1984 Revisited

 

George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed a totalitarian world of the future. According to former MI6 officer John Coleman, Orwell was attached to MI6 and was simply fictionalizing what he knew was to come.

When the actual year 1984 rolled around, the world didn’t look just the way Orwell’s book envisioned; therefore some criticized the book as a failed prophecy. However, events have increasingly vindicated Orwell and silenced his critics. For those who will complain he missed on the year, we point out that (A) the vigilance of freedom-loving people has forced the Establishment to reset its timetable more than once; and (B) if you read Orwell’s novel carefully, it’s not even certain that the year is 1984 – that was simply what the people were told by the government, which controlled all information.

Let’s explore ways 1984 has been fulfilled:

• In 1984, citizens are under constant electronic surveillance by the Thought Police, not only in the city streets, but through their home televisions, which cannot be turned off. To quote the book:

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police . . . .252

Today, through computers connected to the Internet, and through cell phone traffic, the government can keep the bulk of the population under surveillance, in the name of “security” under the Patriot Act. This may even be happening through televisions. Years ago, I thought: “Orwell got it wrong. TVs receive, but they don’t transmit!” Certainly the TVs of the 1950s didn’t transmit, but with the enforced upgrading to digital television, it is increasingly apparent that televisions will probably transmit soon, if they are not doing so already. See, for example, “Is Your TV Spying on You?” at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427405/is-your-tv-spying-on-you/. Orwell was well ahead of the game.

• In 1984, all people of the world fall under three regional governments – Oceania (where the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives), Eurasia and Eastasia. This is reminiscent of the regional approach to world government (European Union, North American Union) now unfolding.

• Just as we have described, power is in a pyramidal structure. At the top of the pyramid is an Antichrist-like figure, Big Brother.

At the apex of the pyramid is Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.253• Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where newspapers, periodicals, books, and other literature forms are continuously changed according to the government’s wishes. For example, if the Times reported Big Brother had made a speech predicting something, which later did not happen, the Times would be subsequently corrected so that it appeared Big Brother had made the correct prediction.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.254While current society has not advanced to this extreme, history has been altered, changing the true nature and records of wars, revolutions, the United Nations, trade treaties, the Federal Reserve, and even the effectiveness of vaccines.

Furthermore, electronic data is increasingly replacing hard copy information. In the Internet age, newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay in print. Newsweek is no longer published in hard copy. If all information eventually becomes electronic, it will be very easy for bureaucrats to change what back copies of newspapers and magazines say – exactly as in Orwell’s novel.

• Although everything in Oceania is in short supply (except that reserved for the elite “Inner Party” members), the government’s economics ministry is termed “The Ministry of Plenty.” This reminds one of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” borne out of NAFTA, which claims we are enjoying “prosperity” while millions of jobs are slashed and we drown in inflation. In 1984, the Ministry of Plenty spews out falsified statistics:

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture . . . . 255

Even today, the U.S. government fudges statistics to make the realities look brighter. For example, the June 23, 2008 The New American exposed how the government has continuously altered methods of determining the Consumer Price Index, inflation’s main barometer. For example, under Richard Nixon, food and energy costs were simply eliminated from the “core CPI.” Later:

In 1983, the Reagan administration decided that rising real estate costs were causing the CPI to be overstated, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) substituted an “Owner Equivalent” measurement, basing housing costs on what homeowners might get if they were renting their houses. Homes were labeled an investment, and the cost of buying a home (like other investments) was no longer included in the CPI.

The Bush, Sr., Clinton, and Bush, Jr. presidencies each further modified how CPI is determined, each change serving to lower it. The end result of all these tweaks is that the U.S. now reports an annual inflation rate of some two percent, whereas true inflation is closer to ten percent. This enables the government to cheat senior citizens out of their Social Security, making payment increases based on the distorted CPI, rather than the actual rising costs the elderly face.

• In the culture of 1984, the truth is reversed. Two of the government’s main slogans are “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” Today, many of yesterday’s truisms have also been reversed. For example, homosexuality, once understood as perverted, is now construed as “normal”; abortion, previously a crime, is today a “right”; advocates of traditional family values, once mainstream, are now “extremists.”

• 1984 says:

It was always at night – the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.256

Many film fans are familiar with the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller The Net, about a woman who no longer “exists” after her identity is destroyed by the cyber-manipulations of the movie’s villains. And today, many have been victims of real-world identify theft. Like money and information, the more your identity becomes electronic, the more it becomes erasable. Orwell warns us that someday identity loss may become a function of government.

• We have mentioned that the Establishment has created much of the “popular” music and literature via the Tavistock Institute. In 1984, Winston hears a woman singing a song as she hangs clothes on a line:

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless songs published for the benefit of the proles [the poor] by a sub-section of the Music Department [at the Ministry of Truth].257

• Winston’s secret lover, Julia, also works in the Ministry of Truth, where she had

been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girl’s School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.258• Oceania was continually at war, the wars never being actually won (sound familiar, Americans?). Bombs would sometimes drop on London (where Winston lived), rousing the people to patriotism. But the bombs “were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself.” 259 Shades of 9-11?

• The war ministry (called the Ministry of Peace) was working on means of “producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves.” 260• Oceania had a language called Newspeak. It restricted vocabulary to very few words. Each successive Newspeak dictionary deleted more words. The eventual result was to eliminate ideas unacceptable to the state, since words for those ideas no longer existed. Orwell pointed out that ultimately an older document, such as the American Declaration of Independence, would become unreadable gibberish. Is this unlike today, when “dumbing down” has left American public school students less and less able to read books of the past?

• In the novel, Winston is exposed as a thought criminal and imprisoned by the Ministry of Love (the secret police). In view of the concentration camps FEMA is now reportedly preparing, certain aspects of Winston’s torture are worth mentioning.

