I hesitate to add my voice to the maelstrom, but since I just spent the
better part of a decade on a dissertation that looks at Pound's
anti-semitism from start to finish, with a whole chapter on the radio
broadcasts, here are some comments based on reading and listening to
these broadcasts longer and harder than anyone else alive.
 
The hard facts, written and recorded, are that Ezra Pound was
unquestionably guilty of treason as it was understood at the time by the
normative voices of the legal community and he was unquestionably an
anti-semite in the common use of the term.  Can't we all just read Tim
Redman's book, offer thanks, and move on to a much more interesting
question: not was he a treasonous anti-semite, but how he was, why he was,
and what it means for the poetry?  I guess the problem is that some of us
(me included) can't or don't want to judge Pound according to norms and
commonalities.
 
Still, I think it worth mentioning that the difference between word and
action was a lifelong problem for Pound--he conceived radio (which was, we
should remember, as he remembered, invented by his sixteenth cousin!) as a
solution to this problem.  Anyone who wants to judge Pound's broadcasts
properly needs to put them in the context of early radio history (people
thought it meant re-evaluating the way language works) and propaganda
efforts on all sides in World War II (verbal nitroglycerine" --EP's
phrase--was the rule).
 
As for the broadcasts themselves, I posted a lengthy explanation of their
availability to this list about two years ago--it should be in the
archive.  Anyone really interested in this topic needs not only the actual
recordings, but transcripts and manuscripts. Yale is a very interesting
place to start, since they've got plenty of material from after September
of 1943--indeed, there are typescripts of broadcasts that seem to date
from early 1945!  Very troubling reading.
 
By the way, my extended work on all of this is currently available only
through Interlibrary Loan or University Microfilm--although the University
of California Press has expressed interest...
 
To conclude, I'm finding this medium an awful way to present my remarks.
That's not an apology, but rather a search for a way to redeem the
medium.
 
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University