_Octopus Colossus_
Sun-Rank Banard remarked, "It's time for lunch, so let's adjourn to
the thought transmission-proof dining room. Our women folk are away
visiting, so we will be by ourselves, and we can informally and freely
converse."
During the meal we carried on an animated and pleasant conversation in
which Sun-Rank Banard very often joined. The gist of it was mainly, at
our earth men's lack of impression and perception of earth conditions.
Our boys were astonished at the detailed information the Martians had
on our earth life. One said that he had never clearly thought through
its economic ills. He had merely accepted them. Although he had heard
and studied many of these points, they are beginning to now take on a
new significance. Another remarked that the observers seem to be more
impressed and are more retentive to what takes place, than those who
are within the actual performance of the scenes of our life's functions.
Sun-Rank Banard said, "Now let's go back and continue the lecture.
"Nature on your earth has destined and caused man to come into
existence, and has provided him with parents to protect him during his
helpless infancy and childhood. During his growth, development, and
maturity, it endowed him with a mentality higher than that of other
animals. But in spite of his intelligence, he is often more cruel than
predatory jungle beasts, especially to his fellow men.
"Creation is prolific even prodigal in its overabundance of production
for your necessities and can produce and supply the needs of a
population more than twice your number, providing you all will work;
but many of you, for a life of ease, use this God-given intelligence
especially for acquisition, storing and hoarding as a means of power
over your fellow man.
"During the Stone Age, your each tribe lived together in caves
adjoining each other for protection, primitively tilling the soil, and
grazing your cattle around your habitations.
"It was then the survival of brute force. The bully domineered and
became the leader of his tribe, acquiring for himself the most wives
and food and the best shelter. The next best he bestowed upon his gang.
"For defensive and offensive weapons against predatory animals and
tribes, you used stones and stone axes. Brute force gradually lost
its power when the more progressive one of the tribe became adept and
dexterous with his stone throwing sling, his lance, and his bows and
arrows. He then succeeded to the leadership.
"As your numbers increased, you expanded your land holdings. This
continued from generation to generation; from squatters you graduated
according to your own laws of possession until the time came when you
were encroaching on the lands of your neighboring tribes, starting
your process of forceful aggression and acquisition. With the Iron Age
started the evolution of your civilization, with sharp iron-pointed
lances, arrows, and axes, leading to the barbarous Middle Ages.
"Laws of property ownership, and barter of land, slaves, cattle, furs,
clothes, utensils, ornaments, food, and offensive and defensive weapons
marked the beginning of this era. In its constant evolution, property
ownership law was continually and mercilessly improved according to
your standards, with the utter enslavement of weaker tribes, and races
who were a good source for procuring slaves and extracting tribute.
"In the further property development during succeeding centuries your
ancestors continually improved, and increased their property power
so that now it is the dominant factor controlling the very life and
destiny of every one of you.
"You have defined and legalized property as everything on your
earth capable and possible of being possessed, and owned, including
intangibles. It even includes the waters of your rivers, your seas, and
the atmosphere over your earth surface, and you seem to be disputing
the ownership of the clouds. Sunshine and air, for the time being, are
still free and cannot be owned and claimed.
"Your Webster's Dictionary defines property as a thing owned, exclusive
right of possession.
"Your Amendments to your United States Constitution, Article V, also
gives assent to property. They say, 'Nor shall private property be
taken for public use without just compensation.'
"You have created it into and described it as wealth, or money. You
have advanced it from stage to stage and perfected and increased
its power to make it a fluid currency system without which no one
can obtain or purchase the necessities of life. You have outlawed
compulsory slavery, for a better system which _compels you to
voluntarily hire yourself out_.
"Those in power, to protect themselves, helped to pass strong laws
for property control. Not content with the ownership of basic raw
materials, real estate, financial affairs, transportation, utilities,
and food production and distribution, they systematically entered
into every sphere of industrial manufacturing--commercial fields,
transportation, shipping, in fact every necessity of your life's
existence--through individual ownership, partnership, companies,
corporations, holding companies, national and international cartels,
and chain company stores.
"To supply the labor they need in their enterprises, most of you,
through necessity, hire yourselves out to them either individually or
through union contracts.
"Their accumulative hoarding, cartel, and pool forming to control,
monopolize, and corner industry are such that you are forced to
purchase your necessities from them only, at the highest profit. Thus
you pay for products, which, without your labor, could not have been
created into value. Your ownership and lack of ownership of property,
wealth, and power are the main contributive causes for 98% of the laws
you make and have on your statute books.