The following exchange occurs between Winston and his torturer, O’Brien:

[O’Brien:]“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?”

O’Brien continues:

“You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

After many tortures, Winston still retains a shred of independent thinking. To finish breaking him, the Thought Police bring him to the place every prisoner dreads – Room 101. Room 101 is different for every person. It contains their greatest horror. In Winston’s case, he has a primal fear of rats. His head is placed in a two-compartment cage. The furthest compartment is filled with hungry sewer rats. If the connecting door dropped, the rats would devour Winston’s face. At this point, Winston completely loses it – he is broken.

How did the Thought Police know Winston’s darkest fear was rats? Because they had monitored his conversations. Likewise, the government today could know a person’s greatest fear, by simply monitoring his emails and phone calls. Compiling a profile of nearly every person would be easy.

At the book’s end, the Thought Police have turned Winston free – because he no longer constitutes any threat. He believes every bit of propaganda coming from the telescreen. He gazes at Big Brother’s image. And the book closes with these words: “He loved Big Brother.” If I may freely translate, he worshiped the Antichrist.

James Perloff

Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: ...

Passions come like a smallpox and disfigure this original beauty

Selected thoughts of Joseph Joubert (from Paul Auster book)

"1783(?)
Do you want to know how thought functions, to know its effects? Read the poets. Do you want to know about morality, about politics? Read the poets. What pleases you in them, deepen: it is the truth.

In order to write perfectly, one must write and think in the same way a perfect man would write and think at the moment when all the faculties of his being were in perfect harmony. This situation would be possible in some state of soul in which all the passions were developed in all their force and to their full extent and combined in perfect equilibrium.

What makes the waters consoling is their movement and their limpidity . . . .

When a nation gives birth to an individual capable of producing a great thought, another is born who is capable of understanding and admiring it.

If I die and leave several scattered thoughts on important things, I beg in the name of humanity that those who see what has been left suppress nothing that seems at odds with accepted ideas. During my life I loved only the truth. I feel I have seen it in many great things. Perhaps one of these [words?] that I have dashed off in haste . . .

1784
If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation.

1785
I imitate the dove, and often I throw a blade of grass to the drowning ant.

1786
If there is one sad thing in the world, it is the poplar on the mountains . . . .

Every sound in music must have an echo; every figure must have a sky in painting; and we who sing with thoughts and paint with words, every sentence and each word in our writings must also have its horizon and its echo.

Thoughts form in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.

1787
A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

Sad harvests . . .

The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work, but that no truth be abused.

1789
It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.
Extension is the body of God, as Newton would readily say.

Mixture of dry and wet. Water swells before boiling.

1791
Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?

A winter without cold and without fire.

The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.

. . . where the accusers are almost always the guilty ones.

The reading of Plato is like mountain air. It does not nourish, but it sharpens our faculties and gives us a taste for fine food.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

In these times of trouble, one commits and suffers great evil.

We are in the world as words are in a book. Each generation is like a line, a phrase.

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.

1793
Wisdom is the strength of the weak.

His ink has the colors of the rainbow.

Let heaven forgive the wicked, after they have been punished.

In order to live, we need little life. In order to love, we need much.

It is necessary that something be sacred.

The good is worth more than the best.

What makes civil wars more murderous than other wars is that we can more easily accept having a stranger for an enemy than a neighbor; we do not want to keep the possibility of vengeance so near.

1794
Here is the desert. In this silence everything speaks to me: and in your noise everything falls silent.

***My son was born during the night of the 8th and 9th, at two and quarter hours past midnight.
That he one day remember the pains of his mother!

Big words. Claim too much attention.

All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.

1795
These coups d’etat are necessary, you tell me. I answer you, what is sinister and criminal is never necessary at any time.

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

1796
The ancients knew about anatomy only through war. It was on the battlefields that they learned all they knew about it.

Passions come like a smallpox and disfigure this original beauty.

He must confess his darkness.

Give me a morality that equally suits the healthy and the sick, men and women, children, adults, and old people.

Everything that cannot grow diminishes, even the qualities that are passed on. Is this true?

The first part and last part of human life are what is best about it, or at least what is most respectable. The one is the age of innocence, the other is the age of reason. You must write for these two ages and banish from your mind and your books that which does not suit one or the other.

I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.

… His necessity invincibly proves his existence.

Illusion is in sensations. Error is in judgments. We can know truth and at the same time take pleasure in illusion.

One loves to say what he knows, and the other to say what he thinks.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The imagination is the eye of the soul.

There are truths that cannot be apprehended in conversation.

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed. All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

Plato. He is an author whose ideas cannot be understood until they have become our own.

Take us back to the time when wine was invented . . .

The penchant for destruction is one of the ways used for conserving the world.

When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned.

1797
In order to be known, he would have to make us immortal and give us another life.

To compensate absence with memory.

A flower that cannot bloom, a bud that cannot open.

To seek wisdom rather than truth. It is more within our grasp.

Lovers. Whoever does not have their weaknesses cannot have their strenghts.

Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.

We do not write our books in advance, we do them as we write them. What is best about our works is hidden by scaffoldings: our texts are filled with what must be kept and what must be left behind.

In metaphysics, the art of writing consists of making sensible and palpable what is abstract. To make abstract what is palpable is its vice and fault. It is the fault of those we have so mistakenly called metaphysicians in this century.

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.

Psalms. Read them with the intention of praying and you will find them beautiful. Eh! Doesn’t every reading demand a readiness of mind that is special and appropriate to it?

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

God made life to be lived (the world to be inhabited) and not to be known.

The thoughts about which we can say: “There is rest in this thought.” This image is encouraging.

The dying inherit the dead.

All these philosophers are no more than surgeons.

Resignation is a hundred times easier than courage, for it has a motive outside of us and courage does not. If both diminish evil, let us the one that diminishes it the most. (Outside us, that is to say beyond our will.)

