ZGram - 5/10/2004 - "Kaminski: Why the 'Good War' wasn't so good"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

May 10, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

If my memory serves me right, it was Ezra Pound who was kept naked in 
an iron cage in Italy for the mob to stare at and taunt at the end of 
World War II.  What we are seeing today on the Internet regarding 
satanic humiliation of those who speak the truth is not at all 
unusual.  That's how a spirit can be broken. 

John Kaminski is one of today's most eloquent Internet writers.  Here 
is a bit of painful truth regarding the true roots of World War II, 
of which Ezra Pound spoke with such passion:

[START]

Why 'The Good War'
Wasn't So Good

Imprisoned Poet's Long-Forgotten Words Mean More To Us Now
By John Kaminski
skylax at comcast.net
5-9-4

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
- Ezra Pound

I have kept repeating one important thought during my rantings over 
the past two years. It is this - realizing that the tragic attacks of 
September 11, 2001 were conceived, engineered and then covered up by 
the powers that be in Washington, D.C. provides us with an open 
window through which to analyze the misrepresented behavior of 
American foreign policy during the past two centuries.

Once we acknowledge the political pathology that has us in its grip, 
we have a realistic chance of rehabilitating our insane society. If 
we don't, we're about to become fishkill in a permanent red tide of 
various poisons.

Examining this happy history that has been falsely imbued in our 
minds by prejudiced corporate media and brainwashed school curricula 
affords a significant opportunity to reclaim our country from the 
corporate rapists who have hijacked it in the name of profit. I 
believe there is no other way to purge America of its destructive 
dementia and bring the true crooks to justice than to deconstruct the 
patriotic propaganda that has led us to believe we are a noble nation 
on the side of truth and beauty.

If we could do this, we could confront our past honestly, and see the 
devil's smile in the pleasant details of history we have grown up 
with.

The first hurdle is getting Americans to understand about 9/11. The 
more intelligent among you know for certain something smells. Why 
else would there have been all these unexplained coverups in the name 
of national security, and all these unanswered questions about what 
really did happen? But once you have mastered the basic questions, 
you can't help but see the Arab hijacker fable as a deceptive 
strategem to justify future wars and oppression against dark-skinned 
people from whom we want to steal precious things.

Only then, when you comprehend in your heart the level of cynicism 
and betrayal necessary to inflict such a grievous wound upon your own 
countrymen, can you begin to visualize what kind of animalistic 
society would cloak its policies of constant aggression and mass 
murder in the righteous euphemisms of fighting for freedom and 
democracy against dreaded evildoers.

The whole fable that has now come unraveled in the rapes and murders 
of imprisoned Iraqis now provides us a clear chance to see the true 
fabric of American behavior, so forgive me if I repeat myself from 
other essays and again try to make you realize that these recent, 
twisted exhibitions of heartless sadism are not exceptions to the 
rule of American behavior, but rather the norm. Wounded Knee. 
Dresden. My Lai. Fallujah.

It is only through this portal of realization and confession that we 
may make America into something that can be truly cherished, rather 
than what it is now, which is justifiably condemned by honest human 
beings everywhere.

In reviewing the history of America's involvement in foreign wars 
throughout the 20th century, I observed an uninterrupted series of 
false excuses - you know the list: Philippines, Cuba, all of Central 
America at one time or other, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, 
Afghanistan, and Iraq again - used to justify carnage, all of it 
passed off as defending freedom and democracy, but beneath the 
surface all of it constructed to maintain financial advantage over a 
certain commodity or a certain geographical segment of the world. A 
small percentage of Americans has always known that these 
involvements have been about protecting the profit-making potential 
of some corporation which has contributed heavily to the man who made 
the decision to go shoot up some defenseless, Third World hamlet.

Initially, the only two wars that didn't fit into this pattern of 
exploitation and invasion were the two big ones, World Wars I and II. 
Those, we had been taught in schools, were good wars, in which 
America sacrificed many thousands of its own citizens and millions of 
lives in other countries to defend "freedom" from evil fascists, 
nasty Communists, or inscrutable Shintoists.

That always bothered me. I mean, things tend to stay true to form. 
Tigers don't change their stripes. How could it be, I thought awhile 
back, could the United States have engaged in all these bad wars, 
that were predicated upon provable lies, and yet have two good wars 
in the middle of the string? I reasoned I must be missing something, 
and I was.

Bits and pieces began to emerge. Worldwide Judea declared all-out war 
against Germany in the mid-30s. Earlier, the Treaty of Versailles, 
ramrodded through by President Wilson's Jewish adviser Colonel House, 
handicapped Germany with onerous financial entanglements, all but 
guaranteeing, according to some historians, the inevitability of 
another war.

And then there was President Roosevelt's apparent foreknowledge of 
the strike at Pearl Harbor, and his failure to tell the troops there, 
in order to aggravate American public opinion into support for war. 
And even the movie "Pearl Harbor" told the tale of how America cut 
off Japan's oil supply to stir up trouble in the first place.

But the real missing piece came leaping out at me a few days ago, 
when somebody sent me a story about the poet Ezra Pound, and what 
happened to him during and after World War II. For those who don't 
know, Pound - considered by many of those who know to be the greatest 
poet of the 20th century - was arrested for treason because of the 
broadcasts he made from Italy during the early 1940s that urged the 
United States not to get involved in the fighting.

The story was Michael Collins Piper's famous 1997 piece in the Barnes 
Review (http://www.barnesreview.org/ezrapound.htm).