"Your controlling class who largely contribute to political campaigns
influence your ruling class through political parties who openly
or secretly help to elect some of their representatives to your
Congress, or appoint former directors, and attorneys as members of
important key cabinet and diplomatic offices. Their numerous inside
and outside lobbyists and subservient newspapers influence the passing
and suppression of laws. They even volunteer as advisers to your
administrations. Most of your professional politicians 'kowtow' and are
servile to them.
"There is always great agitation going on in regard to labor. Next
to war, it is the most important problem to your government and most
exciting discussions and newspaper headliners.
"Your moneyism and labor struggles are an old, festering sore. These
struggles are the general cause of your poverty and destitution. Your
system is such that you have no cure in sight. No matter how successful
you may be in your unionized demands for more remuneration, prices
and values are bound to spiral upward, increasing your living cost in
proportion. You are infallibly moving in a vicious circle which tends
for the rich to get richer. Many among you are born with pronounced
natural aptitudes; some of you have strongly developed these aptitudes
and inclinations and constantly use your full mentality and energy
for accumulation and hoarding for your own use. But you also use this
proficiency especially to gain power through the need of others. The
school boy with the accumulative instinct will spend most of his time
training himself to become an expert marble shooter in order to win
those of his schoolmates. Even though they should find his full bag of
marbles and divide them amongst themselves, or should he voluntarily
give them the marbles, there is no question that he is bound to always
win them back again.
"It is the same with your money and wealth; their division among all
of you would not heal your economic diseases, because it would be only
a question of a short time before most of you would lose yours to the
shrewd and crafty ones among you; very possibly to the same ones who
held them before.
"Money, which you developed as the medium of exchange to facilitate
accumulation, store of value, and property transfer, grew into the
agency of tribute or usury power, progressively expanding to an extent
comparable to that of an enormous, monster Octopus Colossus, covering
and holding your entire earth within its grasp. Each of his tentacles
is a symbol representing your economic and other ills. Each one of
them multiplies into clusters or parasites. They are submissive and
especially amenable in the hands of those of you who are adept, and
know how to manipulate them. With the connivance and at the direction
of these operators, they hold humanity in bondage. Continually
searching, they reach every corner, nook, and cranny within the
innermost recesses of your homes. You have no hiding place or escape
from them. They produce and contribute to all your ills and control
every act of your life.
"'On the one side, man is so heroic and so noble, and on the other side
so base and so cruel,' Mark Twain once said. Time again many of your
economists have tried to extricate you; they have wrestled with these
tentacles and, like the old tribal medicine men, recommended cutting
each one off, but like the nine heads of Hydra, each one of these
tentacles on being cut off becomes two. These economists, by their
other nostrums, try to convince you they have found a cure; each one of
them has his own theory. Your libraries are full of their books.
"Time and again many of you have tried to find a way to save
yourselves, but have been betrayed by your corrupt leaders, who,
through selfish motives, have led you deeper into the quagmire of the
dangerous morass they create for you. They and theirs may some day also
become the victims.
"One of these tentacles spreads and disseminates the infectious polio
and other deadly diseases by distributing from person to person your
disease-carrying, paper money and metal coins. It takes them out from
the foulest and dirtiest parts and places of some of the unbathed,
drunken, and diseased bodies of your living and dead persons. This
money passes along from person to person and merchant to merchant,
handled constantly by your food handlers, held by your children in
their hands and even in their mouths.
"Another tentacle taints you with pride, arrogance, contempt,
insatiable greed, covetousness, and lust. It brings in its wake envy,
jealousy, hatred, and malice, followed by the most atrocious crimes. It
breeds temptation, suspicion, dishonesty, ingratitude, and corruption,
vitiates your entire morale. It was directly and indirectly the cause
of 1,361,593 known crimes in the United States, ranging from murder
to petty larceny for the year 1943. It is responsible for physical,
mental, and organic disorders of diseases among 95% of your population.
It is the cause of separations, divorces, and even of serious
misunderstandings between parents and children, brothers and sisters.
"Still another one of them coiling about you incites and forms in you
a strong magnetic desire to pursue wealth, even by the most unfair or
illegal means and methods, destroying in you your finer human feelings.
It brings out in you the primitive instinct to plot the undoing of
your fellow man to gain his property. It not only distorts your good
resolutions, but in many of your individuals and nations, it creates
greed to the point that a promise, a contract, or a treaty, no matter
how inviolable, is with impunity cancelled or broken.
"How many of you can conscientiously plead innocent to your own selves
that you at no time illegally or immorally benefited from your fellow
man? Many of you boast how smart you are in cheating your friend.
