- A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free
him.
- - Ezra Pound
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- I have kept repeating one important thought during my
rantings over the past two years. It is this - realizing that the tragic
attacks of September 11, 2001 were conceived, engineered and then covered
up by the powers that be in Washington, D.C. provides us with an open window
through which to analyze the misrepresented behavior of American foreign
policy during the past two centuries.
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- Once we acknowledge the political pathology that has
us in its grip, we have a realistic chance of rehabilitating our insane
society. If we don't, we're about to become fishkill in a permanent red
tide of various poisons.
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- Examining this happy history that has been falsely imbued
in our minds by prejudiced corporate media and brainwashed school curricula
affords a significant opportunity to reclaim our country from the corporate
rapists who have hijacked it in the name of profit. I believe there is
no other way to purge America of its destructive dementia and bring the
true crooks to justice than to deconstruct the patriotic propaganda that
has led us to believe we are a noble nation on the side of truth and beauty.
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- If we could do this, we could confront our past honestly,
and see the devil's smile in the pleasant details of history we have grown
up with.
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- The first hurdle is getting Americans to understand about
9/11. The more intelligent among you know for certain something smells.
Why else would there have been all these unexplained coverups in the name
of national security, and all these unanswered questions about what really
did happen? But once you have mastered the basic questions, you can't help
but see the Arab hijacker fable as a deceptive strategem to justify future
wars and oppression against dark-skinned people from whom we want to steal
precious things.
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- Only then, when you comprehend in your heart the level
of cynicism and betrayal necessary to inflict such a grievous wound upon
your own countrymen, can you begin to visualize what kind of animalistic
society would cloak its policies of constant aggression and mass murder
in the righteous euphemisms of fighting for freedom and democracy against
dreaded evildoers.
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- The whole fable that has now come unraveled in the rapes
and murders of imprisoned Iraqis now provides us a clear chance to see
the true fabric of American behavior, so forgive me if I repeat myself
from other essays and again try to make you realize that these recent,
twisted exhibitions of heartless sadism are not exceptions to the rule
of American behavior, but rather the norm. Wounded Knee. Dresden. My Lai.
Fallujah.
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- It is only through this portal of realization and confession
that we may make America into something that can be truly cherished, rather
than what it is now, which is justifiably condemned by honest human beings
everywhere.
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- In reviewing the history of America's involvement in
foreign wars throughout the 20th century, I observed an uninterrupted series
of false excuses - you know the list: Philippines, Cuba, all of Central
America at one time or other, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Iraq again - used to justify carnage, all of it passed off as defending
freedom and democracy, but beneath the surface all of it constructed to
maintain financial advantage over a certain commodity or a certain geographical
segment of the world. A small percentage of Americans has always known
that these involvements have been about protecting the profit-making potential
of some corporation which has contributed heavily to the man who made the
decision to go shoot up some defenseless, Third World hamlet.
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- Initially, the only two wars that didn't fit into this
pattern of exploitation and invasion were the two big ones, World Wars
I and II. Those, we had been taught in schools, were good wars, in which
America sacrificed many thousands of its own citizens and millions of lives
in other countries to defend "freedom" from evil fascists, nasty
Communists, or inscrutable Shintoists.
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- That always bothered me. I mean, things tend to stay
true to form. Tigers don't change their stripes. How could it be, I thought
awhile back, could the United States have engaged in all these bad wars,
that were predicated upon provable lies, and yet have two good wars in
the middle of the string? I reasoned I must be missing something, and I
was.
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- Bits and pieces began to emerge. Worldwide Judea declared
all-out war against Germany in the mid-30s. Earlier, the Treaty of Versailles,
ramrodded through by President Wilson's Jewish adviser Colonel House, handicapped
Germany with onerous financial entanglements, all but guaranteeing, according
to some historians, the inevitability of another war.
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- And then there was President Roosevelt's apparent foreknowledge
of the strike at Pearl Harbor, and his failure to tell the troops there,
in order to aggravate American public opinion into support for war. And
even the movie "Pearl Harbor" told the tale of how America cut
off Japan's oil supply to stir up trouble in the first place.
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- But the real missing piece came leaping out at me a few
days ago, when somebody sent me a story about the poet Ezra Pound, and
what happened to him during and after World War II. For those who don't
know, Pound - considered by many of those who know to be the greatest poet
of the 20th century - was arrested for treason because of the broadcasts
he made from Italy during the early 1940s that urged the United States
not to get involved in the fighting.
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- The story was Michael Collins Piper's famous 1997 piece
in the Barnes Review (http://www.barnesreview.org/ezrapound.htm).
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- Unfortunately, given the way histories tend to be written
(namely, by the victors), what Pound did and what happened to him because
of that are rather widely known, whereas what he actually said that got
him in so much trouble is not.
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- And what he said turns out to be eerily appropriate for
the horrible developments happening today. The stories you have been taught
about World War II are wrong. Pound spent 13 years in a mental institution
(without a trial) for being right.