Unfortunately, given the way histories tend to be written (namely, by 
the victors), what Pound did and what happened to him because of that 
are rather widely known, whereas what he actually said that got him 
in so much trouble is not.

And what he said turns out to be eerily appropriate for the horrible 
developments happening today. The stories you have been taught about 
World War II are wrong. Pound spent 13 years in a mental institution 
(without a trial) for being right.

Consider the way the word "Nazi" has been used in our language as a 
synonym for depravity. After a lifetime of use, the negative 
connotation is second-nature to us. But Pound didn't see it that way.

He believed that international bankers were on the side of the U.S., 
Britain and the Soviet Union, and they were all arrayed against 
Germany. He insisted that without the machinations of the banks and 
their accomplices in the media, there would have been no war - and no 
wars ever.

Pound saw the American national tradition being perverted by the 
aggressive new internationalism, the brainchild of Jews who organized 
Soviet Communism, long had control of British banks, and manipulated 
the American President Roosevelt.

"Sometime the Anglo-Saxon may awaken to the fact that . . . nations 
are shoved into wars in order to destroy themselves, to break up 
their structure, to destroy their social order, to destroy their 
populations. And no more flaming and flagrant case appears in history 
than our own American Civil War, said to be an occidental record for 
size of armies employed and only surpassed by the more recent 
triumphs of [the Warburg banking family:] the wars of 1914 and the 
present one."

Although Pound's broadcasts centered on keeping Americans out of 
World War II, the underlying theme of most of his pieces was money. 
Free people need to be in control of their money if they are to be 
actually free, Pound stressed. On the issues of usury and the control 
of money and economy by private special interests, Pound thundered: 
"There is no freedom without economic freedom," he said. "Freedom 
that does not include freedom from debt is plain bunkum."

Pound believed usury was the cause of war throughout history. "The 
usury system does no nation . . . any good whatsoever. It is an 
internal peril to him who hath, and it can make no use of nations in 
the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them 
and use the worst as flails against the best. It is the usurer's game 
to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not 
pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit."

Pound tried to tell everyone that World War II was not an isolated 
event, and in his words we can hear the warnings that come down to us 
now in the echoes of Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This war did not begin in 1939. It is not a unique result of the 
infamous Versailles Treaty. It is impossible to understand it without 
knowing at least a few precedent historic events, which mark the 
cycle of combat. No man can understand it without knowing at least a 
few facts and their chronological sequence."

And his words in 1942 ring presciently for the future of America as 
the U.S. war machine rumbles around the planet in 2004 and threatens 
every nation on earth.

"This war is part of the age-old struggle between the usurer and the 
rest of mankind: between the usurer and peasant, the usurer and 
producer, and finally between the usurer and the merchant, between 
usurocracy and the mercantilist system . . .

World War II was not an isolated event. It was part of a deliberate 
trend spanning centuries, Pound insisted.

"The present war," he said, "dates at least from the founding of the 
Bank of England at the end of the 17th century, 1694-8. Half a
century later, the London usurocracy shut down on the issue of paper 
money by the Pennsylvania colony, A.D. 1750."

According to Pound, it was the money issue (above all) that united 
the Allies during the second 20th-century war against Germany: "Gold. 
Nothing else uniting the three governments, England, Russia, United 
States of America. That is the interest - gold, usury, debt, 
monopoly, class interest, and possibly gross indifference and 
contempt for humanity."

The real enemy, said Pound, was international capitalism. All people 
everywhere were victims: "They're working day and night, picking your 
pockets," he said.

Pound said: "Usury has gnawed into England since the days of 
Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on earls' estates; usury 
against the feudal nobility. Then there were attacks on the common 
land, filchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a 
usury system, an international usury system, from Cromwell's time, 
ever increasing."

When all was said and done, Pound predicted it would be the big money 
interests who would really win the war - not any particular 
nation-state - and the foundation for future wars would be set in 
place: "The nomadic parasites will shift out of London and into 
Manhattan. And this will be presented under a camouflage of national 
slogans. It will be represented as an American victory. It will not 
be an American victory. The moment is serious. The moment is also 
confusing. It is confusing because there are two sets of concurrent 
phenomena, namely, those connected with fighting this war, and those 
which sow seeds for the next one."

We are clearly in the same spot today.

Pound said one of the major reasons for World War II was the 
manipulation of the press, particularly in the United States: "I 
naturally mistrust newspaper news from America," he declared. "I 
grope in the mass of lies, knowing most of the sources are wholly 
untrustworthy."

And now. Same story, different day. Pound tried to warn us, more than 
60 years ago, but we threw him into an insane asylum for 13 years, 
the best poet of the 20th century given his reward by the country he 
loved for speaking his mind in the land of Freedom of Speech.

A harbinger perhaps of the new Homeland Security laws that ignore all 
poets and truthtellers and keep us securely on the road to war for 
the profits of a precious, pathological few.

Now the entire population of the planet is about to be consigned to a 
worldwide capitalist insane asylum, in which love and honor are 
merely interesting advertising strategies useful in the sale of 
consumer goods, and loyalty and patriotism mere fairy tales at 
contract time, to be sold by all to the highest bidder seeking to 
steal parts of the world from someone else.

Now as then, the world's future rests upon those with ears to hear.


   =====

John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy Report," a 
collection of his Internet essays published by Dandelion Books and 
featured on hundreds of websites around the world. For more 
information on how to get this book or to financially support his 
work, go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/. Or, to read some more of 
his recent essays for free, go to 
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html

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