Dan,

Do you think it is fair to say that, in the American popular imagination,
Nazism is not understood in terms of revolution?

Let me clarify my point about EP not seeing himself as belonging to a mob.
What I was referring to there was not a sense of _individuality_ but a sense
of isolation. I wrote:

>  The impression
>  one gets from the broadcasts is that, if anything, Pound felt isolated,
that
>  he was reaching very few people indeed.

Others on this forum have said that Pound's attempting to distinguish
between "jew bankers" and "innocent jews" is specious, because the violence
anti-Jewish rhetoric awakens tends to ignore such distinctions. I don't
disagree with that criticism.   My reply to such criticism is that Pound
often gives the impression that he thinks his audience--his American
audience-- is a tiny one.  He is not expecting his words to incite violence.
He does not think that thousands of people, who are ready to explode in
anger, are listing to his every word.  And when the idea dawns on him that
his words might incite violence, he says "do not start a pogrom."  And the
"pogrom at the top" which he does urge, he qualifies by saying that maybe
there is a humane way to do it--put the handful of top international
financiers on a desert island somewhere. A very small number of individuals.
Wyndham Lewis considered Pound to be, beneath all of the violent rhetoric, a
gentle fellow. I think it is possible to see this softness in the midst of
the very passages that are most often cited to portray Pound's evil fascist
hardheartedness.   He is hardly the unsentimental revolutionary idealized in
his Cantos.

Wei suggests that, as an experiment, we read the Cantos as if it were a
dream.  In dream, Wei says, alluding to pschyoanalytic dream theory, things
often represent their opposites. In this light, I would say that characters
such as Ezzelino are a kind of wish-fulfilled Pound, the opposite of how he
is -- how he would like to be. An alter ego, rather like the film Fight
Club.  Wyndham Lewis's famous portrait of Pound (which divides the canvas
diagonally in half, light and dark, showing Pound to be in a liminal realm
between sleep and waking; the bottom left-hand corner, looking life a cleft
hoof, lying in a kind of melting-flux; the top right-hand corner culminates
in the trim lines of his confucian goatee, and the trim lines of head and
hair) is consonant with this quick-and-dirty pschyo-analytic sketch of a
divided self.

Tim Romano



> As I recall, Tim, Hitler began with "an ideological purge."
> Apart from that, you raise the point of EP's not "seeing
> himself as belonging to a mob."  I don't see how that sense
> of individuality of his, and of many other intellectuals
> who turned to fascism, prevented him from subscribing to
> fascist ideology.  I thought we all knew that the only mob
> mentality Pound detested was the bourgeois-democratic one
> (well, okay, he detested communism also)
> and that the turn to fascism seemed to him and others entirely
> congenial with their pronounced sense of individuality.  Hey,
> isn't the fascist leader the ideal of the Romantic Hero in
> political translation?
>
> Apologies if I've repeated points already made in recent weeks
> during which I've been unable to follow the discussion threads.
>
> ==Dan
>
> At 08:33 AM 7/22/00 -0400, you wrote:
> >Dan,
> >Pound uses anti-Jewish epithets. He blames war on the putative
machinations
> >of Jewish international banking families.  He would deny Jews the
> >opportunity to work in civil service.  Pound was interested, I believe,
in
> >an ideological purge, in removing Jews from positions of power. However,
I
> >do not find evidence in his published poetry or polemics of his ever
having
> >advocated genocide, overtly or covertly, actively or passively.  From the
> >perspective hindsight gives us, we recognize Pound's voice as one voice
> >among many voices which, when regarded as one voice, seem to us to be
> >assenting to, if not openly advocating, the wholesale slaughter of a
people.
> >But Pound did not seem himself as belonging to a large mob. The
impression
> >one gets from the broadcasts is that, if anything, Pound felt isolated,
that
> >he was reaching very few people indeed. Morever, where he seems to be
aware
> >that his anti-Jewish rhetoric could bring physical harm and destruction
of
> >property upon those whom he would have regarded as "innocent Jews", as
> >victims of the "Jew bankers", he goes out of his way to address his
imagined
> >audience, advising them _not_ to start a pogrom.  I  know of  no evidence
> >which shows that he was aware that his rhetoric, which relies upon
> >anti-Jewish feeling as an engine of social change, might lead to
something
> >worse than 'street violence'.
> >
> >Where would you put Pound? In Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell?  If in
Purgatory
> >or Hell, please describe the torments which you would consider apposite.
> >
> >Tim Romano
>
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