[WEI] > I myself pointed out that Pound advocated a “pogrom at the top” a
few weeks
> ago.  Perhaps you missed that  ...

No, I saw it.  I believe it is one's obligation, when engaged in a public
damnation of a dead poet for crimes against humanity, not to develop
_shorthand_ ways of referring to the matters under discussion which might
prejudice the outcome.


[WEI]> So I will pose the question for you:  Is it really significant that
Pound
> wanted a “pogrom from the top.”  Pound says we should look at the true
> meanings of words.  What does Pogrom mean?  “An organized ande often
> officially encouraged massacre or persecution of a minority group, esp one
> conducted against the Jews”.   Whether such a pogrom is from the top, or
the
> bottom, it is racist in the extreme, as well as being incendiary, an
> incitement to murder of a GROUP of people based on their race, don’t you
> think?

Yes, there is a a real significance, in my view, between "pogrom" and
"pogrom at the top".  If I thought that Pound had intended the pogrom to
refer to the Jewish people as a whole, then I would have a very different
view of him than I do.  Moreover, does he not suggest, in fact, that there
might even be a more humane way of conducting this "pogrom" -- by putting
the Jewish financiers in prison on an island somewhere?  He is using the
word "pogrom" figuratively, for rhetorical purposes.  His rhetoric, as I
wrote, does tend to work against his finer distinctions.  In hindsight, we
understand the wider context of this  rhetoric better than Pound did.



[TR] He goes on to say, in that regard, that the Jewish bankers are the
        Jewish people's problem.

[WEI] Do you take him at his word on this?

Yes and no.  To the extent that the phrase "their problem" means "a problem
they must solve, whether ot not it is of their own making," I would agree
with Pound in one sense, and disagree with him in another. The perception
that the world was being sent to hell in a handbasket as a result of the
manipulations by a small cabal of international Jewish financiers was
"their" problem, in the sense that the diffuse hatred against Jews in
general that arose therefrom is a problem FOR THEM. The perception and
hatred were not of their making, and in that sense, were NOT their problem.
While it was certainly in their own interests as a people to solve that
problem, as a dispersed, minority polity, they were unable to do so.  Today
there is Israel.


[WEI] >He also said, while in Italy, that he
> approved of the 1942-43 rules which denied all Jews the right to serve in
> the government.  If Jewish bankers were the only problem, and if they were
> only the Jews problem, then why did Pound (a non-Jew) spend so much time
> speaking about Jews; why did he support the sacking of all Jews in gov’t
> positions in Italy (most of them non-bankers); and why does he use the
> racial epithets (kike, yid, etc) so indiscriminately, and so often?
>

I have understood Pound's desire to remove all Jews from civil service in
the context of his anti-communism. Pound wants a sweeping ideological purge.
I refer you to his frequent remarks about the Old Testatment, the hebrew
scriptures, being the record of a semi-barbaric tribe of herdsmen,
unsuitable, as a moral doctrine, for a modern civilized society. Pound saw
the worldview of contemporary Jews as amenable to communism. Yes, the
anti-Jewish slurs are designed for rabble-rousing, to use resentment and
hatred as an engine of social and political change....but ideological
change, not genocide.

Regards
Tim Romano