EPOUND-L Archives

- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine

EPOUND-L@LISTS.MAINE.EDU

Options: Use Forum View

Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
William Stoneking <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 27 Nov 1999 11:34:05 -0500
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (143 lines)
The fact that there is such equivocating amongst
members of this List (re: Pound's ideas vis a vis
anti-semitism) is proof in itself that Pound was
unrepentent about his views re: "kikes", etc. If he
had come forward and made an unequivocal statement
about his outrage (as a human being, let alone a poet)
concerning the Nazi regime... we would not be in
this no person's quagmire of phony allegiances
and alliances that smack more of groupee-ism than
anything else.
 
Stoneking
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: bob scheetz <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
 
 
> here's jonathan morse's j'accuse,
> shouting tim romano down,
> and naming him "anti-semite":
>
> >8. None of this is news. But "counter-propagandist"? That rustling noise
> >you hear is the sound of a political hand being tipped.
>
>
> so ... a pretty classical illustration how it works.
> while one may well see an abundance of the all-too-human,
> he searches  morse's 9 articles in vain
> for the "blood" dripping from ep's hands.
>
> the historical context of this whole fascism issue
> is the maelstrom of what everybody at the time
> saw as a world-wide pop rising  against capitalism
> after the exhaustion and incommensurable
> cruelty of ww1 and great depression.
>
> that rev is the ball which everybody had their eye on.
> thence the usa temporized opening a western front
> despite its intelligence on the "final solution",
> because its o'erwhelming consideration
> was that nazism and bolshevism destroy each other,
> thereby to allow the ancien regime to weather the crisis,
> make the world safe for democracy...n'all dat.
>
> ep's focus, from the opposite end of the field,
> was equally intent...so in that out-of-focus area
> a crime was committed by his party.
> which party he considered to be on the side of humanity.
>
> it is indeed a devilish moral problem,
> ...if only he'd been with gramsci, silone, ...the resistance
>
> but the holocaust industry's brief here
> is extravagantly meritricious .
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Saturday, November 27, 1999 3:55 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
>

ATOM RSS1 RSS2