Violence
June 15, 1942
I have been looking over a careful study of America by a careful writer, it is not an edition deluxe and the photo reproductions are not pretty. Some of them deal with gangsters, and gangsters’ ends. There are also a few Negroes suspended from trees, without apparently due trial by law.
There are also photos of Mexican pyramids. The traveler was quite impartial, he recorded whatever he saw, or the parts that aroused his interest.
The book leads me to reflections on violence. American lynch law had its origins in the Jewish ruin of the American South. It is very hard to explain lynch law to Europeans.
The Ku Klux once had a reason. Today the survival of lynch law appears, at least from Europe, to be a sheer manifestation of COWARDICE. It is an expression of course of brutality. But the European sees nothing distinguished in a mob of a thousand men, chasing one man. It does not find lynch law heroic.
Neither does he find British treatment of Italian prisoners a convincing proof of British honesty or civility or of military capacity. All that will in time go into history.
What I am trying to work out in my head is WHY American violence always takes such a monotonous form. Perhaps Clemenceau found the answer in what he alleged to be the American incapacity for ideas.
You would think with all that anarchy and violence and contempt for everything, that political violence might be possible in America, yet it apparently is not.
I am asking, I don’t know the answer, does anyone in the audience, in visible audience, know the answer? You lynch the Negro, you glory in the manhunt, but you are incapable of political violence. But the degraded Finkelstein, coward and accomplice of murderers, accomplice of the men responsible for the labor conditions on the Stalin canal, put such utter swine in an official position, and Americans at once become little Lord Fauntleroy.
The British poisoners have become sacred persons. The 5,000 members of a wholly corrupt secret government get diplomatic passports and all is suave and serene. Perhaps some of our college psychologists will explain it.
The American has the head, evidently of a chicken, he is incapable of political revery.
The existence of a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE government does not worry him. It has been there at least since 1863 and he takes it as a matter of course. It gets worse daily and hourly.
All the means of intercommunication pass into the hands of the secret and largely Semitic control; and the American dreams of Thoreau and says, “who am I to interfere in such muchness?”
The Stalin Canal is a matter of psychological interest. The British treatment of Italian prisoners is a matter of pathological interest. But unfortunately I arrive at these points after the fact. The historian’s job is not soothing. One would rather have used preventive measures. I, quite honestly, don’t see what more I could have done to prevent this unholy shindy. I have tried, I think fairly, to diminish my personal ignorance. I have only two eyes, and not very good for readin’.
No one can accuse me of not trying to communicate what I knew, what I have known, during the past 20 years, often with tactless insistency, often when I might have gained official approval by not sayin’ it quite so soon. History shows us certain recurrin’ phenomena. Goin’ back to Philippe le Beau or before that in Europe, going back to the days of King Wen, and before that.
I have done what I could to give some of these facts—what seemed to me significant facts—some publicity, as far as was in my means.
As to Churchill betrayin’ England and the people of England, I don’t know how far the boosy old hog knows what he is doing. I should lay a bet, and quite heavy, that Mr. Churchill was picked and put into the place he could do the most dirtiness exactly because he is an obstinate fool. A fool possessing almost unsurpassable cleverness in appealing to what is most utterly damned rotten, brutal, and stupid in the worst type of Englander. Just as I think other idiots and pathological specimens are often picked for a set job of wreckin’. I don’t want to descend into vague general statements. When I was in England in November ‘38 a good soldier told me: We will lose India, we will lose all our Eastern possessions. Meanin’ IF England goes into war. A Naval man told me how rotten material was bein’ put into British submarines, or at any rate he was tellin’ it to company at a lunch table where I was present. I heard it stated, with perfect truth, that the profit system was so rotten and stupid that no matter WHAT they spent, no matter how many millions sterling was spent, the British industrial system could NOT deliver the goods. That bein’ so I consider that England has suffered treason, low treason, high treason, red, green, pink, purple treason. And that Eddie may have felt it was comin’, at any rate he hadn’t the backbone to stick it [out]. And the traitors were afraid that he might balk at the last moment and refuse to sign on the dotted line, for mobilization.
