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Continuity News W. J. Sidis Mimeographed newsletter, 4 pages, found in Helena Sidis's files in 1977. |
No. 6 October, 1938
Issued by the Successors of
Shays THE PAST IS THE KEY TO THE PRESENT A journal of current events presented on the basis of the
theory of social continuity.
______________ Temporary mailing address, c/o Parker Greene,
905 Central Sq. Bldg., Cambridge, Mass.
(Boston Branch)
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Issued monthly. Subscriptions in U.S., $1 per year, 50¢ for 6 months.
In discussion
groups, 25¢ a year after the first.
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We invite news contributions or constructive criticism.
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"PENACOOK COURIER"
For a period of three years there has been apparing a hektographed paper called the Penacook Courier, mailed from a mysterious source (its postmark was different almost every time), and each issue of which was dated from some time in the past, such as "July, 1776," and described the Courier's own version of American history as though it was a current event. It now appears that this paper actually had a subscription list, as arrangements were completed―still without revealing who issued the paper―on September 21, at the height of the great hurricane, to transfer that subscription list to Continuity News. Although we are a different sort of paper, we hope we will give satisfaction to the former readers of the Penacook Courier. We will try to make special arrangements for those who were on both subscription lists.
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In view of complaints we have received regarding the legibility of Continuity News, we are trying out a larger size of type with a slightly wider margin. This will give room for less news, but maybe it is all for the best, if our readers can understand it better. Let us hear from you if you think our new type is an improvement.
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LYNN
VERSUS ZLIN
OR, "IT'S ALL INTERRELATED"
Continuity News has been frequently criticised for failing to feature events of the Eastern Hemisphere, and confining itself to American News; and we hear such pleas as "European events affect us" or "It's all interrelated." The high temperature such people run on seeing American news in our pages is proof positive that they are not interested a bit in what affects us, and the plea of interrelation is obviously hypocritical in that they do not consider American events as having any bearing on the world, or even as forming part of the world. If anyone is so exclusively interested in what is happening on the other side of the ocean, they are under no compulsion to read Continuity News; we continue to center our chief attention on this side of the ocean, and feel that things can be understood much better here if not viewed as reflected in a mirror three thousand miles away. Again, interrelation does not necessarily mean that events follow parallel courses on the two sides of the ocean; the courses may still be diametrically opposite.
Within the last month there has been considerable propaganda directed at making us feel that, in some mysterious way, our interests are tied up in those of a synthetic nation called Czechoslovakia, manufactured by the Versailles peace conference in its bungling way in defiance of all principles of peace, and coming to grief in the same manner as did many other products of that conference; propaganda intended to involve us in another war "to make the world safe for democracy," but asking us to impose a dictatorship on ourselves for war purposes on the pretext that we would possibly save someone else's alleged "democracy" which does not correspond to the American standard or definition of such a thing; propaganda intended to oppose principles of self-determination of peoples whose choice the propagandists do not approve of; propaganda, in short, which could not be approved of except by a downright traitor to all that America has stood for since long before the white invasion.
What is the interrelation, if any, between the interests of America and Czechoslovakia? We have embodied it in our headline of "Lynn vs. Zlin." Lynn, the largest shoe manufacturing center on earth, is one of the units of Greater Boston, one of the largest metropolitan areas on earth; in its neighborhood are numerous other centers of the same industry, such as Brockton, Haverhill, Newburyport, etc. This industry in these populous centers has been affected by shutdowns on a large scale, throwing many thousands out of work and affecting thereby the livelihood of at least two hundred thousand people in this part of America.
These shutdowns are in large part due to natural economic causes; certainly we cannot accept the theory current in some circles that "Big Business" is deliberately cutting its own throat to stop workers from earning a living, though the so-called "class-struggle" idea, carried to a logical conclusion, would seem to imply something of the sort. However, under the present economic system, there is such a thing as competition, and much of the shoe trade formerly served by Lynn―and other American shoe centers―is served by the underselling and dumping of a Czechoslovak center called Zlin, which a Yankee press correspondent thought was their pronounciation of Lynn. (maybe it is, at that.) This is a much smaller place than the American shoe manufacturing centers, and one where workers are regimented in barracks, with every detail of their life regulated in a manner which would cause revolutions many times over in Lynn or Haverhill. And so, two hundred thousand Americans have to sacrifice their chances of living in order to help regiment a much smaller number of people across the ocean in a way that Americans could never stand for. It is for that that all the propaganda to save Czechoslovakia has been directed.
The end of the recent war crisis, being unfavorable to the little nationlet that recent propaganda has asked us to defend, will probably cripple this bit of industry in Zlin in such a way that America will be forced to patronise Lynn instead, and restore a livelihood to hundreds of thousands of Americans. There may be something screwy about the fact that the economic destruction of one group (workers and capital alike) should greatly benefit another group (again, workers and capital alike); but it is part of the screwiness of the present prevalent economic system, and cannot be cured by anything having an organisational continuity with any part of the present system. This is merely one of the numerous antagonisms into which the world is divided by its present form of organisation―one that cuts across occupational or so-called "class" lines which some people think is the only antagonism of importance within present society.
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Speaker: Quiet! I cannot hear myself speak.
Heckler: Cheer up; you aint missin much.
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Columbus didn't know where he was going when he started, where he was when he got there, nor where he had been when he got home―and did it all on borrowed money!―Wakefield Item.
