Broken Wings

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people

Died some, pro patria,*
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Ezra Pound

Claimstakers

From the 1988 LP ... another late great Nashville band 

Broken Wings

This high in the stratosphere

The earth is hazy blue

The sky looks like an emerald

From inside my silver tube

My work is almost surgical

I fight a sterile war

I never see my enemy

Just a target down below

To just punch in positions

Is my method of attack

They never see their murderer

Like I shot 'em in the back

16 miles before we reach the enemy

15 miles everybody check in

14 miles enter pictures from the satellite

13 miles do coordinates fit

12 more miles we're encountering fire

11 more miles I think about home

10 more miles this is something I believe in

9 more miles I see engine smoke

8 more miles there's fire in the cockpit

7 more miles our oxygen quits

6 more miles our radio breaks down

5 more miles our pilot's been hit

4 more miles abandoning target

3 more miles too late to engage

2 more miles we empty our payload

1 more mile over any ole place

As a boy

I dreamed of the day that I would fly

I see airplanes like needles scratch the sky

Now I sit like a prison's over me

Now the eagle can fly with broken wings

Outside the air is freezing

But in my room it's warm

The nurse says Europe's burning

And there's talk of winter storms

I try to watch the weatherman

And his pictures on the screen

Taken from a satellite

Like the kind I used to read

He says the wind chill factor

Tonight is twenty-one

But still my blood runs colder

When I think of what I've done

16 days have I done the right thing

15 days how will I know

14 days now I'm hearin' voices

13 days comin' from below

12 days I couldn't help what happened

11 more days anybody can see

10 more days I'd do anything

9 more days to make 'en fall on me

8 more days before I reach insanity

7 more days the doctor wants proof

6 more days he says it's just trauma

5 more days everybody goes through

4 more days before my nervous breakdown

3 more days there's a letter from home

2 more days everybody's proud son

1 more day we just thought you should know

Music: Steve Boyd

Lyrics: J. Sherraden

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. 
Ezra Pound

The prospect of a 30 years war is not one to arouse mirth and hilarity even in a flighty, chicken headed and irresponsible people such as the United States of Americans.


You are in it, and Lord knows, who is a goin’ to git you out. The late Lord Rothermere, whose culture was nothin’, as you might say, to write home about, finally decided that the English public was wholly unteachable. I don’t know whether you can learn ANYTHING from history, I don’t know whether you are even yet in the state of mind where you want to learn any thing from history or from any other source whatsoever.


A way to get yourselves OUT, might be discoverable, it might be more discoverable if you first had
the faint inkling of a curiosity as to how you got yourselves IN.


The Honor of the United States of America is NOT concerned with becoming an arsenal.
The men who wintered at Valley Forge did not suffer those months of intense cold and hunger with
the design, or in the hope that Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, the union of the colonies would one
day be able to stir up wars between other countries in order to sell them munitions.


Whether you intend to be slaves, lifelong slaves, hereditary slaves to machinery and whether you
propose to sell your children and your grand children into long lasting slavery to usurers and to machinery.
I mean you will have to make up your MINDS. YOU can not live on cold iron, you can not live on
airplane spare parts, YOU can not live well without LAWS which even the officials obey.


Gold is a coward. Gold is not the backbone of nations. It is their ruin. A coward, at the first breath of
danger gold flows AWAY, gold flows OUT of the country.


 and every gun was a golden egg, for the Bankers in New York.


The war you ought to be fightin’ is NOT five thousand miles OUTSIDE Boston. Or five thousand miles outside New York, or even outside San Francisco. It is INTERNAL


You can then clear out the crap that journalists BELIEVE along with their fake news, along what the
advertisers LET the OWNERS (so called), let the editors PUBLISH. There is a second layer of crap that
newspapermen believe to be real. BUT it is not grounded on a real knowledge of ANYTHING.
They have NOT gone into the documents. They have not read the real history. They chase one
butterfly after another.
NOW the facts are NOT wholly hidden. There are fifty authors whom you could read, Brooks Adams,
among ’em. You could read the works of the men who fought for the making of the Republic, John Adams,
Jefferson, Van Buren, hidden or kept in shadow by punk propaganda.


What are you fighting for? Fighting for the starvation of Europe? Fighting to spread famine in Asia?
Fighting for vain boast proved false? Fighting for the Sassoonery? Are you fighting for the National
Heritage? For the heritage of wisdom, the heritage of Washington, and of Monroe, of John Adams and
Lincoln?
I’ll say you are not.
You are fighting AGAINST what all these men stood for. And it will take more brains than I got, to
get you out of it prettily.


The Bolshevik anti-morale comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever
codified. The Talmud is the one and only be getter of the Bolshevik system.
And if there ARE any Christians in the United State of America, they would do well to consider
Renan’s warning. They would do well to consider the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew parts
of the Bible.
They would do well to look objectively at the record of Hebrew barbarism, and at the nature of
Christ’s revolt, as recorded in the Gospels.
I ask you WHY WAS CHRIST crucified? He was crucified for trying to BUST a racket.


