AMERICAN heritage.”
The poet also warns of the serious consequences of such war to America’s freedom:
“The U.S.A. is NOT formed and organized INTERNALLY to participate in foreign quarrels. It can’t be done without a lot of small dirty meanness to millions of American citizens…STRANGULATION of all communications. You have no secret postal service? Papers get held out, and then starved out if they are not pro-Jew. Soon you will not be able to motor over and talk to your neighbors.”
Try flying lately? The poet goes on to address the issue of the costs of building an empire:
“I also object to the misuse of the American army and navy. I mean in view of a long term policy, It is known, and should be know better, that an empire to be solid, to be a goin’ concern has to be able to stand the expense of policing its trade routes…I see, I repeat, a very considerable likelihood that these methods of grab and extortion and bottleneck will in time irritate other eastern and near-eastern peoples. And that will go into the bill…There is an old motto about the inutility of winning wars militarily when they have already been politically lost. What about wars that are economically lost? (He then goes on to factor in the cost of dealing with) millions and millions of, say, Mohammedans, proud with age-old tradition, thousand and more years of unified doctrine, traditions, customs, and a dislike of Anglo-Saxon disposition…”
America’s great poet also questions the motives of the war, for instance, to “democratize” the target country:
“There is NO freedom without economic freedom. Freedom that does not include freedom from debt is pure bunkum…Whenever Hank or any one of the high Jewsfeld committee pulls that wheeze about freedom, enforced by Jewish world police, centered in Panama or Palestine, ask: does he mean freedom from debt? Freedom from payin’ two dollars OUT of the people’s pocket for every buck spent by the government? Debt is the prelude to slavery…without freedom from DEBT there is NO total freedom….”
In the case of the Islamic world, the use of interest-free banking has cost the world banking establishment many trillions of dollars. And they are not going to stand by while it continues!!! Says the poet of the looming “Islamic threat”:
“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…Wars are made to make debt…Ships are sunk IN ORDER TO HAVE SHIPS SUNK. When ships are sunk, there is a greater demand for new ships…And LOAN CAPITAL, usurer’s capital, money made by a stroke of a banker’s pen is wanted for FINANCING new construction…Arabs are murdered to keep things lively. Cities are destroyed IN ORDER that cities may be destroyed. The frontier means nothing to the financier. The MORE houses fall on BOTH sides of the frontiers, the more loan-capital will be wanted so long as the usocrat system endures, the more loan capital will be required to finance reconstruction. The more simple people are ruined, the more bankruptcies, the more bankrupt concerns can be snapped up cheap by the owners of loan capital.”
I will now reveal the mystery poet. It was Ezra Pound, the American author of the famous “Cantos”, and he did not make the above statements in 2003–he made them in Italy from 1941 through 1943. After the war, Pound was convicted of Treason and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital and subjected to drugging and torture for some 13 years until rescued by the efforts of Robert Frost, another great American poet, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost spoke.
(For the complete text of Pound’s WWII radio broadcasts see: “Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II”, Ed. by Leonard W. Doob, Copyright 1978 by the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, Greenwood Press.)