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The United States has discovered that no ally can be trusted. While we were thanking God for the Atlantic Ocean, it turned upon us with unprecedented fury.―The New Yorker
And the Atlantic is still our best ally.
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By inadvertence, we left off our front page in this issue one of our mottoes,
which we give our readers here instead. It is: WE ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN RATHER THAN TO
ADVOCATE.
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PLATO ON TYRANTS
A quotation from Plato’s Republic has been recently circulated in this country as to the tactics by which tyrants gain power. The modern reader may readily read "dictator" for "tyrant." As a matter of fact, the word "tyrant" originally meant "leader," and is therefore identical with such titles as "duce" or "führer," which mean the same thing. Note, however, that the type of society Plato has in mind has the type of continuity which, like modern Eastern-Hemisphere communities, lacks the resistance to this sort of tactics that is a fundamental part of American continuity.
"The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.
"At first in the early days of his power he is full of smiles and he salutes everyone whom he meets. He to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! Liberating debtors and distributing land to the people and his followers and wanting to be so kind and good to everyone!
"But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
"Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?"
Continuity News names no names. We believe our reader can fill in plenty of nameas, and without going overseas to find them.
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APPLES
Around 1930, when the severity of the recent depression began to make itself felt, the apple began to take its place as the symbol of the catastrophe that hit our economic organisation, as in many American communities arrangements were made to set up many of the unemployed in the business of selling that fruit on street stands.
After the great New England hurricane of [Wednesday,] September 21, 1938, the apple again took its place as a symbol of disaster. So many apples and apple trees had been blown to the ground throughout New England that apple growers from Cape Cod to Lake Champlain appealed to the public to take the apples off their hands and keep tons of fruit from rotting. Grocery stores everywhere issued posters of the "apple emergency," and sold apples (sometimes labeled "hurricane apples") at prices such that even the reliefers―or the panhandlers begging for a dime for a “cuff a copy”―could afford to gorge themselves for once, and the eating of “blow-down pies” (that is, apple pie) has become a patriotic duty for Yankees, while even the scoffers can merely reply “applesauce.” A Boston lunchroom recently advertised a menu consisting of baked apple, apple sauce, apple pie, and apple dumpling, in line with the fact that New England expects everyone to do his duty in destroying apples in every form that is digestible―and Yankees generally have no aversion to demolishing apple pie.
At a time when other countries, in other parts of the world, have to go hungry in the name of patriotic duty, it is a remarkable thing to [illegible] that over here even a great and destructive disaster can have the opposite effect, so that here the patriotic duty is―to eat. So far, no relief projects of have been organised, but that may happen any day now, as nearly every other way has been tried.
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A prominent Republican candidate recently remarked that a Democratic governor must, even if unintentionally, be the window front for a political machine which is at least partially corrupt. Very true; but the same is equally true for a Republican office-holder, and a vote for either must, by that reasoning, be a voter of corruption.
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CHACO
An undeclared war that has been going on for several years has at last come to an end by means of a six-power agreement, and everyone seems glad it is all over in the belligerent countries, though neither side got its demands satisfied.
This news does not come from Europe. It is from South America, where hostilities have been raging for some years over disputed territory called the Chaco (do not confuse with Czecho). The arbitration was conducted by agreement between five neutral South American nations and the United States, and both belligerents, Bolivia and Paraguay, have been only too pleased to come to a compromise agreement. Such an outcome could hardly be even imagined on the other side of the ocean, where, whatever the agreement, both sides would nurse for centuries schemes for revenge.
The idea of federation, a native of North America which has never found a home in the Eastern Hemisphere though it has had its influence in South America, is an important factor in this. The idea that governments may retain independence and still unite into a federated nation, originated in 1509 by Daganoweda of where is now Syracuse, and then embodied in the Iroquois Confederation, has been always at home in North America and has spread readily to South America; but the idea of limited government, on which federation is founded, has always been at odds with Eastern Hemisphere continuities, which require a "State" to have supreme and unlimited power. The European "State" is a continuity that leads to conquest and conflict; the idea of federation has tended towards peace, and is a continuity that tends to nullify conquest to a great degree; so that, though this country has forcibly annexed territory in its time, it has always tended to erect each territory into autonomous States, or else to prepare the conquest for ultimate independence.
In South America, where the federate idea is still imperfectly developed, its effect in discouraging the spirit of conquest is also observable. For instance, in the constitution of Brazil during the federated period (1889-1937), appears the declaration: "Os Estados Unidos do Brasil, em algum caso, nã se empenharão duma guerra de conquista" (The United States of Brazil should not, under any circumstances, undertake a war of conquest). When nations which such traditions and continuities undertake mediation, small wonder that result are more satisfactory than in Europe.
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SCREWBALL ECONOMICS
One of the characteristics of this year’s political campaign is the popularity of various varieties of what may, with little exaggeration, be labeled "screwball economics." The main point common to the various brands of screwball economics is the fanatical belief that, given proper juggling, there is no difficulty in making something out of nothing, and that the particular candidate could do it if elected.
The laws that govern the structure of an economic system cannot, in the nature of things, be set aside or altered by anything a mere government can do. Such a change requires a break of continuity, something that mere political elections can never supply.
The New Deal itself, with its idea of making money appear bigger by shortening the measure, and its idea of non-productive projects that have kept Americans trying to live by the equivalent of doing each other’s washing, is the most conspicuous case of screwball economics in existence, and has undoubtedly prepared the public mind for other schemes only slightly less hare-brained.