(I thought I sent this message way back in December but just discovered it
unsent in my drafts. Hope it's still pertinent.)

My guess, off the top as they say, (and I have just read the essays in
Impact) is that Pound wouldn't (couldn't) fault much S. says as description,
but the underlying tone of exultation in the advance of the inevitable, in
triumphant "Destiny," etc., is the kind of thing he didn't like in S., whom
he someplace said wasn't a patch on Frobenius, at least when it came to
Germans. The most heartwarming thing about Pound (to me) is that he never
accepted anything as "inevitable" while breath lasted, in other words while
men of intelligence and good will could be energized to fight for the right.
This very much an instant reaction. Will be interested to see what others
say. Tom White



> From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 08:34:05 -0500
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Roma locuta, causa finite.
>
> Just for the fun of discussion-
> Would Pound agree or disagree?
> What do you think?
>
>
>
> "This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is proof
> that decides all, in that of facts it is success. Success means that one
> being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the dreams of the
> world-improvers have turned out to be but the tools of master-natures. In
> the Late Democracy, race bursts forth and either makes ideals its slaves or
> throws them scornfully into the pit. It was so, in Egyptian Thebes, in
> Rome, in China - but in no other Civilization has the will-to-power
> manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The
> thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron
> pressure - for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted
> to be readers and voters - that is, in a dual slavery - while the parties
> become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Caesarism
> already touches them. As the English kingship became in the nineteenth
> century, so parliaments will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty
> pageantry. As then sceptre and crown, so now peoples' rights are paraded
> for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really
> signify - it was for this reason that the cautious Augustus never let pass
> an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman freedom.
> But the power is migrating even today, and correspondingly elections are
> degenerating for us into the farce that they were in Rome. Money organizes
> the process in the interests of those who possess it, and election affairs
> become a preconcerted game that is staged as popular self-determination. If
> election was originally 'revolution in legitimate forms', it has exhausted
> those forms, and what takes place is that mankind "elects" its Destiny
> again by the primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of
> money become intolerable." -Spengler (1918) (2002)
>
> Chas