Remember to let your ink grow ripe.

Around every flame there must be a void, so there can be light. Without space, no light.

1798
The sign then makes us forget the thing signified.

What good is modesty? – It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

Beauties that leave nothing to the imagination.

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.

Stars more beautiful to the eye than to the telescope that robs them of their illusions.

In the same way that man was made in the image of God, the earth was made in the image of heaven.

. . . Pleasure of being seen from afar.

A century in which the body has become

subtle, in which the mind has become coarse.

Among the trhee extensions, we must include time, space, and silence. Space is in time, silence is in space.

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

Too much talk (they say). Nota bene: too much writing.

It is impossible to love the same person twice.

1799
Like Daedalus, I am forging myself wings. I construct them little by little, adding one feather each day.

Illusion or play. Everything agreeable is in them.

When you want transparency, the finite, the smooth and the beautiful, you must polish for a long time.

Lions, bulls; images of strength are everywhere, whereas images of wisdom are nowhere.

We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this we must make many erasures.

Dreams of love. Those of ambition. The dreams of piety.

Arrival of Bonaparte.

Old men, when neglected, have no more wisdom.

1800
Each man thinks not what he has been told but what he understands.

The word, in fact, is disembodied thought.

Antiquity. I prefer ruins to reconstructions.

It would be difficult to be scorned and to live virtuously. We have need of support.

All ardent people have something mad about them, and all cold people have something stupid.

Analysis: in morality, in cooking.

Descartes’s noises. His physics has too much commotion. Newton’s offers a more silent world, but too naked, too lifeless.

He who has the abstract idea of a thing understands it; but only he who can make it understood is able to make it imaginable. Yes.

There are truths that instruct, perhaps, but they do not illuminate. In this class are all the truths of reasoning.

The old age of men resembles their childhood. Without exception.

We are worth more when someone looks at us. And, because of this, an eye is always watching us.

Let us remember this. – What? – That it is not the sun in the sky that we see, but the sun at the back of our retina.

To know: it is to see inside oneself.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Leibnitz and Spinoza. – The realm of abstractions. The first offers its perfection, the second nothing but its flaws.

To analyze, to deconstruct. – What they so emphatically call analysis is what we would call division when speaking simply.

If prayer does not change our destiny, it changes our feelings – which is no less useful.

How admiration contributes to the peace of the human mind and is necessary to it.

Every house: temple, empire, school.

In our writings thought seems to move like a man who is walking straight ahead. On the other hand, in the writings of the ancients, thought seems to move like a bird that glides and advances by turning round and round.

Everything seems naked to eyes that have never seen without veils. Nothing can please them for very long.

1801

History, like perspective, has need of distance.

Close your eyes and you will see.

Vision is made by the joining of two lights. – Add. March 19: And if objects shine toward us, we shine toward objects.

Christianity. We cannot speak against it without anger, nor speak for it without love.

It is the bell that moves, but you who ring. It is the sun that shines, but you who see. The nourishment is in the meat, but the taste is in you. Fire gives or creates warmth, but it is you who feel it.
Harmony is in the one who listens: yes, as effect; but not as cause.

I like Leibnitz’s expression the soul carries the body. And observe that everywhere and in everything, what is subtle carries what is compact; and what is light holds in suspension all that is heavy. Admit it, at least in the sense of – and as the most beautiful conception of the human mind.

This stone in my hand, it demands glory.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.

Too seek the truth. But, as you are seeking and as you are waiting, what will you do, what will you think, what will you practice, what rules must you follow?

The spectacle has changed, but our eyes are the same.

Everything beautiful is indeterminate.

Beautiful works. Genius begins them, but labor alone finishes them.

Of the unfortunate need to please oneself.

Newton. How ripe his apple was.

It seems more difficult to me to be a modern than to be an ancient.

1802
Floods of passions. It would nevertheless be better to raise the dikes for them.

From this day forward, to give up Locke, and to agree never to read another word he has written.

The only thing Newton invented was the how much.

The things we believe are difficult to conceive of because it is difficult to talk about them.

In fact everything (according to Descartes) happens through figure and movement. That is the fixed point from which his mind proceeded to all its operations, the result of his explanations. That is his doctrine, summed up in a few words. Goodbye, Descartes!

You say that books are soon read, but they are not soon understood. To digest them, etc. To understand a beautiful or great thought perhaps requires the same amount of time it takes to have it, to conceive of it. To penetrate a thought and to produce a thought are almost the same action.
Piety is a cure.

Imagined harmonies. If they are not a physical fact, they are at least a human fact, and because of that, a reality.

If superior intelligence wanted to give an account of human things to the inhabitants of heaven and to give an exact idea of them, he would express himself like Homer.

I pass my life chasing after butterflies – considering the ideas that conform to generally held ideas as good, and the others simply as mine.

That is true, a king without a religion always seems a tyrant.

The revolution chased my mind from the real world by making the world too horrible for me.

It is even easier to be wrong about truth than about beauty.

It seems that Plato has too much and that there is too little in Aristotle. From which, in the first, an abundance carried to superfluity, and in the other a precision or brevity that leads to obscurity.

Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public.

To call everything by its name.

Illusion based on reality, that is the secret of the fine arts – in fact, all of art.

We speak to ourselves in metaphors. We are naturally led to it as a method of better understanding ourselves and of retaining our thoughts more easily – which we then label in a kind of container.
“In a container of light.” Y.

There are only two kinds of beautiful writing, that which has a great fullness of sound, meaning, soul, warmth, and life, and that which has a great transparency.

We have it in our soul, but we hardly ever put into our life what we put into our writings.

In every piece of music, not everything is music, and in every poem not everything is poetry.

The first act of a man who finds God displeasing is to say to himself: I must arrange the world without him.