"Desire for money has blunted your moral views to the point that many
of you do not know or do not want to know what a moral sin may be. It
has created among you many flatterers, and hypocrites. Many of you join
ultra-exclusive clubs, orders, lodges, and other similar organizations
solely for this purpose. Some of you even choose your religions with
these motives.
"For money, you even subdue your natural love instinct. The craving for
money makes many of you desire, and some of you execute the death of
your nearest and dearest relatives or friends, in order to enable you
to inherit his property or to cash in on his life insurance policy.
"Those of you who have developed in yourselves the habit of thriftiness
are very gullible. You deposit your savings in banks, for interest
earnings and safety. A great many of you have lost your life's savings
through dishonest mismanagement of these banks, or other mediums of
savings.
"You who are called the general public; farmer, professional man,
small businessman, white collar worker, laborer, widow, orphan, old
person; those who pinched penny by penny to accumulate a little nest
egg, those who mortgaged your homes, those who saved it at extreme
sacrifices, denying yourselves certain luxuries or necessities, to
the point of avarice--you have listened to the evil persuasion of
high pressure. You have read the enticing overstatements in your
newspapers, financial papers, and company reports, you have listened
to professional tipsters, financial wizards, or your bank's financial
expert and adviser offering you a lifetime opportunity to purchase
investments supposed to pay good interest and dividends. Or you have
diligently read your stockbrokers' pamphlets and daily sheets. You
have watched stock and bond fluctuations on ticker or boards in their
sumptuous board rooms. You have been enticed into high finance, stock
exchanges, boards of trade, and commodities--all of them types of
gambling producing revenue. It is a wonderful system to fleece you
of your savings. Your big financiers with their executives, whom you
helped to elect with your proxies, have a permanent stranglehold on
all your basic industries. They always aim to have you 'the public,'
invest your money into their companies and corporations, in fact,
become majority holders of their securities. It's with your money
that they finance them. They are satisfied to be the insiders with
control and management holding a minority of stock. Presumptuously,
these executives not only pay themselves from $50,000 to $600,000 and
over, yearly salaries, but some of them also have the impudence to get
themselves voted large yearly lifetime retirement pensions. They are
past masters in creating and influencing a demand for their stock among
you, declaring and increasing interests and dividends, manipulating
the stock markets to create an artificial boom, and spreading news of
a bull market. They load you with the supposed gilt-edged investments
at high prices from their portfolios, that they are gradually emptying.
After they have sold their securities to you and have entirely emptied
their strongboxes of them, these philanthropists sell you more on
'short' sales of shares they don't possess. Thus they make you the
'holder of the bag.'
"Then they start their bearish news and decrease and even pass interest
and dividends, bringing on a depression, forcing you to sell at a
sacrifice. They wipe out your margin and your collateral bank loans;
then they gradually purchase the shares back again at bargain prices.
"They are very discriminating. They do not purchase back securities of
those enterprises which by their mismanagement they wrecked. They are
sure of getting control of them again for a song during reorganization.
Thus, you are left with many valueless stock and bond certificates and
with a complete loss of your savings. Every ten or fifteen years they
use the same scheme to plunder and to again entrap you, adding new
dupes each time. Your stock market collapse of 1929 was not a natural
phenomenon, but a man-made concerted crime. With their old tactics of
surreptitiously bidding for stocks, they created a boom and a demand
for the securities, until every one of you got the stock-buying fever
and craze. No one of you was immune--the street sweeper, dishwasher,
bellboy, all were becoming rich, pyramiding your stock holdings, and
your paper profits were increasing from day to day. Then the time came
when the financiers generously unloaded the last of their securities on
you, as well as sold you more on short sales. They then stopped bidding
for stocks, taking out the props from under the market and letting it
decline through its own momentum.
"The market was like a large overflowing lake with a weak dam. It burst
and created a flood overwhelming your whole house of cards in your
financial world. It was followed by the most drastic panicky drive
against all commodities and industrial production prices. The crash
brought on ruin by closing weak banks, building and loan companies,
and financial houses. It wiped out the savings of millions of people
through bankruptcies and foreclosures of an unprecedented panic. The
result was a large world wide depression which lasted for years.
"And when you, the public, had finished throwing over securities at the
bottom of market prices, who purchased them? Why, those who originally
sold them to you.
"Not content to rig the stock markets, they also trade and corner
in futures of your most staple commodities. Again, the 'public' is
inveigled, and again you are made the losers, not only in the gambling
losses but also in the increase of your costs of bread, meats, sugar,
coffee, and other necessities.
"These people are more treacherous to each other than wolves. They
would just as soon ruin their own set as not. Their financial
activities according to your laws are not only legal, but very
respectable.
