POETIC LICENCE
The cataclysmic events of the First World War (1914-1918) shaped the lives of artists, writers, poets, men of letters and ordinary people during the inter-war years. A generation of young men, of all trades, professions and backgrounds, had gone off to war in their thousands under the impression that they were embarking on an adventure which would last a matter of weeks. The four traumatic years of the ‘War to End All Wars’ left survivors emotionally stunned. (See Links page for War Poetry Website) “Our power of feeling or caring beyond immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed”, observed John Maynard Keynes in 1920.
In his autobiography, Insanity Fair, the journalist Douglas Reed paints a powerful picture of his personal experiences during and after the First World War. Like so many young men of his generation, he went off to war in 1918 when he was just 19 years old. As an international journalist moving between the capital cities of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled to comprehend the course of events, writing his recollections as the Second World War approached. By 1945, Insanity Fair had run to fifty-two impressions.
The twentieth century financial system which made the First World War feasible was the subject of comprehensive study by Clifford Hugh Douglas. Despite Douglas’ analysis of the relationship between finance and real-world policy formation, throughout the inter-war years financial policies leading inevitably to poverty amidst plenty and further warfare were persistently adopted. Subsequently, the worldwide Social Credit movement which arose during the 1920s and 1930s was systematically airbrushed out of public memory. The vast body of literature on the subject of Social Credit is documented elsewhere on this website.
The Social Credit debate was supported by a wide variety of poetry, fictional and autobiographical writing, much of which is currently being made available again, in print or electronically. Eimar O’Duffy’s Goshawk Trilogy, King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, and Asses in Clover illuminates the lunacy of maintaining outdated and irrelevant economic theory as a guide to practical policy formation.
King Goshawk and the Birds (1926)
Extracts from the first book of Eimar O’Duffy’s Trilogy can be read here, with accompanying Commentary. Here, and in Asses in Clover, O'Duffy takes up the theme of the futility of waste and war in the twentieth century.
Asses in Clover (1933)
Extracts from the final book of the O'Duffy Trilogy can be read from here.
Commentary to 'Asses in Clover by Frances Hutchinson
Other Literature
'Pearls of Wisdom' by William Dobson
Poems
The Banker and Economist' by Eimar O'Duffy (1933)
'Our Problem and a Solution' by Bob Harvey (2008)