Imagining is good, provided you do not believe you see what can only be imagined.

Lost spirit. Judges without justice, priests without religion.

Sensibility that comes from the nerves. Opinions have a great influence on it and can led to cruelty. Examples in the revolution.

(At the baths.) Piety defends us from ourselves; modesty defends us from others.

(5 in the morning. Insomnia.) Everything must have its sky. To be put everywhere.

All beautiful words are susceptible to more than one meaning (or signification).

The phrase: “One dies because one has lived.”

Sad science that teaches blind men to speak of light and colors and that persuades them they can even make judgments about these things.

1803
Nothing is more difficult for children than reflection. That is because the last and essential destination of the soul is seeing, is knowing, and not reflecting. Reflection is one of the labors of life, a means of getting somewhere, a path, a passage, and not a center. Everything always tends towards its final destination. To know and be known, these are the two points of rest. This will be the happiness of souls.

. . . but in the end a year comes when you find that you are getting old.

To know how to walk in the night, to have a goal, to reach it in the darkness, the shadows.

Everything is made through images. They enter us through all the other senses, as through the eye. An echo (they say) is an image of the voice. All our affections are produced by images of touching. Our whole body is a mirror.

Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering. “One would like to breathe for him.”

Everything must be precise in it and yet nothing should be too tight.

. . . because, what must be put in the work and what must be left out is infinite.

The thoughts that come to us are worth more than the ones we seek.

To know what one must forbid oneself.

Chateaubriand. We inhabit the same regions but we do not bring back the same curiosities.

What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply.

All nightingales do not sing equally well, nor do all roses smell the same.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes.

It is difficult for me to leave Paris because I must separate myself from my friends; and difficult for me to leave the country because I must separate myself from myself.

The silence of the pen and its advantages. Force builds up in it. Precision must flow out of it. A chatterer fallen quiet. When silence comes from force, it should make itself felt in discourse. What is hasty would be bad upon reflection. – To know how to write – to be capable of not writing.

Everything has its poetry.

To write, not only with few words, but with few thoughts.

Two sorts of truths. I. what must be thought, II: what must be done.

They speak to the ear, I want to speak to the memory.

Attention is sustained (in poetry) by the amusement of the ear. Prose does not have this advantage. Might it have? I try. But I think not.

1804
Then there comes into languages a facility and an overabundance that, if you want to become a great writer, you must oppose with difficulties, with a sure taste, a meditated choice. When you find a torrent, obstacles must be places in it.

Strength in organization and weakness in carrying out the material. Like an automaton whose elasticity would be exquisite if the wood were not too thin or too fragile.
There I am: a flattering self-portrait

To survive one’s passions and not one’s strengths. Happy.

It is beautiful enough to be seen, but not to be dreamed.

God. There are many things that should be left in life and not put into books.

It is a key; what difference if it is golden or iron? It can open things.

When the author speaks to himself instead of speaking to the reader.

These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.

I wanted to bypass words, I disdained them: words have had their revenge – through difficulty, etc.

To the question: is he guilty? must be added another question: is he incorrigible?

The time I once lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering.

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

1805
Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.

For simple light is perhaps still more beautiful than colors.

Glory. Lovelier to desire than to possess.

All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said.

To judge things of taste, we must give ourselves time to taste them.

The soul speaks to itself in parables.

All grace (decor) comes from patience. And, consequently, from some force exerted on itself.

We are afraid of having and showing a small mind and we are not afraid of having and showing a small heart.

One ruins the mind with too much writing. – One rusts it by not writing at all.

One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one’s own ideas and how to come back to them.

In everything mathematical there is something imperishable, because there is nothing living.

A drop of light is worth more than an ocean of darkness: is worth more, I say, be it given or received.

What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

Terrestrial by birth, celestial by origin, only our body is of this world.

1806
I don’t like to write anything down on paper that I would not say to myself.

The important business of man is life, and the important business of life is death.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

Illusions come from heaven and mistakes come from us.

Tacitus. And all those words that are obscure only once.

– in these times when, to express ourselves well, we must speak in a way the others do not.

. . . burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves.

Facility is the enemy of great things.

Undoubtedly, philosophy caused the Revolution. But what caused philosophy? Theological arrogance.

Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth.

There must be several voices together in one voice for it to be beautiful. And several meanings in one word for it to be beautiful.

It is through the flesh that we judge what is hard and what is soft.

I stop when I see no more light; it is impossible for me to write by feeling my way.

– for wine is a wet fire.

1807
. . . all the pleasures it does not bless (religion).

Why in language and in the course of all violent passions there is always something familiar and naive.

Beauty is something animal, the beautiful is something celestial.

Little people have few passions, they hardly have anything but needs.

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

Great minds are those that disguise their limits, that mask their mediocrity.

The first poets or writers made madmen wise. The last seek to make wise men mad.

When the last word is always the one that offers itself first, the work becomes difficult.

Heaven gave strength to my mind only for a time – and this time has passed.

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.

A nail, to hang his thoughts on.

1808
I am like Montaigne: “unsuited to continuous discourse.”

Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.

To be tragic, misfortunes must be rare.

– maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.

To finish! What a word. We finish nothing when we stop, when we say we have come to the end.

What makes us look for a long time is that we do not look where we should or that we look where we should not. But how to look where we should when we do not even know what we are looking for? And this is what always happens when we compose and when we create. Fortunately, by straying in this fashion, we make more than one discovery, we have good encounters, and often are repaid for what we have looked for without finding by what we have found without looking for.

Here I am outside civil things, in the pure region of Art.

Necessity can make a doubtful action innocent, but it cannot make it commendable.

-and the pernicious habit of accepting pleasures without gratitude.

To be the soul of a body, but not the head, that is a noble ambition.

Sloth waiting for inspiration.

