Tim Romano wrote:

>
>as something at once both broader and more specific than a rejection of
>Christ and Christianity.  Ezalino rejects the notion of a "chosen people".
>He denies the claim of the israelites to any sort of privileged status as a
>people.

No rational being can support the notion of a chosen people.

But does Pound himself reject the notion of chosen people, or of chosen
individuals?  In this letter to Lewis, written in 1936, Pound might appear
to believe in the Italians as a chosen people.

  Now that the Empire exists, it needs a Center in
  which intelligence and the strength of the race
  are concentrated, but from which in turn the light
  of its civilization spreads across and penetrates
  the lesser nuclei. . . The New Order will speak from
  Rome in ways neither heard nor dreamed of, in ways
  foreseen only by a few people of ardent imagination



Recall also that even as late as May, 1943, when Italy had lost virtually
everything in Ethiopia, Pound would still assert

  if ever a race could colonize and bring civilization and
  the benefits thereof into colonized land,  that nation is
  Italy, and that race is the Latin race of this peninsula . . .
         (Doob, 308).

Does this assertion somehow belie Pound's objection to the "chosen people"
status of the Jews?  Does it indicate, not that Pound was against the notion
of a chosen people, but that he simply thought the Jewish race did not
deserve that status?

On the issue of chosen individuals:

Some people qualify Pound's religious outlook as pagan. We might recall that
Pound on one occasion objects to Christianity on the grounds that the gods
cannot love all human beings.  They love, "the elect", he says, citing
Odysseus as an example of person loved by the gods, elected and favored.

So for Pound there are "chosen" individuals? Is Pound's view, that universal
love is impossible, that even the Divine cannot love all human beings,
tenable? Is it consistent or more sensible than the view that there are no
chosen people?  And how is it really any different to suggest that there are
chosen individuals and not chosen people?

Pound's disapproval of the Jews is, or course, in part, connected with his
disapproval of bank owners.  But does it make any more sense to say the Jews
are to be UNIVERSALLY DESPISED AS A A RACE than to say that the Jews are NOT
a chosen people?  Why does Pound reject one absurd generalization about Jews
and affirm another opposite and equally absurd generalization, namely, that
Jews are to be blamed for the financial ills of Western civilization?


What would your view be?  Are there such things as chosen individuals? Does
the Divine (God, or the Gods) act in such a way as to favor certain
individuals as opposed to others?


Salut et Fraternite,

Wei

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