LETTERS
445
the Communist Manifesto was that "the proletariat should not plan, should
not study the facts of society and of political and social organization,
should not organize into cooperatives and labor unions, should not con–
cern themselves with expanding their political and social liberties, and
asserting their influence in the actual political activities of their day." This
is plain distorted nonsense. Or perhaps Howard has gotten hold of the
true,
smuggled-in Communist Manifesto only one copy around.
Unhesitatingly, I applaud the League of Composers'
Modern Music.
The editor, Minna Lederman, manages to get all, or nearly all, the serious
people in and around music and, at the same time, has shaped the maga–
zine into a cultural, fighting anti-fascist weapon.
It
is cohesive, workman–
like.
If,
as I believe, Aaron Copland is the personality around which this
group revolves then he, as well as Miss Lederman, earns our gratitude.
Here, at any rate, one family of the arts seems to transcend fratricide.
Townsman,
edited by Ronald Duncan (wasn't he a young, promising
poet once?), is a trollop. I would, for a brief time, be Thersites. Here is
phenomena (still phenomena on February, 1942) to whet that metaphysi–
cian of raillery! The too-much-with-us Duke of Bedford carries on:
"If
you suggest that what Hitler saw in the suffering and death of the German
and Austrian women and children during the post-armistice blockade that
followed the last war may well have made him ruthless in the steps he was
prepared to take to avoid a repetition of that catastrophe for his people:
if you suggest that the exploitation of Germans by individual Jews during
the economic crisis may explain Hitler's anti-semitic complex...." The
Indian is not given his freedom and the Duke of Bedford is allowed to
walk the streets of London and gibber and belch and fart. Ah, Albion!
Letters
SOCIAL CREDIT AND FASCISM
Sirs:
In your March-April 1942 issue, Mr.
Orwell speaks of "a tendency for Fascists
and currency reformers to write in the
same papers," a tendency to be noted in
our own night-shirt papers, but I think
that Mr. Orwell through his association
with the
New English Weekly
knows that
Social Creditors do not include themselves
in the currency reformer category; they
are revolutionary, not reformist, in their
social objective, and they propose to
achieve their objective by a radical
change in credit-policy, not by currency
manipulation as ordinarily conceived.
This point has to be made because a
few lines later the "pacifist" Duke of
HARVEY BREIT
Bedford is spoken of as "one of the main
props of the
Dou~la3
Credit Movement."
What Mr. Orwell does not say is that the
Duke of Bedford hRs been publicly criti–
cized and rerurliated bv the Social Credit
Pa rty of Great Britain on several occa–
sions since the war began. At the war's
outbreak the Duke dropped his Social
Credit, remarking privately, I am told,
that Social Credit must be put into the
icebox for the duration, and you will
searc!l his war-time writings and speeches
in vain for any trace of Social Credit
anafysis of Hitlerism or the issues of the
war.
Like the Dean of Canterbury, the Duke
of Bedford is a Social Credit renegade;
the main body under John Hargrave goes
vigorously forward, its anti-fascist posi–
tion defined in Hargrave's pamphlet on
Mosley's British Union and its total debt-