The breadth of the mind is attention.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Animals love the people who talk to them.

The republic of ants and the monarchy of bees.

If we exclude the idea of God, it is impossible to have an exact idea of virtue.

Voltaire had the soul of a monkey and the mind of an angel.

Freedom. The freedom to do something well. There is no need of any other kind.
Truths. The truths that teach us to act well and to live well. There is no need of any other kind.

Abuse of words, foundation of ideology.

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them forever.

Tenderness is the repose of passion.

1809
– because the sublime gives a useful pleasure.

Whoever consults the light within himself (it is in everyone) excels at judging the objects this light illuminates.

The ellipsis, favorable to brevity, saves time and space.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

He must not only cultivate his friends, but cultivate his friendships within himself. They must be kept, cared for, watered.

1810
All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy everything.

Let’s go; and follow your mistake.

Anger, which purges resentment.

1812
To let the reader sometimes complete the symmetry between words and to do no more than suggest it.

Ash Wednesday.
The face. After the face, action. Between the two, attitudes. But before everything, the idea.

Having found nothing worth more than emptiness, he leaves space vacant.

When I had the strength, I did not have the patience. I have the patience today and I no longer have the power.

– and to destroy my memory by my presence.

Poetry made with little matter: with leaves, with grains of sand, with air, with nothings, etc.

Of those who have a muse and those who have only their soul.

1813
Silence. – Joys of silence. – Thoughts must be born from the soul and words from silence. – An attentive silence.

In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.

“Leave behind endless hope and vast thoughts,” says the poet. I no longer have vast thoughts.

In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks nothing of himself knows nothing.

There are, following Plato’s idea, souls that not only do not have wings but do not even have feet (for progress or consistency) or hands (for work).

Egregie fallitur. He is wrong, but nobly, intelligently, with grace, with spirit, with wisdom and much beauty.

There is a residue of wisdom (as there is a residue of madness); and in human wisdom this residue purified by old age is perhaps the best thing we have.

A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: “oldmen want to survive.”

People that have overthrown geography ( like winds, storms, and torrents).

I can do something well only slowly and with great effort.
Our moments of light are all moments of happiness.
When it is bright in our mind, the weather is good.

1814
Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.

What leads us astray in morality is an excessive love of pleasure; and what stops us or holds us back in metaphysics is a love of certainty.

More than once I have brought the cup of abundance to my lips; but it is a water that has always escaped me, (Another version: I have often brought to my lips the cup that holds abundance; it is a water that has always escaped me.)

Almost all men prefer danger to fear. Some prefer death to danger and to pain. This is because fear, danger, and pain disturb reason. The horse throws himself into the precipice to escape the spur.

In literature, beauty must not be fabricated.

Let us look for our lights in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.

Fire, ignition, and brightness; the body, its shadow and penumbra; sound, echo, and half-echo: everything has some shadow, some glow or reverberation. (Reflection.)

Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea in any way be treated as a thing.

There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just as there is nothing perfectly round.

Our life is of woven wind.

To speak to God of everything; to dare to question him and to be attentive to what he says about everything. But sometimes we take our own voice for that of God.

Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered.

Of the sincerity of things. To see it. Truth consists of this.

1815
I confess that I am like an aeolian harp – which gives off some pretty sounds but can play no songs.

Too much harmony. Prose can have too much of it; also too much sweetness. And this is a very seductive fault, at first very agreeable, but unbearable and ridiculous over the long term.
Varnish (in style) makes a glaze (for the reader).

Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

You go to truth by way of poetry and I come to poetry by way of truth.

What is pleasing always has something chanced about it.

Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings.

When we find what we have been looking for, we don’t have time to say it. We must die.

All foods are in fact good for someone who is hungry, but not for someone who has no appetite.

Leave dreams of the imagination time to evaporate.

France destroyed by its philosophers.

It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes: it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.

Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing.

Old age and its mask.

When you no longer love what is beautiful, you can no longer write.

1816
Plato. The poetic spirit that gives life to the languors of his dialectic. He is lost in the void; but we can see his wings beating, we can hear their noise. His imitators lack these wings.

1818
You want to talk to someone: first open your ears.

I am an aeolian harp. No wind has passed through me.

Then, God withdrew his forces into himself, and we grew old.

If you want to think well, to write well, to act well, first make a “place” for yourself, a “true place”. Because we lack true places, we put our thoughts outside the true light and our conduct outside order.

1819
Happy is the man who can do only one thing: in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.

Don Quixote going to Tobosa and talking to Sancho as Socrates did to his disciples; and this is not ridiculous and does not even seem out of place.

Because they know all the words, they think they know all the truths.

There are things we can speak of only in writing, that we cannot know except when thinking of writing them down, and that we cannot, however, think of writing except when we know them in advance.

1823
And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: – Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.

Spaces . . . I would almost say . . . imaginary, existence is so much in them, etc.

1824
Nota. – The true – the beautiful = the just – the holy

Source

https://withagreenscarf.wordpress.com/2024/03/31/the-notebooks-of-joseph-joubert-with-an-introduction-by-paul-auster/

Mike Stone - Young Girls Now Must Defend Themselves

When are white men going to protect white girls?

A fourteen-year-old Scottish girl identified as Mayah Sommers was forced to defend herself and her little sister from a migrant rapist last week. When the would-be-rapist refused to leave the girls alone and threatened Mayah's twelve-year-old sister, the protective older sibling pulled out a knife and a hatchet.

The common people of Scotland praised Mayah for her actions and dubbed her the "Young Queen of Scots." Local media and local government took the opposite approach. They painted the migrant man who threatened the two girls as a "victim," and the police arrested the teenage heroine.

It's important to note that this is not an isolated incident. It just happens to be one that was caught on video and beamed across the world.

Non-White migrants threaten, assault, and rape girls every day. You just don't hear about it.