"They are among the most respected of your world. They belong and are
the leaders of not only your most exclusive clubs, and societies, but
are the top members of your so-called high class social world, and live
in the utmost luxury and affluence.
"The Octopus has other mediums in which his tentacles excel. To exploit
from you enormous profits, he craftily and mercilessly by seductive
propaganda, and intensive methods of advertising, subverted and
succeeded in turning 90% of your Earth population toward habits of
indulgence, greatly contributing to your extensive organic diseases,
and early deaths.
"Your federal, state and city governments attempt to enforce laws but
are powerless against organized crime, because so many of your citizens
prefer criminal activity for its easy money. They control gambling,
narcotic drug sales and other illegal vices in lucrative territories by
their strong-arm methods or corruption.
"Many of you are deeply impregnated with the gambling and venture
habit. Octopus Colossus has invented many more avenues through which
you can give vent to this habit, other tempting pastimes, sports, and
devices to attract your earnings and bets, be they ever so small.
"Gambling is legally forbidden (except on your stock exchanges and
boards of trades); in most of your national states; in spite of that,
it is actively carried on in all its forms as you all know everywhere;
powerful gangsters reach and ever entice from the poorest and their
children. They also live in affluence and luxury and travel around in
expensive bullet-proof automobiles, and live in electrically guarded
and protected mansions.
"At your well known gambling dens of Monte Carlo, many spend the last
moments of their lives sitting in despair on the suicide bench before
jumping over the high cliff.
"Reno, Nevada, called "The Biggest Little City in the World," the
divorce capital of your country, has legal gambling of all kinds and is
wide open twenty-four hours a day. Gamblers two lines deep stand around
dice tables and roulette wheels, play at twenty-one card tables, and
bet on horse races. Many mechanical gambling devices and card games are
constantly busy, mostly on the receiving end.
"Here you can discern your extreme human weakness; in spite of the many
humorous warning posters in one of its most sumptuous gambling houses,
your rich and even your poor take gambling chances.
"Rich society men and women, business and professional men, low and
high paid workingmen and women, housewives, mechanics, laborers and
lumber camp workers, cowboys, old miners, Indians, Chinese, and
Africans--men and women of all ages, social security and state welfare
recipients in all kinds of attire, elbow each other as they stand or
sit alongside each other around these tables, gambling most of their
pay, savings, and pensions away. There are no limits on the bets, from
a nickel up to a thousand dollars. Gambling palaces, night clubs, and
saloons, all with gambling paraphernalia, seem to occupy most of the
largest and best stores and buildings in the business section as well
as in other commercial zones all over the state.
"Most restaurants, retail food stores, and drug stores have gambling
devices of some kind. Outside of mining, gambling may be the largest
paying industry for the whole state and its population. The federal
government, the state, county, and city governments of Nevada derive,
directly and indirectly, large taxes and license revenues from these
games of chance in every one of its cities and villages. If you Earth
people must indulge in that pastime, we here feel that it's very
commendable for these authorities to tax them.
"The gambling system in Nevada is praiseworthy, because it's in the
open and legal, whereas in all your other states, gambling is operated
clandestinely and on much larger scale, where they are thriving on
their pay-offs. They either buy protection from, or are in cahoots
with, politicians, officials, or police helping to greatly corrupt
government. Large numbers of visitors pour into Reno from adjoining
and distant states for divorces and gambling purposes."
Washington, April 22, (UP)--Sen. Estes Kefauver, D., Tenn., said today
that the annual gambling "take" in the United States is reliably
estimated at $20,000,000,000.
Kefauver, in his weekly radio address to Tennessee, did not give the
source of his figure. But he said it amounts to nearly one-half this
country's budget. Crime and gambling have grown to such proportions
that a congressional investigation has become a "matter of urgent
necessity," he said. Kefauver is the author of a resolution to hold
such an inquiry--a resolution now pending before the Senate.
"We ought to cut out the cancer when gambling and crime reach the
point of endangering our system of government," he said.[27]
"These gambling losses do not include the billions lost on the stock
exchanges, and boards of trade.
"Your Octopus derives his blood soaked profits, from your poison
habits, as follows:
"The saloon and liquor lounge is your poor man's heaviest burden. It
not only takes away and robs him and his family of his meager earnings,
but it wrecks his health and turns him into either a criminal or a
drunkard. Every dime or dollar they extract from you means one nursing
bottle less for your babies, less food and medicine for your families.
"Thus come need and destitution. The saloon is one of the chief causes
of poverty and degeneracy, crime, insanity, and suicides. It is both
directly and indirectly the cause of the killing and injury of many
people.
