Alas, alas1 Discussion has once again been replaced by recrimination on this
list. Since I wrote the book which gives this thread its title, I feel
obliged to intervene once more. I think some of the issues could be settled
by reading my book, but it may be that people don't want their settled
opinions disturbed.
    However, I have no certain knowledge of what Pound knew or did not know
at any given time--except for those occasions when he committed his
knowledge in writing, and the document has survived. Even then, there is
sometimes room for interpretation. However, I found no such documents. Of
course, that does not prove that such documents do not exist, but we should
not come to settled conclusions on the basis of an absence of information.
    There are documents from the fifties in which Pound speaks of the
Holocaust, and he does not then express remorse for his anti-Semitic
posture. I think he ought to have. Indeed, he ought never to have succumbed
to the ludicrous notion of a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, but he did.
I carefully document his early resistance to such views, and his eventual
acceptance of them. However, in none of those documents does the question of
the Final Solution come up.
    I also point out in POUND IN PURGATORY that other individuals who had
identified Jews as responsible for the financial chicanery of banks--notably
G. K. Chesterton--publically apologized for those views, and disassociated
themselves from them after Kristallnacht. Although I found no mention of
Kristallnacht by Pound, it is impossible to imagine that he had not heard of
it, since news of it was not suppressed--as was the case with the Final
Solution. However, it had no effect on Pound's views--admittedly the event
preceded his acceptance of the PROTOCOLS.
    In POUND IN PURGATORY I try to find some means of accounting for the
fact that an intelligent, decent and concerned human being fell into such a
ludicrous, vicious, and malicious set of views and behaviours. Insofar as
one can explain human behaviour, I think I provide a story superior to that
of an innately evil human being on the one hand, or a superior individual
incapable of error or vice on the other.

Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7