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>From: Tom White <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Roma locuta, causa finite.
>Date: Fri, Dec 27, 2002, 9:28 AM
>

> (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

    Agreed, Tom, I think you can make a good case that Pound held out hope
to the very end. Ironically that would make him very American in the best of
that naive Weltanschauung.
    No index in my "IMPACT: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American
Cilvilization". Here we go again to the bottom of the murky pond.

Charles
>
>
>
>> 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