Fake economists are one form of the journalist bacillus. Put out in front to lie, and rising on the
wings or tin toes of ambition, permitted (on the leash and chain system) to get out in front and holler.
Quoted from one press to another, NOT because they ever print anything useful, or tell the truth, or
approach it. They are either men who KNOW NOT, or men who say not, and who put up a word screen, or
esCHEW certain issues; who do NOT make revelations. And whose interest even when quoted
internationally is NOT due to the INTRINSIC meaning of what they actually say. Their blather IS
symptomatic, and is studied and quoted as a symptom of the diseases


The American has the head, evidently of a chicken, he is incapable of political revery.
The existence of a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE government does not worry him. It has been there at
least since 1863 and he takes it as a matter of course. It gets worse daily and hourly.
All the means of intercommunication pass into the hands of the secret and largely Semitic control; and
the American dreams of Thoreau and says, “who am I to interfere in such muchness?”


That question can be put scientifically, just as well as puttin’ it in a hortatory form, or asking what is
nice, or what ought a decent man do. No man will do anything WORTH doin’ till some sense of
“OUGHT” enters his system. Profit motive is silly, in the sense that it ultimately kills the good life; makes
the mare go, yass, makes the mare go, money makes the mare go. And then somebody wakes up crazy.
And that takes JUST long enough, so nobody notices what is going on. Suddenly wake up and find
American abundance has been chucked out of the window.


ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources
PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of
unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won’t think up and use to get a
monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin’. And the shyster is pizin’. He is the sworn
blasphemer, false swearin’ and cheatin’ FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better
discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will
eliminate him from your system.


One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the
sake of livin’ on the Purchasing Power that DON’t come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement
so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin’ position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of
chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual
knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i.e., gangsterism AND chivalry, the
feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were
enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak
overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and
to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit.


You are in black darkness and confusion. You have been hugger-muggared, and carom-shotted into a war,
and you know NOTHING about it. You know NOTHING about the forces that caused it, or you know next
to nothing.


You can keep the ole Constitution. Mostly sailors and landlubbers no longer care, but as a technicality
(if no more than that) I am tellin’ you. Lots of folks want to bust it, so as to fish in the troubled waters, lots
of folks want to keep it rusty and inefficient, so’z it won’t interfere with their various rackets.


You are at war to conceal the fact that a lot of purchasing power, a lot of capital comes from a hoax.
Damn the hoax. But don’t go out and die for just bein’ idiots. Or for your tolerance of being run and ruled
over by dumheads who are pushed on by shysters.


And the program of this ENEMY is known, and the action of governments in the hands of the
ENEMY SHOW the nature of the AIM of the enemy. Their aim is not to win war, but to make peace
impossible. These bombings of towns are NOT military, they are done to rouse hate, to be causes of hate.


There is NO freedom without economic freedom. Freedom that does not include freedom from debt is
plain bunkumb.  Debt is the prelude to slavery. And you are now, I ’spose, arrived at the intermezzo. America WAS promises. America today is largely, shall we say, promissory notes that simply can NOT be honored. 


It probably seemed very eccentric that a man, any man should suspend playin’ tennis and trying to
understand the Confucian anthology, and after a long period of years return to America to protest against
ANYTHING, or to offer suggestions to his fellow citizens about anything whatsoever.


The 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.
Goods are destroyed rather than exchanged against other WANTED goods, during war time. The ratio
of units of currency, money, to things people want to eat and to wear is altered, i.e., there are more dollars
in circulation in relation to goods, or pounds or other monetary units. Debts mount up. When they have
reached hitherto unprecendented size, the manipulators of currencies “return” to what they have called
“sound money.”


Wars in old time were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is DEBT. Usury
is an instrument for increasing debt, and for keeping the debtor in debt perpetually or at least for the
longest possible period.


Quite apart from military operation, from the results of military operations, from the possible results of any
military operations that may occur, the American people appear to have suffered crashing defeat, at the
hands of the financiers.
There is no understanding of history without some understanding of finance. And nine people, at least
nine people out of ten are ready to tell you proudly that they understand nothing about finance, and that
they do not understand economics. It has become the hallmark of the end of the bourgeois era to proclaim
ignorance of economics.
Yet you can not allocate the responsibility for an event, for a crime, for an accident, until you know
what has happened.


The world was to be enslaved according to plan. Slavery consists in having to do uninteresting work,
at another’s bidding


I suppose if I go on talking to you kids LONG enough I will get something into your heads. If I go on
poundin’ from day to day, every day and in every way, I will finally teach you kids why you got drug into
this war (if you survive it), and when you know that you will know more than your fathers did by the end
of the last one, that is, more than most of ’em ever discovered.

excerpts from “Ezra Pound Speaking”  RADIO SPEECHES OF WORLD WAR II