Tim Romano wrote: > >as something at once both broader and more specific than a rejection of >Christ and Christianity. Ezalino rejects the notion of a "chosen people". >He denies the claim of the israelites to any sort of privileged status as a >people. No rational being can support the notion of a chosen people. But does Pound himself reject the notion of chosen people, or of chosen individuals? In this letter to Lewis, written in 1936, Pound might appear to believe in the Italians as a chosen people. Now that the Empire exists, it needs a Center in which intelligence and the strength of the race are concentrated, but from which in turn the light of its civilization spreads across and penetrates the lesser nuclei. . . The New Order will speak from Rome in ways neither heard nor dreamed of, in ways foreseen only by a few people of ardent imagination Recall also that even as late as May, 1943, when Italy had lost virtually everything in Ethiopia, Pound would still assert if ever a race could colonize and bring civilization and the benefits thereof into colonized land, that nation is Italy, and that race is the Latin race of this peninsula . . . (Doob, 308). Does this assertion somehow belie Pound's objection to the "chosen people" status of the Jews? Does it indicate, not that Pound was against the notion of a chosen people, but that he simply thought the Jewish race did not deserve that status? On the issue of chosen individuals: Some people qualify Pound's religious outlook as pagan. We might recall that Pound on one occasion objects to Christianity on the grounds that the gods cannot love all human beings. They love, "the elect", he says, citing Odysseus as an example of person loved by the gods, elected and favored. So for Pound there are "chosen" individuals? Is Pound's view, that universal love is impossible, that even the Divine cannot love all human beings, tenable? Is it consistent or more sensible than the view that there are no chosen people? And how is it really any different to suggest that there are chosen individuals and not chosen people? Pound's disapproval of the Jews is, or course, in part, connected with his disapproval of bank owners. But does it make any more sense to say the Jews are to be UNIVERSALLY DESPISED AS A A RACE than to say that the Jews are NOT a chosen people? Why does Pound reject one absurd generalization about Jews and affirm another opposite and equally absurd generalization, namely, that Jews are to be blamed for the financial ills of Western civilization? What would your view be? Are there such things as chosen individuals? Does the Divine (God, or the Gods) act in such a way as to favor certain individuals as opposed to others? Salut et Fraternite, Wei ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com