"You may know from your own experience that after drinking a very small
quantity of an alcoholic beverage, you have an obnoxious breath. Nature
biologically did not intend alcohol for human consumption. It is an
unhealthy digestive irritant, stimulant, and narcotic.
"Seemingly many people from top to the bottom of your social strata
have fallen for the wiles of John Barleycorn and his side-kicks. At
sumptuous social functions and at the parties of the poor, alcohol is
freely consumed. It is served in the homes, cocktail lounges, night
clubs, cafes, and the cheapest corner bars. No home of the well-to-do
is fashionable unless it has the latest push wagon liquor service or
a permanent, small, drinking mixing bar. Alcohol drinking seems to be
the fad. The serving of alcoholic beverages is supposedly a sign of
hospitality.
"Afternoon and early evening cocktail hours are an important event to
patronize cocktail lounges and bars. Both sexes guzzle liquor and make
new acquaintances. Women and men companions of all ages, mothers who
are neglecting their children and homes, mothers with their daughters,
youths, businessmen, brokers, politicians, and clubmen mingle
with idlers, gamblers, bookmakers, policy operators, and narcotic
distributors, and other human vultures. All are fashionably attired
with assumed social graces and smooth voices. The smoky and noisy
atmosphere is drowned by music.
"The same kinds of crowds frequent the night clubs with sensually
contorted dancing and floor shows until early morning. That's where
some of you take your daughters, sweethearts, and wives, and you think
you are having a good time. That's where your daughters and sons from
adolescence to maturity go with their dates or to pick up dates. They
think it very smart. That's where they acquire pernicious habits.
"Look or walk into any of the great numbers of night clubs, high class
hotel cocktail lounges, or neighborhood saloons and you will see
daughters, sweethearts, wives, mothers, or sisters, of your friends
and perchance your own, sitting on stools around the bar or in booths,
close to known or unknown male companions. A man may take a girl out
for just a little moonlight spin in his waiting automobile and even
perhaps in a call house, a wayside cabin or in his bachelor apartment.
"In some of the sumptuous ladies' restrooms in the finest of these
places brothel and call house madams sometimes recruit their new
inmates.
"These are the fathers and mothers of your future generations. Half
of your population in the near future may be prison, insane asylum,
or hospital inmates, and a great many of the rest may be atrocious
supermen of Hitler's type of moron.
"The best your federal, state, county and city governments can do is to
tax alcohol and liquor to the limit, which they commendably do.
"No wonder that
"On December 10, 1945, at Miami Beach, Florida, Edgar Hoover, Chief
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, bluntly warned the nation's
police chiefs that the United States is headed for a major crime
wave, with juveniles taking the lead in an era of 'Bloody' postwar
lawlessness.
"Here, at the convention of the nation's police chiefs, Hoover
revealed statistics showing an amazing increase in arrests of
bobby-sox girls of 18 and under. Hoover asserted that one out of
every twenty-three Americans had been criminally fingerprinted by
the F.B.I., whose files, he said, contain records of 6,000,000 such
persons. He cited figures showing that persons under twenty-one commit
15% of all murders, 36% of the robberies, 30% of all rapists, 34% of
thieves, 26% of the arsonists, and 62% of all car thieves.
"Hoover said arrest of bobby-sox girls under eighteen jumped 198%
since 1939, while arrests for boys in the same age group increased 48%
for homicide, 70% for rape, 72% for assault, 55% for auto thefts, and
101% for drunkenness and drunken driving.
"Lawlessness has taken on such proportions as to even startle the
imagination," he said.
"In Miami Beach, December 11, 1945, President Truman in a personal
message called on the nation's police officials to organize a
country wide crime prevention drive aimed at the roots of juvenile
delinquency. Mr. Truman said in the message read to more than 700
delegates to the International Association of Chiefs of Police
Convention that he looked upon the rise of juvenile delinquency as
perhaps the most alarming problem faced by law enforcement officers.
"Americans cannot afford to regard that problem passively or to
postpone the action necessary to its solution," the President said. "I
am convinced that the active cooperation of all welfare, religious and
social agencies, civic leaders, businessmen and citizens in the broad
national crime prevention program directed at the roots of the evil is
the path to be followed and without delay."[28]
"Mr. Edgar Hoover, chief of your Federal Bureau of Investigation, and
your President Harry Truman know full well one of the main reasons for
these conditions; but with liquor and alcohol traffic protected by the
21st Amendment to your Constitution, with the strong financial interest
in the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol, and with the strong
propaganda which strengthens the desire for the existence of these
conditions, their hands as heads of Government and Investigation Bureau
are tied and powerless. They and your Congress would greatly hesitate
to try to do away with this evil, if doing so would close those
industries with their large numbers of workers out of work and bring
back prohibition conditions.