It's no different than black-on-White violence. You hear about seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf being stabbed to death by a black at a high school track meet; little one-year-old Clay Weeks being pummelled and beaten by a black woman at a daycare center, and that couple in Cincinnati that was viciously beaten and almost killed by a mob of blacks.

But you don't hear about the hundreds of other attacks, beatings, carjackings, burglaries, rapes, and murders that blacks commit against Whites every day in the United States.

The same thing is happening in Europe. That fourteen-year-old Mayah was carrying a knife and a hatchet to begin with tells you that she and her sister were routinely harrassed and threatened by migrant rapists.

All of this raises the question: Where are the men?

Well, the men see what's happening, but they refuse to do anything about it.

That's not surprising when you look at how the men of the world responded to the recent virus hoax. They did nothing.

Men who refused to fight during the recent fake pandemic - and by fight I mean refused to wear a face diaper, refused to take the clot shot, and refused to let anyone promoting the clot shot near their children, while simultaneously boycotting every person, place, and organization that helped promote the entire pandemic - are not  going to lift a finger to help defend their women, even when teen and preteen girls are being attacked and raped by foreign invaders.

Crisis reveals character, and the phony pandemic showed us exactly who everyone around us really was. How you acted during "covid" is exactly who you are.

Make no mistake, black-on-White violence, migrant rapes of White girls, and every other form of violence and crime against White people is only going to increase. White people who defend themselves will be arrested - just like young Mayah. White men and White women watching on the sideline will continue to do nothing.  

We can blame the media, the government, the Jews, the Illuminati, and everyone else we can think of, but until we ourselves say, "Enough is enough," and do something about it, nothing is going to change.
----------
Mike Stone is the author of the new book REAL or FAKE: The Donald Trump Assassination Attempt and Teen Boy's Success Book: the Ultimate Self-Help Book for Boys; Everything You Need to Know to Become a Man

Related- Scottish Girl Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker

Just this week an American man visiting Dresden, Germany was stabbed in the face while bravely preventing two migrants from assaulting a pair of women on a tram.  One of the man's attackers, a Syrian refugee, was arrested by police and then immediately released by prosecutors back onto the streets.

https://www.renegadetribune.com/scottish-girl-arrested-for-using-knife-and-axe-to-ward-off-migrant-stalker/

"The systematic and engineered destruction of Europe through "multicultural" invasion is heartbreaking to watch.  It is clear, beyond any doubt, that this program spearheaded by progressive politicians (and fake conservative politicians) is designed to crush the spirits of predominantly white, native born citizens still retaining a sense of national pride and cultural heritage.  That is to say, they have become the targets of a government funded terror campaign to subjugate the west.

Starting around 2014, millions of third world migrants have been allowed to flood into Europe's borders, often encouraged by globalist NGOs, the UN and leftist political leaders within the host countries.  The effects of this decade long campaign have been devastating.

Violent crime has skyrocketed and migrant "grooming gangs" have spread, targeting underage girls for sexual exploitation.  Rape has become a common problem, which local governments have chosen to ignore.

https://henrymakow.com/2025/08/mike-stone---young-girls-now-m.html

Banking System is Responsible for Our Enslavement

 

We already have a digital currency. “Money” is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Occasionally they will produce coupons i.e. currency, to make it all seem real.

Chinese-style social credit is planned. They will control us by controlling our money.

The covid scam and deadly “vaccines” have told us that politicians and cops don’t work for us, but for the central banking cartel that wishes to lock down humanity permanently.

The same applies to the mass media and most professions. Everyone dances to the money tune, and Rothschild is the Pied Piper.

BLOOD POISONING

We suffer from blood poisoning. “Money” is the blood supply of society. This “medium of exchange” circulates like blood in a human body. With it, everyone is sanguine; without it, you have a corpse.

Unfortunately, our feckless ancestors gave control over the money supply to Cabalist Jews and Freemasons who find excuses (wars, scamdemics) to produce it in the form of a debt to themselves.

They profit at both ends. They charge interest on debt they create out of thin air; and their shares in “defence” and pharmaceutical corporations also increase, due to the phoney wars and pandemics they start.

Their goal is to expand their monopoly over money creation into a monopoly over literally everything, (e.g. thought, “wokeness”) inducting humanity into their satanist sex-and-death cult. They weaponized the common cold as a pretext to decimate and enslave humanity.

MONEY IS A MIND GAME

In March 2022, a half dozen US regional banks went bankrupt losing $500 billion in deposits.

It’s all black magic. Money is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Did these depositors lose their money? No. The Fed just created another $500 billion out of thin air. These Satanists finagled the US national credit card and are maxing it out until the USD collapses.

In the last few years, banks have become increasingly active in pushing the globalist agenda. For example, my bank is all for “diversity” — homosexuality and migration. (It’s rare to find a white male teller at a Canadian bank who is not a homosexual.)

Similarly, most corporations sing from the same globalist hymn book.

Banks are all franchises of the Rothschild world central banking system, much like some MacDonald’s stores are independently owned. But banks all depend on the central bank for “money.” That’s why banks and the corporations dependent on them promote bizarre agendas like gender dysfunction, family breakdown, gun control, sodomy, miscegenation and minority status for Caucasians.

WHAT DOES ‘MONEY? LOOK LIKE? (When it’s not currency)

When I write a cheque to the gas company, an armored car does not pull up to my bank, collect the cash from my account and deliver it to the gas company’s bank. All that REALLY happens is some digits change at the two banks.

My bank account is not a little letterbox with cash sitting in it. My account is just a number in their books signifying what they owe me should, God forbid, I decide to withdraw the cash.

When we use our credit cards or when we buy a stock, the only thing that happens is that accounts are adjusted.

