What Leon Surette writes below reasonably indicates that Pound's
anti-Semitism was stupid, that is, short-sighted, unfeeling, ungenerous
but - and please correct me if I'm wrong - there is nothing to indicate that
it had any murderous or even criminal intent. Is there anything in Pound's
work that allows us to reasonably conclude he would have looked on Auschwitz
with approval?

Certainly he believed the "Protocols" and similar clap-trap but having
stupid beliefs does not make a man an accomplice to murder even though
others are motivated to murder by the same lunacies.  He expresses no
remorse for his anti-Semtic views after the Holocaust becomes better known
because his own views had nothing to do with the actual Holocaust.  To
implicate Pound in the Holocaust is not only illogical but unjust.

Pound's anti-Semitism is shameful and despicable enough; there is no need to
paint him blacker than he is. Unreasonable accusations lead to unreasonable
defensive re-actions and this does not serve the more important goal of
understanding why Pound became anti-Semitic in the first place.
I have never known an anti-Semite (and with my German last name, I still
meet a few who make silly Goldhagian assumptions about Germans and Jews...)
who adopts such views for purely intellectual reasons.

Best wishes,

Ian Kluge














----- Original Message -----
From: "Leon Surette" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 1:43 PM
Subject: Pound In Purgatory


> Alas, alas1 Discussion has once again been replaced by recrimination on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
>