As I recall, Tim, Hitler began with "an ideological purge."
Apart from that, you raise the point of EP's not "seeing
himself as belonging to a mob." I don't see how that sense
of individuality of his, and of many other intellectuals
who turned to fascism, prevented him from subscribing to
fascist ideology. I thought we all knew that the only mob
mentality Pound detested was the bourgeois-democratic one
(well, okay, he detested communism also)
and that the turn to fascism seemed to him and others entirely
congenial with their pronounced sense of individuality. Hey,
isn't the fascist leader the ideal of the Romantic Hero in
political translation?
Apologies if I've repeated points already made in recent weeks
during which I've been unable to follow the discussion threads.
==Dan
At 08:33 AM 7/22/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Dan,
>Pound uses anti-Jewish epithets. He blames war on the putative machinations
>of Jewish international banking families. He would deny Jews the
>opportunity to work in civil service. Pound was interested, I believe, in
>an ideological purge, in removing Jews from positions of power. However, I
>do not find evidence in his published poetry or polemics of his ever having
>advocated genocide, overtly or covertly, actively or passively. From the
>perspective hindsight gives us, we recognize Pound's voice as one voice
>among many voices which, when regarded as one voice, seem to us to be
>assenting to, if not openly advocating, the wholesale slaughter of a people.
>But Pound did not seem himself as belonging to a large mob. The impression
>one gets from the broadcasts is that, if anything, Pound felt isolated, that
>he was reaching very few people indeed. Morever, where he seems to be aware
>that his anti-Jewish rhetoric could bring physical harm and destruction of
>property upon those whom he would have regarded as "innocent Jews", as
>victims of the "Jew bankers", he goes out of his way to address his imagined
>audience, advising them _not_ to start a pogrom. I know of no evidence
>which shows that he was aware that his rhetoric, which relies upon
>anti-Jewish feeling as an engine of social change, might lead to something
>worse than 'street violence'.
>
>Where would you put Pound? In Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell? If in Purgatory
>or Hell, please describe the torments which you would consider apposite.
>
>Tim Romano
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