We are really banking with the Rothschilds. Our little nest egg is actually their magical “credit,” a slice of the national “debt” owed to them, “money” which they created from nothing and “loaned” to the government. It is a reflection of the government’s ability to repay, although it never will.

The banking system is a vast system of accounts. Money doesn’t actually exist except for a small amount in paper coupons (currency). “Money” is an abstract concept denoting value.

MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE

Money is a medium of exchange. Think of it as electrical current instead of currency. It is basically a virtual credit system that is the lifeblood of every economy.

Who owns this franchise? This system of accounts? Who adds or subtracts credit?

Who decides who gets to play?

A syndicate of mostly cabalist (Masonic) Jewish banking families led by the Rothschilds.

Unfortunately, these Cabalists are Satanists. They are determined to protect and extend this banking monopoly to a monopoly over everything — real wealth, political power, knowledge, media, education, culture, religion, law etc.

They want to own us and our children as well. (We are collateral on the national debt.) This is the essence of Communism and New World Order which is largely in place. The goal is to gradually enslave humanity. When they finally get rid of cash, they can cut off our “credit” at a moment’s notice.

How do they maintain control? They control the corporate cartels who are all dependent on banks. These corporations fund the politicians who follow bankers’ orders.

Many of these politicians are Freemasons. Organized Jewry and Freemasonry are accomplices in the banking racket. In general, complicity in the banking fraud is the price of success today.

Why is it a fraud? Because sovereign governments could “generate their own electricity” interest-and-debt-free. We wouldn’t need to sell our soul and our children’s Birthright.

THE DEEP STATE

The “Deep State” is the secret network dedicated to protecting the fraudulent banking system and advancing its satanic agenda. Most of the players belong to Freemasonry or Organized Jewry. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6, the police and the army are the bankers’ enforcers. Mass surveillance (the NSA etc.) ensures that nobody gets any ideas.

Mankind is doomed unless the central bank is nationalized, “debt” is disowned and money is created debt-and-interest free.

It’s a question of whether mankind will be dedicated to making satanist trillionaires even richer, or lifting everybody up to where they can begin to fulfill their Divine potential.

ILLUMINATI 4 Genocide & War

Henry Makow Ph.D

Flattery - The First Principle of Mind Control

 If a patient does not regard himself as sick he cannot submit to a cure. The arrogant man does not need to see-he already sees almost everything and what he thinks he has yet to learn, he believes "the experts" will one day show him. Who are these "experts"? They are not really doctors of the soul. They do not have the man's interest at heart. They are in fact his worst enemies, his most cunning manipulators who lead him to do their bidding like any slavemaster since Egypt.

Nature Or Gnosis? Divine Creation and Its Counterfeit

A description of Anthony Shaeffer's protagonist in the film The Wicker Man: "…tearing around in dizzying circles trying to solve it, never able to guess the true plot beyond it although the evidence of it lies all around him."

Cinefantastique

"Almost all people of all eras are hypnotics. Their beliefs are induced beliefs. The proper authorities saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and people believed properly."

Charles Fort

"As the mountebank delivered his harangue, the clown would repeatedly poke his head out from behind the curtain, making fun of everything his master said, parodying his patter and twisting the meaning of his words. The mountebank played the perfect straight man, meanwhile. Here he was, trying so hard to hawk his wares, and his own assistant was doing everything possible to undermine sales.

"The merriment was of course intentional. While the clown seemingly encouraged the public not to buy the proffered merchandise, the mountebank knew full well that the bystanders would easily be converted into customers as soon as they forgot that they were, in fact, supposed to be buying. Once the audience had been effectively hypnotized, once its judgment and willpower had been weakened, the real sales pitch could begin…"

J.H. Towsen, Clowns

"Hoodwink: A symbol of the secrecy, silence and darkness in which the mysteries of our art should be preserved from the unhallowed gaze of the profane." Dr. Albert Mackey, 33rd Degree Freemason, The Encyclopedia of Freemasonry

In a study of mind control and psychological warfare, it is not enough to simply review the latest technology of coercion, the most recent gadgetry and techno-junk littering the hardware and supply depots of governments and cults.

Far more dangerous than these appliances is the praxis behind them, the underground current which informs the modern project and this modern era. For life in our modern era is little more than life in an open-air mind control laboratory where a form of human alchemy has emerged to transform the mass of targeted percipients-targeted merely by virtue of their being urban dwellers plugged into the electronic and digital pageantry of the Establishment's system-of-things.

And what sort of creature inhabits the modern domain? Who is the modern man? The puppet-masters say he is the smartest, most advanced individual to ever strut the planet, the most relatively liberated being in history. But Louis-Ferdinand Celine said it well, "What does the modem public want? It wants to go down on its knees before money and before crap!"

The public have been trained to do this by two principle methods: direct "speaking" archetypal messages of pure terror ("psychic driving" as the CIA's Dr. Ewan Cameron termed it), encoded in massively publicized "lone nut" mass murders, and the sinister flattery heaped upon them by their masters in the cult of civilization and progress.

The acid test of a human being's freedom and will to protect the quality of his life, lies in a person's attitude toward his oppressor. What is modem man's attitude toward Wall Street and the bankers, toward Dan Rather and the ignorance-bestowing media and advertising man, toward Lincoln and Truman, FDR and Reagan, George Bush and Johnny Carson, Exxon and Monsanto?

As one writer has observed, "The most amazing thing about the American people is that they are constantly defending their worst betrayers." Who then is the modern man? He is a mindbombed patsy who gets his marching orders from "twilight language" key words sprinkled throughout "his" news and current events. Even as he dances to the tune of the elite managers of human behavior, he scoffs with great derision at the idea of the existence and operation of a technology of mass mind control emanating from the media and government. Modem man is much too smart to believe anything as superstitious as that!

Modern man is the ideal hypnotic subject: puffed up on the idea that he is the crown of creation, he vehemently denies the power of the hypnotist's control over him, even as his head bobs up and down on a string.