"Man's poison habits are often the cause of an innocent person losing
his life or being disabled through the recklessness of the moderate or
social drinker.
"Your Congress should at least pass, as soon as possible, a Federal law
completely outlawing the drinking of alcoholic liquor, no matter how
moderate, to anyone who has a driver's license for motor cars, buses,
aeroplanes, or any other rapidly moving vehicle and make it a crime
punishable with strict and heavy penalties. Driver's licenses should be
issued by the Federal government only, after a thorough examination.
"Tobacco is another avenue where your Octopus gains nearly four billion
dollars per year.
"If you smoke a pack a day, you inhale 400 milligrams of nicotine a
week."
Said Dr. J.L. Myers of Kansas City, "Nicotine irritates the mucous
membranes of the respiratory tract. Tobacco tar injures those
membranes."
"Non-smokers, in four years at Yale and at Amherst, grew more in
height and weight and lung capacity than did their smoking colleagues."
Knute Rockne was definite: "Tobacco slows the reflexes, and any
advertising which says it helps an athlete is falsehood and fraud."
Habitual smokers have a 50 percent higher incidence of palpitation of
the heart than non-smokers. There is evidence that heart disease is
more prevalent among smokers than among non-smokers.
It is generally agreed that cancer of the mouth, tongue and lips is
unduly prevalent among smokers.[29]
"Study fire statistics from your fire insurance companies. They will
show you that most fires you have are started by smokers.
"One of the more sinister activities of the Octopus lies in relation to
drugs.
"The drug habit, as I understand, has been acquired by many on your
earth through your purchase and use of many cheap, unsuspected mild
patent medicines, or through your doctor's prescriptions for medical
purposes, or through the narcotic drug traffic by your gangsters, with
the connivance of some of your unscrupulous politicians. The Octopus's
slimy tentacles here surpass themselves. Once the habit takes hold of
its victim it is very hard to free him of it, and he becomes enslaved
to its use. Unless he gets his daily dose, his overpowering desire and
need for it become acute. In that state he will commit any crime to
obtain the drug to alleviate his acute hunger.
"Some of your doctors, nurses, medicine manufacturers, mostly your
gangsters are to blame. Those who, against human decency and law,
deliberately induce those tendencies are reprehensible human hyenas.
There is nothing so monstrous as the extreme lust and selfishness of
some of you who grind out profits through the suffering of your fellow
man. Through neglect or by design you turn him into a lifelong addict
so that you can live in affluent luxury and security. There is no
conscience guilt, compassion, nor pity, in your soul for him and his
babies; but inexorable retribution is bound to seek you out and have
vengeance against you and yours in your future progeny.
"Your intensive money-craving tends to cause you, when you are ill, to
hazard your health by delaying medical examination, by trying to cure
yourself with home remedies or patent medicines, very often risking
your health and life by postponement. For the lack of funds, you are
often at great disadvantage by not being able to procure competent
medical attention.
"Politics and certain politicians give the Octopus another stronghold.
"Earth--Man by instinct is not wicked, he is molded by environment
and force of circumstances. Beset with the stress of uncertainties
and insecurity of life. And with vicissitudes of selfishness, greed,
temptations, desires for riches and power. Contributive to the breaking
down in some of you of love, honor, chastity, character, honesty,
respect, ethics and morality.
"Your lack of our sense of thought reading, and under your present
moneyism system of life the best form of your earth government cannot
guard itself against isolated cases of weak, unscrupulous, and
treacherous persons.
"Some of your opportunists, amateur and professional politicians, with
the lust for wealth and easy money, seek and secure high offices,
and permanent soft jobs in your Government. Few hirelings of crooked
political bosses and machines reach high places in Government, or
attain them through political campaign work, contributions, fixed
elections, and dishonest political maneuvers.
"Some few do not hesitate while in public office, through inside
information and political maneuvers, to influence and benefit through
a rise or decline of stocks, bonds, commodities, and real estate.
They use it to speculate on the commodity markets tending to increase
food costs. They obtain high salaries, Government offices, and other
positions for their near and distant inexperienced relatives and
friends, and get kick-backs on their salaries.
"Few of them have procured their nominations and elections by paying
for them in advance or by promising future favors. They get your vote
by promises that very often are not kept. Some officials sometimes
have been tempted to accept bribes. Dishonest ones demand them openly
or by subterfuge. In return, they help individuals or organizations
to operate unlawfully. Some, in Government office, have helped to
contribute to crimes of the worst exploitation, and extortion, against
your nationals, or other nations.
