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
> 
>