Pound is known to have signed letters, "Heil Hitler".
I can't give you the exact source for this, but it was something
I found in my research several years ago. Then there was
Pound's infamous reply:  "There weren't any gas ovens in Italy!"
WHEN he knew is not so important as the fact that HE DID
KNOW... and said nothing about it! If in the Confucian sense,
the poet is one who advises the King... one can only wonder
(and marvel in horror) at the advice he might've given
Shicklegurger!!!! or however you spell that guy's name!
 
Stoneking
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
 
 
> 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
> >
> >
>