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- Consider the way the word "Nazi" has been used
in our language as a synonym for depravity. After a lifetime of use, the
negative connotation is second-nature to us. But Pound didn't see it that
way.
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- He believed that international bankers were on the side
of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, and they were all arrayed against
Germany. He insisted that without the machinations of the banks and their
accomplices in the media, there would have been no war - and no wars ever.
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- Pound saw the American national tradition being perverted
by the aggressive new internationalism, the brainchild of Jews who organized
Soviet Communism, long had control of British banks, and manipulated the
American President Roosevelt.
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- "Sometime the Anglo-Saxon may awaken to the fact
that . . . nations are shoved into wars in order to destroy themselves,
to break up their structure, to destroy their social order, to destroy
their populations. And no more flaming and flagrant case appears in history
than our own American Civil War, said to be an occidental record for size
of armies employed and only surpassed by the more recent triumphs of [the
Warburg banking family:] the wars of 1914 and the present one."
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- Although Pound's broadcasts centered on keeping Americans
out of World War II, the underlying theme of most of his pieces was money.
Free people need to be in control of their money if they are to be actually
free, Pound stressed. On the issues of usury and the control of money and
economy by private special interests, Pound thundered: "There is no
freedom without economic freedom," he said. "Freedom that does
not include freedom from debt is plain bunkum."
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- Pound believed usury was the cause of war throughout
history. "The usury system does no nation . . . any good whatsoever.
It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make no use of nations
in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them
and use the worst as flails against the best. It is the usurer's game to
hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not pretty,
it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit."
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- Pound tried to tell everyone that World War II was not
an isolated event, and in his words we can hear the warnings that come
down to us now in the echoes of Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.
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- "This war did not begin in 1939. It is not a unique
result of the infamous Versailles Treaty. It is impossible to understand
it without knowing at least a few precedent historic events, which mark
the cycle of combat. No man can understand it without knowing at least
a few facts and their chronological sequence."
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- And his words in 1942 ring presciently for the future
of America as the U.S. war machine rumbles around the planet in 2004 and
threatens every nation on earth.
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- "This war is part of the age-old struggle between
the usurer and the rest of mankind: between the usurer and peasant, the
usurer and producer, and finally between the usurer and the merchant, between
usurocracy and the mercantilist system . . .
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- World War II was not an isolated event. It was part of
a deliberate trend spanning centuries, Pound insisted.
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- "The present war," he said, "dates at
least from the founding of the Bank of England at the end of the 17th century,
1694-8. Half a
- century later, the London usurocracy shut down on the
issue of paper money by the Pennsylvania colony, A.D. 1750."
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- According to Pound, it was the money issue (above all)
that united the Allies during the second 20th-century war against Germany:
"Gold. Nothing else uniting the three governments, England, Russia,
United States of America. That is the interest - gold, usury, debt, monopoly,
class interest, and possibly gross indifference and contempt for humanity."
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- The real enemy, said Pound, was international capitalism.
All people everywhere were victims: "They're working day and night,
picking your pockets," he said.
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- Pound said: "Usury has gnawed into England since
the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on earls' estates;
usury against the feudal nobility. Then there were attacks on the common
land, filchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a usury
system, an international usury system, from Cromwell's time, ever increasing."
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- When all was said and done, Pound predicted it would
be the big money interests who would really win the war - not any particular
nation-state - and the foundation for future wars would be set in place:
"The nomadic parasites will shift out of London and into Manhattan.
And this will be presented under a camouflage of national slogans. It will
be represented as an American victory. It will not be an American victory.
The moment is serious. The moment is also confusing. It is confusing because
there are two sets of concurrent phenomena, namely, those connected with
fighting this war, and those which sow seeds for the next one."
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- We are clearly in the same spot today.
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- Pound said one of the major reasons for World War II
was the manipulation of the press, particularly in the United States: "I
naturally mistrust newspaper news from America," he declared. "I
grope in the mass of lies, knowing most of the sources are wholly untrustworthy."
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- And now. Same story, different day. Pound tried to warn
us, more than 60 years ago, but we threw him into an insane asylum for
13 years, the best poet of the 20th century given his reward by the country
he loved for speaking his mind in the land of Freedom of Speech.
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- A harbinger perhaps of the new Homeland Security laws
that ignore all poets and truthtellers and keep us securely on the road
to war for the profits of a precious, pathological few.
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- Now the entire population of the planet is about to be
consigned to a worldwide capitalist insane asylum, in which love and honor
are merely interesting advertising strategies useful in the sale of consumer
goods, and loyalty and patriotism mere fairy tales at contract time, to
be sold by all to the highest bidder seeking to steal parts of the world
from someone else.
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- Now as then, the world's future rests upon those with
ears to hear.
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- John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy
Report," a collection of his Internet essays published by Dandelion
Books and featured on hundreds of websites around the world. For more information
on how to get this book or to financially support his work, go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/.
Or, to read some more of his recent essays for free, go to http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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