It does matter (to me) if Pound regarded himself, or should have regarded himself, as complicit in these acts. So what he knew and when he knew it is a significant issue. Signing letters 'Heil Hitler' is NOT evidence of knowledge of knowledge of genocide. Pound cites Mein Kampf a number of times in the broadcasts. Nor is that evidence of knowledge of genocide.
Tim Romano
----- Original Message -----
From: William Stoneking <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 10:46 AM
Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
> Pound is known to have signed letters, "Heil Hitler".
> I can't give you the exact source for this, but it was something
> I found in my research several years ago. Then there was
> Pound's infamous reply: "There weren't any gas ovens in Italy!"
> WHEN he knew is not so important as the fact that HE DID
> KNOW... and said nothing about it! If in the Confucian sense,
> the poet is one who advises the King... one can only wonder
> (and marvel in horror) at the advice he might've given
> Shicklegurger!!!! or however you spell that guy's name!
>
> Stoneking
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 10:30 AM
> Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
>
>
> > Jonathan,
> > I know there are people who think the stories of genocide are all
> fabrications. I am not one of them. You don't need to point me to Goldhagen.
> You write that "Pound had no Goldhagen to help him. But he knew." How, when,
> and what did Pound know? I asked specifically about Pound's knowledge of
> Ethnic Cleansing or genocide _during the period of his wartime broadcasts_.
> The evidence you have cited does not address the specific question asked.
> Not that Pound's knowledge post-war is unimportant. But I am trying to
> approach these questions in an orderly manner and trying not to smear the
> man with the blood on other peoples' hands. My question is Did Pound have
> the blood of the Jewish people on his own hands during 1942-1943? Not
> literally, of course. But was he aware of what was going on in Germany, and
> did he perceive himself to be complicit? As I wrote, Pound says several
> times, "Don't start a pogrom."
> >
> > With respect to Marianne Moore's early relationship with The Criterion:
> could you provide the bibliographic details? I will follow them up. Did
> Pound read her letters?
> >
> > When Dorothy refers to her transportation as "cattle trucks for goyim" she
> may be expressing a view that Pound had long expressed: that America and
> Britain were coming to resemble the degraded conditions in Russia, whose
> slave-labor projects, Pound had claimed, were financed by international
> capital. Read the broadcasts where he talks about e.e. cummings's book
> EIMIE, about the author's trip to Russia in the 1930s, and the other
> broadcasts where communist Russia is the topic, for examples of this sort of
> rhetoric. This is not necessarily an allusion to the cars that took the Jews
> to the death camps.
> >
> > As for the term "counter-propagandist": there was Allied propaganda and
> counter-propaganda during the war, and Axis propaganda and
> counter-propaganda. Pound frequently states that American and British
> citizens are being duped by the newspapers and he makes it his job to offer
> a different "take" on events. He saw himself as fighting AGAINST a
> well-orchestrated propaganda machine, and many of his broadcasts express
> this point-of-view.
> > Tim Romano
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 3:59 AM
> > Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
> >
> >
> > > At 12:30 AM 11/27/99 -0500, you wrote:
> > > >I would like to be directed to the evidence of Pound's "blood-dripping"
> > > racism, as you put it. So far, I've found nothing to indicate that Pound
> > > the wartime counter-propagandist approved (or was even aware) of
> anything
> > > remotely resembling Ethnic Cleansing or genocide. Or perhaps you meant
> > > something else by "blood-dripping"?
> > >
> > > I meant that the whole racist mental pathology is dripping with blood,
> > > historically speaking. But as to Pound's awareness, I refer you to
> > > _Letters in Captivity_, letter 49, p. 187. There, after visiting Ezra at
> > > the DTC, Dorothy reports this way about her trip home under chaotic
> postwar
> > > conditions: " . . . boarded the train, a merce, with cattle trucks for
> > > goyim." About which we can say:
> > >
> > > 1. "Merce," without the grave accent over the last letter, is Italian
> for
> > > freight train. Elsewhere in the book the word is translated correctly,
> but
> > > here Omar Pound and Robert Spoo make an interesting Freudian slip: they
> > > render "a merce" as "Thank God!"
> > >
> > > 2. "Goyim" is a Hebrew word meaning "non-Jews." By Jews it's ordinarily
> > > used in a derogatory sense, as the Pounds knew. I.e., Dorothy here is
> > > indulging herself and Ezra in a fairly nasty bit of self-pity, meaning
> > > "They're doing to us what we did to them!" Compare T.S. Eliot's French
> idol
> > > Charles Maurras, Nazi collaborator. When the court handed down his
> prison
> > > sentence after the war, he shouted, "C'est la revanche de Dreyfus!"
> > >
> > > 3. Date of Dorothy's letter: November 13, 1945. That's just six months
> > > after General Jodl surrendered to General Eisenhower. Several years
> later
> > > Sylvia Plath would write, "An engine, an engine, / chuffing me off like
> a
> > > Jew," but the information was out and available much earlier. It was
> shown
> > > in the same newsreels where Pound saw Mussolini's battered body, for
> > > instance. Or, if you insist on literary evidence, Vasily Grossman's 1944
> > > eyewitness article "Treblinskii ad" -- the first published account of
> the
> > > death camps -- was available in a French translation ("L'Enfer de
> > > Treblinka") as of 1945.
> > >
> > > 5. More generally: Daniel Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing Executioners_
> may
> > > not be worth much as history, but the phenomenon of its reception in
> > > Germany is worth a great deal. Well no, not all the Lager were in
> faraway
> > > Poland; there were some 10,000 concentration camps within Germany. Well
> > > yes, it took a positive effort not to know about those. Goldhagen helped
> > > the generation of the Third Reich admit that at last.
> > >
> > > 6. Pound had no Goldhagen to help him. But he knew.
> > >
> > > 7. See also the recent thread on this list about people who tried to
> tell
> > > Pound, and compare Marianne Moore's vain effort to get _The Criterion_
> to
> > > notice Hitler's persecution of the Jews. How close to the European
> action
> > > was Moore? Not very. But when did she start saying things that Eliot
> didn't
> > > want to hear? In 1933.
> > >
> > > 8. None of this is news. But "counter-propagandist"? That rustling noise
> > > you hear is the sound of a political hand being tipped.
> > >
> > > 9. Nevertheless, sursum corda. The text of Pound's own diagnosis is
> badly
> > > garbled in the old Paige _Selected Letters_ (no. 328, p. 295), but some
> > > meaning does come through the static. "A man can read a thousand or 5000
> or
> > > whatever books," says Pound, "but to suppose that they will be the
> _same_
> > > 1000 or 5000 after new treasure is available than there were in 1500 is
> to
> > > relapse into habit." Pound is talking here about the classics;
> specifically
> > > Pindar, whom he considers no longer worth reading. Substitute the name
> > > "Kenner" and interesting possibilities arise.
> > >
> > > Jonathan Morse
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>
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