"Your money packs the potentiality of the greatest power force and
medium for most all your evils and is a constant strong tempting
magnet staining with its putrid stigma of corruption, some of your low
and high pillars of your temples of justice, law, righteousness, and
benevolence, since historical times they have shaken its foundation and
toppled over the weak edifice you call civilization.
"No matter how impregnable your officials may be, their jobs are
difficult. There are always a few who sooner or later are tempted
by economic necessity or desire for social betterment to advance
themselves at the expense of their principles. The men resisting must
have the integrity of flint. It is unfortunate that the weak ones by
their action break down the good done by the strong. In your three
branches of government we find that the officials of the upper strata,
except for a few isolated instances, have kept their records clean.
"Your world history shows that dictatorship, unjust political, or
government ruling power nearly always caused political violence
and the early death of most of your leaders through revolutions,
assassinations, overwork, and extreme tension.
"Even your religions are not immune from its contamination. Your money
greed Octopus through his enticement has unlawfully violated and
corrupted your most sacred religious commandments and sacraments.
"Disrupting and weakening your safety protection is another function of
your Octopus.
"Property caused you to surround with guards all your government
departments and bureaus, and all your business establishments and
industry, from the largest to the smallest. Your office, your home, in
fact, every building at immense costs is provided with all safeguards,
contrivances, and precautions.
"Your legislative departments everywhere have passed innumerable
stringent laws and created law enforcement departments of all kinds.
You have built your so-called impregnable safes, safe deposit vaults,
and burglar alarms. You have developed intricate and costly systems of
business protective methods; and services and guards of all kinds to
check and counter check every deal, item, and number of articles, down
to the last penny or article of the lowest value.
"You have insurance of all kinds against loss and fraud; real estate
title insurance, indemnity bonds, postal insurances. With all these
precautions, you are still vulnerable to loss through your most trusted
partners or employees, through your competitor, through unforeseen
circumstances, through dishonest and crafty speculative plots against
you by individuals, gangsters, or through a rapacious dictator, through
plundering governments, or through predatory national wars.
"The double latches on your windows or the double locks on your doors
do not always protect you. Day or night, awake or asleep, through all
the regions on your Earth, you are prey to the most atrocious crimes.
Alive or dead, your body is in jeopardy. Alive, you are in danger of
being blackmailed, kidnapped, or waylaid openly or from ambush. Some
will kill you for a few pennies or for your clothes; in a rooming house
in England, persons were murdered in order that their bodies might be
sold to dissecting rooms; and ghouls may desecrate your grave to sell
your body.
"The overwhelming temptation for the possession of money, wealth,
affluence and power is so great that all your laws, and enforcement
agencies are powerless against your criminal elements, with venal
tendencies in some members of your police departments, and in certain
members of large political organizations, one of them is reported to
be dominated by an underworld leader, and whose friends are appointed
to official positions, when a court witness can be intimidated or
murdered, when the services of a murderer can be ordered or bought, as
per a statement to your senate crime committee that there exists an
underworld nationwide Murder, Inc., when some of your law enforcement
officers, some of their superiors and some politicians associate with
and are friends and partners of criminals, when gangsters who not only
contribute to and are active in political campaigns buy protection, and
carry open shooting and bombing wars on the crowded streets of your
cities in the daytime, and when your most secret government and arms
information is easily obtained by other nations through your traitors
and their spies, you certainly have no law enforcing security."
"Washington, (AP)--F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover said today that
crimes in 1946 broke all records for the past decade. Every 5.7
minutes, there was a case of murder, manslaughter, rape, or assault to
kill."
"Major crimes in all categories throughout the country totaled
1,685,203 last year, an increase of 119,622 over 1945, he said in a
report. He noted this meant an average of one such crime every 18.7
seconds."[30]
"Moscow, Ida., July 20 (UP)--A serious crime is being committed in the
United States every 18.7 seconds, Paul Shine, assistant F.B.I. agent
in charge at Butte, Mont., told Law Enforcement Institute delegates
today at the University of Idaho, here."
"Shine added that each day 36 persons are slain, 150 robberies take
place and 1,032 burglaries are committed."[31]
"What about the numbers of hushed up, unknown and secret crimes?
"Your overcrowded prisons where you confine your adults and very often
in the same cells mixed with your juvenile offenders are breeding
places not only for many hardened criminals and murderers but also
habitual sex depraved fiends. Many of them become habitual drug
addicts, induced by their fellow prisoners, or by some of their guards
who sell the drugs.
"There is no need for me to detail all crimes and offenses for
material gain; where your Octopus excels in his violent and constant
aggressiveness. Your newspapers every day, everywhere give you
innumerable, criminal deeds and happenings.