Well, that is guesswork. I don’t know that the little shrimp was much fit for his job. But as to the betrayal of England, Mr. Churchill has at least some responsibility. But knowing EXACTLY what kind of an obstinate idiot he is, the men who put him into the Premiership have MORE responsibility. Concerning which the English have as yet shown no EFFECTIVE curiosity.
Well, you are their allies, and the allies of the Stalin canalites. Now what causes that? Press lies in part are responsible. Who HIRED the press lies? Are you, NONE of you, even amateur sleuths? Are all your Ellery Queens and Van Dines on cheap fiction paper? Is there NO Yankee curiosity left? Is New England (according to birth statistics) to be populated only by bohunks at the end of the next 60 years?
Razza, race? Is the ruck end of the old colonial stock so hog stupid, so sterile, so stubborn that NONE of ’em have the sense to raise the race issue? That none of ’em have an even polite parlor interest in enquirin’ even the ouija board or the whist table whether the American colonial race shall survive?
Kipling said it: he said the Americans obligingly slaughtered each other during the Civil War, so that the Czechoslovaks could inherit Boston Common. Well, what causes that?
Is it too late to inquire, is inquiry become impolite and unYankee? And what races coalesce or amalgamate? What races can dwell together without constantly inciting other races to start fraternal slaughter, and civil assassination?
The Welsh didn’t spend 800 years trying to get English and Scotch to murder each other. The Irish refused to forget their race for hundreds of years, but they weren’t continually fomenting internal warfare in England, no third race was at the bottom of even the Wars of the Roses. English, Scotch, Irish and few minorities made the American colonies. Germans, and Italians came in without causing civil slaughter. If the American intelligentzia ever THOUGHT about anything, these facts would enter the mental range.
[The] point I took up the other night might do with an emphasis. Also my curiosity; WHY does the intelligent American, the bright lad who CAN write, but doesn’t, why does such a man take it as a matter of course that to earn his living he has to hide his intelligence and work for some blob-headed vulgarian SLOB?
Whence comes this superstition that the worst pays and the better doesn’t and that the BEST is impossible; that America has NO place at all for the best, despite the American instinct [of] knowin’ the best, and insistin’ on having it, the minute they are in position to get it? No other race on earth [is] so almost fanatical on wantin’ maximum, up to what they know. And then the refinement, the flair in some of these Americans who get over to Europe. Of course they may be exceptions, but I have known cases, I don’t mean persons of genius, but people of moderate mental energy, and with that funny little flair for the best. How do you figure along with this, the acceptance of being bossed by pigheads, by almost inhuman objects; the equivalents of Litvinovs and Maiskys at the head of big industry, big radio corporations, the [whores?] of the Hollywood ghetto? What is there in the ruck end of the American era that makes Americans stand it?
Have they all been bred down into halfbreed and quarterbreeds? I ask you, I don’t quite make it out. Doth avarice make cowards of them all?
As for their opposite numbers in Britain. They aren’t quite opposite as against Americans working for blob headed kikes on your radio. England has naught quite similar, they have refinement. Perfect Alice in Wonderland, perfectly poisonous, but refined and unconscious. I don’t suppose you take it very seriously either. I have always told you the Atlantic and Nation were festers, spoon fed from the nectar of England.
I daresay you can’t see that. Well, get some of British equivalents, say by New Statesman and Nation. ALICE in Wonderland. G.D.H. Cole. As long as a printin’ press functions in London, those blokes will go on gettin’ 25 dollars an article: doing IMAGINARY geometry. Imaginary futures for the land that never was and never will be. Schizophrenia. Alice in Wonderland, Little Lord Fauntleroy, private worlds, in the gook house sense of these words. Over Hell’s Kitchen. It is perhaps time for young Americans to start reading the classics, Plutarch, or Cicero against Verres.
