Wei,

You write:

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

I agree  ... almost without reservation or qualification. A quibble -- I'd
change one word: "rational" to "enlightened".

You do well to remind us that Pound's notions of the good empire appear to
be based on a belief in some form of superiority, and  that this belief
seems to come quite close to the idea of "a chosen people" which elsewhere
he rejects:

> 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?

Pound believed there was a conspiracy among a small clique of Jewish
financiers to destroy the world, to turn free men into automata, into slaves
of the machine, slaves of the money principle, which uses up men's energy in
the service of making a few men billionaires. In the broadcasts, Pound goes
on at length about these machinations. The influence of these money-men
represents the inverse of the "light of civilization" that Pound envisions
as emanating from Rome.  Pound says that their plan is to destroy the
race-strength of the peoples they wish to enslave.  Thus, the Latin race
does not represent so much a "chosen race" as a savior race, a heroic race,
a race whose identity and solidarity is strong enough to withstand the
corrupting influences of the feared cabal. In the broadcasts Pound often
alludes to the destruction of the physical health of the racial breeding
stock, and  he frequently refers, metaphorically and literally to
sexually-transmitted diseases, such as syphilis.



> 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.
>

Actually, if I recall correctly, Pound words are something to the effect
that it is easier to imagine gods who prefer elect individuals than a god
whose love is boundless and unqualified.  Weeks ago, I said that it is
helpful, when reading Pound's works that touch on religious experience and
the gods, to make a distinction between how men are given to imagine the
gods, on the one hand, and the  divine nature, on the other. The point Pound
is making here is a sociological one, not a theological one:  gods who have
loves and hates, gods who play favorites, are more "real" to the people than
a God of infinite mercy. Pound wants the experience of divinity to be one
that is not merely empty ritual or disputation.  "Hay acqui mucho
catolicismo, pero muy poco religion."  When Pound is talking in a
theological frame, he equates Deity with light and transcendence, i.e. not
in anthropomorphic terms.

> 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?

Pound makes a distinction between the "man-in-the-street" Jew and the
"man-at-the-top" Jew.  The man-in-the-street Jew is, he writes, the victim
of the Jew banker. The man-at-the-top Jew  "scurries down some hole in the
ghetto",  leaving the innocent hardworking Jew to "take the bullets". So,
Pound advises, if you are going to start a pogrom, "start it at the top".  I
think that Pound did not believed that the Jews  as a race are to be
"universally despised".  Pound would think that certain Jews are to be
despised and hated for their nefarious intentions, and that all other Jews
are _not to be trusted_.  Pound's anti-semitism was in some respects like
the officially sanctioned mistrust shown Japanese-American citizens in the
United States during the second world war.  There are shades of evil, shades
of injustice.  That is what Pound means when he talks about "proportional
goodness".  As bad as the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens
were, they were not extermination camps. Japanese-americans endured  hatred
and injustice borne out of fear, but not, strictly speaking, atrocity or
"crimes against humanity".  Let no one mistake my attempt to put Pound's
anti-semitism in context as support for japanese internment or as a
condoning of the crimes committed against or the atrocities inflicted upon
Jews.

Tim Romano



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