What we observe in the population today are the three destructive symptoms of persons whose minds are controlled by alien forces: 1. Amnesia, i.e. loss of memory. 2. Abulia, i.e. loss of will. 3. Apathy, i.e. loss of interest in events vital to one's own health and survival. Amnesia, abulia and apathy are nearly-universal among us today and gaining a greater foothold with each passing day.

Japanese philosopher George Ohsawa stated that there was only one incurable sickness--arrogance. If a patient does not regard himself as sick he cannot submit to a cure. The arrogant man does not need to see-he already sees almost everything and what he thinks he has yet to learn, he believes "the experts" will one day show him. Who are these "experts"? They are not really doctors of the soul. They do not have the man's interest at heart. They are in fact his worst enemies, his most cunning manipulators who lead him to do their bidding like any slavemaster since Egypt.

Flattery The First Principle of Mind Control

Why then does he revere them? Because they flatter him. This is the first secret of mass mind control and can be observed as the foundation stone of virtually every false religion, party, cult, philosophy, system and training. How can modern man free himself when he is told that he is already a demi-god, that the problem lies only in finding a pure enough economic or political system worthy of his high-minded brilliance?

If we look closely we will see that this mind control principle is so basic and simple it is almost stupidly so, to the point that we marvel that anyone would be seduced by it. But it is all a matter of attention, as we saw in the parable of the mountebank and the clown. Arrogant hypno-patsies have been told by their masters that they are "Demigods" and demi-gods are never deceived or distracted. They're too smart! And by their arrogant self-satisfaction they blind themselves to the simplicity of the device that ensnares them and that is when "the real sales pitch begins."

What the Alchemical managers have bred over a millennia is a human race of the most wretched stupidity and ignorance unrivaled in thousands of years. These blind slaves are told they are "free" and "highly educated" even as they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant to run screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror. The symbols that modern man embraces with the naive trust of an infant would be tantamount to billboards reading, "This way to your death and enslavement," to the understanding of a traditional peasant of antiquity.

I doubt any medieval man would have much difficulty in feeling a sense of overwhelming foreboding in the face of the Soviet hammer and sickle symbol. Yet most modern, literate people obviously don't know a thing about what that symbol actually represents except on the most profane level as the implements of the farmer and the worker.

Michael A. Hoffman II

SECRET SOCIETIES AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

War Is a Racket!

  The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier 

Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler

CHAPTER ONE

War Is a Racket!

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds again gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep’s eyes at each other, forgetting, for the nonce, their dispute over the Polish Corridor. The assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia complicated matters. Yugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other’s throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people—not those who fight and pay and die—only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, II Duce in “International Conciliation,” the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

And, above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility for the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energyand puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war—anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter’s dispute with Yugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre-rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not a greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping on their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose.

In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russian and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the “open door” policy in China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in 35 years and we (our bankers and industrials and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war—a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit—fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the masses?

What does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit the men who are maimed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our Country. We forgot Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely financial bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit.

CHAPTER TWO

Who Makes the Profits?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits—ah! that is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulder to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket—and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friend the du Ponts, the powder people—didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 was $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918.

Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit, we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that so patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910–1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump—or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914–1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914–1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910–1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914–1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910–1914 period. Jumped to average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910–1914 were a$137,480,000. Then along came the war. The yearly average profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,500,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year.

Then came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. A leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company—and you can’t have a war without nickel—showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,500,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $200,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufactures, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance, the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed this great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organization, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public—even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only a pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam had a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought—and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit on it—so we had a lot of those McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in the muddy trenches—one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in war days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France.

I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000—count them if you live long enough—was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplanes and airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars’ worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100 or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14 cents to make and Uncle Sam paid 30 cents to 40 cents each for them—a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturers and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers—all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equip-ment—knapsacks and the things that go to fill them—crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them—and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls! Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride horseback. One had probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding on a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some to the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up—and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee—with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator—to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses—that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than twelve per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than seven per cent in a division should be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

CHAPTER THREE

Who Pays the Bills?

WHO provides the profits—these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500, and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them—in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the banker. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people—got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veterans’ hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men—men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face”! This time they had to do their own readjusting, sans mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice, sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades.

Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.

In the government hospital at Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement—the young boys couldn’t stand it.

That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead—they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded—they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too—they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam—on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. They paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they went hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and in the cold and in the rain—with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don’t forget—the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share—at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting the soldier anyway. Then the soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor. Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.

Napoleon once said,

“All men are enamored of decorations... they positively hunger for them.”

So, by developing the Napoleonic system—the medal business—the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys like to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month!

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more in a month than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance—something the employer pays for in an enlightened state—and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all—he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back—when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work—at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of those bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays it too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly—his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too—as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits that the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

CHAPTER FOUR

How to Smash this Racket!

WELL, it’s a racket, all right.

A few profit—and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parlays at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation to be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and

mayors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this flight to smash the war racket is a limited plebiscite to determine whether war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and the dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having the 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant—all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war—voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms—to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and to be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide—and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that “We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.” Oh, no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate our 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern, through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go farther than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

CHAPTER FIVE

To Hell With War!

I AM not such a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had “kept us out of war” and on the implied promise that he would “keep us out of war.” Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and to die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers,American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) jive or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States wemust lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won’t.

So...

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had the radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in the utmost secrecy.

When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a “war to make the world safe for democracy” and a “war to end all wars.”

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of a democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don’t mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has been not to achieve disarmament in order to prevent war but rather to endeavor to get more armament for itself and les s for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were at all possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to get built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturers must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war—even the munition makers.

So ... I say, “TO HELL WITH WAR!”