LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

spend several evenings trying to get you to concentrate on the depth and
import of G.K.C.’s opening statement.
The press, your press, is a machine for destroying the memory, the
public memory. For effacing, for washing out the memory of yesterday
and the day before yesterday.
Now what causes that? I mean why does the press exist for that
particular purpose?
It is a great pity more people aren’t isolated—as I believe you call it—
aren’t in some way left once a year, for a week, with a stock of old
periodicals. Just to find out what did happen, or what was written
AGAINST the current, or with the current, a decade ago. No one
supposes Chesterton was writing Axis propaganda in 1931 and 2. Big
business depends on big bankers (Vide G.K., Two Views of England,
September 26, 1931). Big bankers who govern England as a dependency
from New York, though they themselves are something non-American
enough to get into a club there.
By 1931 G.K.C. had attained a concision of phrase which, had he
possessed it 20 years earlier, would have prevented my juvenile rage
with his views about poetry. He continued: “These people are the
dependents of dependents of dependents; and nobody is independent but
a few foreign financiers working from the other side of the Atlantic.”
And then with bitter irony he finished the paragraph: “This is an
assurance that we shall always be masters of our destiny.” Perhaps irony
is a sin, or at least a peccadillo. Perhaps Chesterton’s phrase shot over
the head of his readers. It seems to have shot over the top of British
intelligence. “Indifference to fact,” said G.K.C., he tries to distinguish
that from stupidity. “Our weakness in politics. By refusing to face the
facts the English had let themselves in for being ruled by Jews, or
Americans.” G.K.C., 1931, I add “and/or Americans.”