"You men may have been wondering why I have again gone into such
detail to sketch briefly some of the ills of the world in which you
have lived. You may feel that we Martians should consider the case
hopeless. But the contrary is true. Because there have been and are
many leaders of integrity and high principles in your midst, we feel
they should be commended and given the support of greater numbers of
your citizens. The paths of virtue, kindness and tolerance should be
made more attractive than the paths of dishonesty, vice and crime. Much
of the energy of your people is dissipated in activities of the Octopus
that destroy not only themselves, but those near them and around them.
We here in Mars believe that there are not enough of your citizens
awake and aware of what is happening. Many of those living in palaces,
beautiful suburbs, or in the quiet villages are not aware of the
crowded living quarters, the poverty and the ignorance of many of their
fellow citizens who live in the slums where fresh air and sunshine are
lacking, and sanitary conditions are most primitive, where your poor
are crowded in dark, filthy small living quarters, where large families
with many sick and diseased adults, children and animal pets live
together, communicating diseases to each other. These families barely
have enough for necessities, causing malnutrition, and desperation.
There is no privacy in their home life; parents and small and
adolescent children of both sexes live together in small apartments, in
tenement houses, cabins, and shacks, where families, and vice dens are
neighbors.
"Narrow, filthy yards are full of wash lines; streets and sidewalks
are crowded on both sides with pushcarts loaded with fish, fruits, and
vegetables and smelly eatables; gutters reek with rotting garbage, but
the poor man's club, the saloon, is at every corner, which gets most of
his earnings.
"This is fertile soil where crime and vice are born and flourish, where
venereal diseases are rampant, and where many of their daughters and
wives are forced or enticed to become drunkards and prostitutes. Vice,
disease and crime wave epidemics that begin in these slums, spreads
quickly to and within your own neighborhood and you are not immune
from its contamination, suffering or falling its victim.
"Your money is the primary and only cause which creates some of
your greedy and hard driving executives and employers, disloyal,
distrustful, malicious, and wastefulness in some employees, false
friends, extreme envy, dangerous, and criminal covetousness, undue
influence, bribery, corruption, extortion, and brings into existence
among some of your so-called educated, ruling and leader classes
prejudices to an irrational influence and selfishness; in their social
intercourses, class struggles and human exploitation resulting in all
the evils of your world. From your infancy your cruel taskmasters
inculcated and built up in you a deeply rooted man-made system like a
quagmire into which you sink deeper and deeper.
"You are completely under the spell of your Octopus. You yield to
its will and influence. Your reason, intelligence, will, conscience,
emotions, in fact, even your soul is directed by its grasping
tentacles. He is the Godfather of 'Mammon' the Demon you worship, above
mother love, children's love, parent love, mate and brother love.
"Unless you drive these money changers out of your temple, chaos,
terror, forced slavery, annihilation of most of your humanity, complete
destruction of your present culture, inventions, and discoveries, all
that you have built and created will become rubble, and deeply buried
and earth covered. The few left of you will revert to the primitive
status of your primordial life.
"Indications point that the Octopus now even in his own stronghold,
there is the beginning of decay, but he is still all powerful, and full
of fight.
"My mental vision discerns beyond the distant horizon, after the storm
a rainbow, a ray of hope, with symptoms of a gradual change in his
fundamental functions."
Addressing himself to me, Sun-Rank Banard said, "Now Lieutenant
Balmore, I want to let you know that the President of our planet is to
tender you a farewell dinner before your departure.
"Among those invited will be the highest dignitaries, of all races
of Mars; they will include the President, his cabinet members,
supreme court judges, congressional leaders, representatives of some
professional and craft academies, including some of our top scientists,
and some of our highest Sun Rank members, and not forgetting also
myself.
"They all look forward and are very desirous to meet and make the
acquaintance of men of their sister planet. You and your friends may be
called on and are expected to speak; especially on matters pertaining
to Earth conditions.
"We are aware that certain members of your crew were active in Germany
before and during the last War. Being that we all know in detail of all
the atrocious happenings, we would prefer that they would recount them
to us.
"You will be advised of the exact date."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 27: _Nevada State Journal_, April 23, 1950.]
[Footnote 28: _Reno Evening Gazette_, November 14, 1947.]
[Footnote 29: Page 1, _Reader's Digest_, January 1950 issue. "How
Harmful Are Cigarettes," by Roger William Riis.]
[Footnote 30: _Reno Evening Gazette_, March 10, 1947.]
[Footnote 31: _Nevada State Journal_, July 21, 1949.]