4pQonT

EZRA POUND 233
usury, at sixty per cent. And by the wheeze of varying the purchasing
power of the government's money at the every whim of
the financiers. And if you won't, or if a given gang of profiteers,
sometimes called politicians, would not even try to prevent it
inside their own countries, how the Sam Hill do you expect the
rest of the world to do anything about preventing it outside the
boundaries of their own oppressed and unhappy countries?
"London slums and the rest of it is proof of Churchill's misanthropy,
and his contempt for all social justice, his loathing of the
ideas of justice and equity. Of the three . . . Churchill, Roosevelt
and Stalin, conscious or unconscious, Stalin is the more open. I
think he has never tried to deny his hand in mass murders, assassinations
and so on. He'd argue that it is just part of his business.
Roosevelt would try to say that a murder today is committed in
the hope of preventing your being murdered by your greatgrandchild's
nephew.
"Mr. Churchill, who is an arrant . . . and clever scene-shifter,
has never faced or answered questions. Is there any difference between
slaying a man with a sword and killing him with a system of
government? Hence the pink popularity of Bolshevist propaganda
amongst Lord Professor Keynes' students in Cambridge, England.
"Well, part of the world prefers local control of their own
money, power and credit.
". . . But I should like them to preserve a few art works, a
few mosaics, a few printed volumes. I should like to store or bring
to peace what is left of the world's cultural heritage, including
libraries, and architectural monuments, to serve as models for one
who constructs them.
". . . But there is no accounting for the peculiarities of the
American people or for their lack of coherence. They seem to like
spending their money on war, destruction and inedible metal. Perhaps
the biosophites or some other American votaries of the infinite
will, in time, produce some sort of diagnosis of the neurosis
of the American sweetheart."
On July 25, 1943, the last of the talks was transcribed in
Washington, and an indictment for treason returned against Ezra
Pound. Of the seven broadcasts specifically cited in the nineteen-