Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Pound Ezra Weston Loomis
Title : America, Roosevelt and the causes of the present war
Year : 1944

Link download : Pound_Ezra_Weston_Loomis_-_America_Roosevelt_and_the_causes_of_the_present_war.zip

The Incidence of the War in the Process of History and the Fate of Revolutions. This war was not caused by any caprice on Mussolini’s part, nor on Hitler’s. This war is part of the secular war between usurers and peasants, between the usurocracy and whomever does an honest day’s work with his own brain or hands. I don’t know how many books one may have to read in order to understand this simple sentence, but a writer of history must count more on the selection of facts than on the bulk of exposition. A few pages of a writer like Georg Obst are worth more than the whole of D.R. Dewey’s Financial History, because Obst seeks to make himself clear to the reader, whereas Dewey sought to produce a work useful to the plutocratic bosses. The historical process has been understood at various times, but this understanding on the part of a diligent minority fighting for the public good is again and again thrust down beneath the surface. In 1878 my grandfather said the same things that I’m saying now, but the memory of his efforts has been obliterated. The same applies to the revelations of men like Calhoun, Jackson, and Van Buren. Forty years ago Brooks Adams assembled some very significant facts, but his books were not widely read. He had no vocation for martyrdom, he confessed with irony. There are, perhaps, thirty books a knowledge of which will enable us to understand how the American Revolution has been, and is still being, continued by the Italian Revolution, but none of these thirty books will be found on the bookstalls. It took me seven years to get hold of a set of The Works of John Adams, published in 1850-56 in ten volumes, edited with a Life of the Author by Charles Francis Adams, grandson of the Father of the Nation. Besides, these works are partly incomprehensible to anyone who is not already provided with some knowledge of economic or, more specifically, monetary matters. If you can understand the cause, or causes, of one war, you will understand the cause or causes of several—perhaps of all. But the fundamental causes of war have received little publicity. Schoolbooks do not disclose the inner workings of banks. The mystery of economics has been more jealously guarded than were ever the mysteries of Eleusis. And the Central Bank of Greece was at Delphi. In the nineteenth century the public more or less believed that political economy had been invented by Adam Smith. Regius Professorships were founded to falsify history and teach Whiggery. And even the Tudor monarchs used to talk about “tuning the pulpits.” The cardinal fact of the American Revolution of 1776 was the suppression, in 1750, of the paper-money issue in Pennsylvania and other colonies, but history as taught in the U.S.A. speaks of more picturesque matters, such as the Boston Tea Party. Ethics arise with agriculture. The ethics of the nomad do not go beyond the distinction between my sheep and your sheep. If the study of Aristotle and Demosthenes has not actually been suppressed, it has at least been soft-pedalled for perfectly deliberate and definite reasons. Certain classical authors speak too frankly for the tastes of the Grand Seigneurs of Usury. The terminology of financial operations has already been studied and set forth with uncommon seriousness by Claudius Salmasius (De Modo Usurarum and De Foenore Trapezitico, Lugd. Bat. (Leyden), 1639 and 1640). But even those encyclopaedias that mention his name tend to ignore these two books. What constitutes a sound basis of credit was already known and affirmed at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the founders of the Monte dei Paschi of Siena. It was, and is, the abundance, or the productive capacity, of nature taken together with the responsibility of the whole people. I quote these apparently unconnected facts to indicate that certain high crimes are not due to any negligence on the part of a handful of scholars, and cannot be attributed to the ignorance of the whole of humanity, but that they can only happen on account of the ignorance of the great majority. What the sages understood was recorded, but inscriptions disappear, books decay, while usurocratic publicity floods the public’s mind like a muddy tide, and the same greed, the same iniquities and monopolies rise up again subjecting the world to their foul dominion. ...