This War On Youth—On A Generation
November 6, 1941
A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me. I don’t mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears. Thus I have learned that Professor I.A. Richards, one of England’s few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.
And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on. Wallace Stevens, J.G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven’t quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.
And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British. And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin’ on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin’ poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel. [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics. I don’t quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.
Well, that’s a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers. We need more communication between the five continents.
And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda. Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.
And that brings me to the question of AGE. Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ? That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.
Back in the other war W.B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.
And in one way or another—lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation—pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won’t be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect. It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers. The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.
Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda. Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear. Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.
HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ? Details of Roosenstein’s “freedom of the seas,” NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.
If Chile don’t, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.
STARVE ’em out. Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?
Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another. Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax. First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.
RATIONING!
In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance. Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year. Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.
The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia. Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore. From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents. AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.
Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ? Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937. In 1937 there was NO necessity of War. Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable. There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war. Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.
Don’t say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution. That is a fairly conservative statement. He has NEVER been neutral. But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ? What is their business ? What is their civic record ? What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?
Have any of ’em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ? Which is basic in all economics.
Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.
The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.
If you start a ten years war ? Yes, IF you start a ten years war. None of these old swine will be there at the end of it. It won’t be their world, it may be your ruin.
As to RUIN. What about Petrograd ? No military purpose in its destruction.
Laval saved Paris. Churchill would have had ’em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France. What causes that ? Criminality ? Imbecility ? Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind’s eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.
Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.
Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill. Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.
Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution. Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right. The remedy did NOT work. AND the revolution was betrayed. Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed. It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.
A lot of ’em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses. The fools got control. Now YOU are NOT communists. The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead. The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage. The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.
You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever. You don’t even look at what is done by your governments. Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy. Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business. Very few analyze that want or carry their thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.
Our system was O.K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc. The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn’t stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.
First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity
Amateur move.
COHABITATION with other men. POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city. Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.
Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed.
Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.
AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth. I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers
What causes that ? Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it
Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair. We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas. For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms. We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.
We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it
Why do we NOT ?
Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?
For whom ?
It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.
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