"Wars are made to make debt"
About this Quote
A stark economic claim sits behind the epigram: modern wars are engineered not merely for territory or ideology but to expand credit, bind nations to creditors, and turn violence into long-term financial obligation. The phrase compresses a central conviction in Ezra Pound's lifelong battle against what he called usury. He saw the money system as debt-driven, with private finance creating credit, renting it to governments at interest, and profiting most when states must borrow at enormous scale. War, he argued, was the largest engine of such borrowing, and therefore a temptation for those who lend.
The line belongs to the interwar and World War II milieu in which Pound wrote and agitated. Traumatized by World War I and disillusioned by the Depression, he embraced economic cranks and read C. H. Douglas's Social Credit theories, which cast modern finance as a parasitic abstraction draining real production. In the Cantos and in polemics like the Usura canto, he linked interest-bearing debt to cultural decay. He notoriously amplified these ideas in fascist Italy, folding them into bigotry and conspiracy, a stain that cannot be separated from his public voice.
Stripped of that toxic frame, the observation points to a verifiable mechanism. Since the 18th century, states have financed wars by issuing bonds, central banks have stabilized those bond markets, and the resulting debts have reorganized domestic life through taxation, austerity, and inflation. War spending enriches contractors in the short term and secures a stream of interest payments in the long term. Debt then governs the peace: it disciplines budgets, justifies policy, and outlives the causes that sparked the fighting.
The aphorism does not explain every war, and it reduces complex causality to a single lever. But it sharpens attention on the symbiosis between militarism and finance. Who borrows, who lends, who profits, who pays, and for how long? The battlefields end; the bonds mature. Pound's line insists that the aftermath is the point.
The line belongs to the interwar and World War II milieu in which Pound wrote and agitated. Traumatized by World War I and disillusioned by the Depression, he embraced economic cranks and read C. H. Douglas's Social Credit theories, which cast modern finance as a parasitic abstraction draining real production. In the Cantos and in polemics like the Usura canto, he linked interest-bearing debt to cultural decay. He notoriously amplified these ideas in fascist Italy, folding them into bigotry and conspiracy, a stain that cannot be separated from his public voice.
Stripped of that toxic frame, the observation points to a verifiable mechanism. Since the 18th century, states have financed wars by issuing bonds, central banks have stabilized those bond markets, and the resulting debts have reorganized domestic life through taxation, austerity, and inflation. War spending enriches contractors in the short term and secures a stream of interest payments in the long term. Debt then governs the peace: it disciplines budgets, justifies policy, and outlives the causes that sparked the fighting.
The aphorism does not explain every war, and it reduces complex causality to a single lever. But it sharpens attention on the symbiosis between militarism and finance. Who borrows, who lends, who profits, who pays, and for how long? The battlefields end; the bonds mature. Pound's line insists that the aftermath is the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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