Wei, "Do you have another view?" you ask. "But of course", I answer; and
it is not entirely unrelated to Pound's view also. I mean his real view, not
the demonic one you have designed for him. If you wish to know I, like
Pound, am disappointed in many ways in my government for forsaking its
original purpose to be a democratically elected government "of the people,
by the people, and for the people" and evolving into something else. Pound
and I are not the only ones who feel this way at times.
I'm sure you do too.
    Your problem is that you take everything Pound said at face value. I do
not. I do not also believe everything in the Bible. Still this does not
prompt me to throw out either Pound or the Bible in their entirety. The same
can be said of Confucius. Remember the admonition of St.Paul to consider
everything but only keep the good.
    As an American whose ancestor fled religious oppression in 1751 and
settled in this country to later fight in the Revolutionary War for freedom,
and whose ancestors and relatives have fought in every war since then, I
would be a disappointment to them all if I were affraid to exercise my
freedom to criticize the government which is intended to be built on the
principals for which they fought.
    But it is one thing to believe in an ideal and another thing to be blind
to the reality around you. And in the former instance I ask you to consider
the words of a severe critic of democracy who contends that it is not what
it purports to be. It is from Oswald Spengler and although he was not a Nazi
and rejected them, they used his criticism nonetheless. He writes;

    "As the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliments
will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As then sceptre
and crown, so now peoples' rights are paraded for the multitude, and all the
more punctiliously the less they really signify - it was for this reason
that the cautious Augustus never let pass an opportunity of emphasizing old
and venerated customs of Roman freedom. But the power is migrating even
to-day, and correspondingly elections are degenerating for us into the farce
that they were in Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of
those who possess it,(1.) and election affairs become a preconcerted game
that is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally
REVOLUTION IN LEGITIMATE FORMS, it has exhausted those forms, and what takes
place is that mankind "elects" its Destiny again by the primitive methods of
bloody violence when the politics of money become intolerable.
    Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has
destroyed intellect. But, just because the illusion that actuality can allow
itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away;
because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will CAN BE
OVERTHROWN ONLY BY ANOTHER (for that is the great human experience of
Contending States periods); there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old
and worthy tradition that still lingers alive, Men are tired to disgust of
money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some
real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and
duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which
the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths.
Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has
saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of high
money-distaining ethic, everthing that is intrinsically sound enough to be,
in Frederick the Great's words, the SERVANT - the hard-working,
self-sacrificing, caring SERVANT - of the State, all that I have described
elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast to Capitalism - all this
becomes suddenly the focus of immense life-forces. Caesarism GROWS on the
soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood
tradition."

    And to this he appended the following footnote:

    (1.) "Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e. poor) parties
necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the Bourse.
Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the
Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true to-day as it
was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries. Fifty per cent of
mass-leaders are procurable by money, office, or opportunities to 'come in
on the ground-floor,' and with them they bring their whole party."

     I see Pound as a poor player caught in this political evolution , now
taking the part of democracy now taking  the part of Caesarism, unaware of
his own destiny in the mean time.
    I have said before that from my vantage point I think that the jury is
still out, but Spengler's criticism is hard to refute regardless of how much
we wish to defend our system or rationalize its shortcomigs. We will see how
coming generations view them.
    Incidently, I was a councilman in my village for the last four years and
recently was defeated in my bid for mayor. My criticism is heart-felt.

CM