I suppose Tim would also like to make distinctions among the Nazis
who ran the camps: the relatively harmless clerks who typed up the
branding-iron numbers of those consigned to the chimneys on any
particular day, the more personally vicious enlistees who marched
the Chosen Ones up to the bath-house doors (but never peeked inside),
the really bad guys who herded the day's naked consignment into the
showers, etc. ... My original point was, I guess, that publicly
voiced, verbal acts of race-hatred are morally repugnant acts of
VIOLENCE--not equal to murder, but aiding and abetting eventual
acts of murder, whether consciously or unconsciously. We have to
simply admit that Pound did EVIL THINGS and get on with it. People
are modularly constructed beings. Dostoyevsky was a great novelist
and a horrible antisemite, but I love his novels. I accept the
fact that, as human beings, we can each of us quite compatibly be
part asshole and part saint. So get on with it.
==Dan P
At 06:38 PM 11/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Michael,
>I don't know why, and prefer not to make guesses. Several weeks ago I
suggested here that one might take as a sort of repudiation Pound's
admission " that I lost my center fighting the world" in that his admission
seems to be an allusion to these famous lines from Yeats's poem "The Second
Coming":
>
>Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold;
>Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
>The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
>The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
>The best lack all conviction, while the worst
>Are full of passionate intensity.
>
>Though Dan Pearlman would not admit any distinction in degree of
anti-semitism, I don't think he really can mean that. A country club's
board of directors deciding to not admit Jews, while doing something
repugnant, were not culpable to the degree that an SS officer who
exultantly herded Jews into a cattle car was culpable. Dan P. may see these
manifestly different acts as existing along a continuum or as symptoms of
the same social illness, avatars of the same devil. But I think it
important to refine our understanding of the nature of Pound's
anti-semitism as accurately as possible, the nature of his support for
Hitler and Mussolini's fascisms, even if that may seem at times like
medieval hair-splitting in light of the genocide. We must refrain from the
understandable tendency to make categorical, lumping sorts of judgments --
this was "suburban prejudice" or Pounds bogey was of the superego not the
id variety or all anti-semitism is the same-- for they will serve only to
obscure our view of the intellectual and political forces that shaped
Pound's 'speech acts' in whatever medium and genre. We'll have a clearer
notion of Pound's thought if we study the public discourse of the eugenics
movement. Doing so, we'll see how Eugenics, Confucius, the ideas Pound took
away from Western Europe's middle ages, and Fascist ideology formed an
integer in Pound's mind. If I were to write a book on this, its working
title would be _Splendor? It all coheres_.
>
>Tim Romano
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Michael Springate <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 12:45 AM
>Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
>
>
>> Tim
>>
>> I would like an answer to this question.
>>
>> In your mind, why is it that Pound never clearly and publicly repudiated
>> the huge pogrom that, manifestly, did take place, a pogrom initiated and
>> executed by the very individuals and groups that he had publicly,
>> repeatedly and emphatically supported?
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>
HOME:
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