Timothy P Redman wrote: > > I fully agree with David Moody about the need to be precise when > describing Pound's political program. I suggest that those list > members who have not read my _Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism_ > (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and who are interested in this > subject might read that book, particularly its treatment of Pound's > "left-wing fascism," a phrase meant to avoid facile presentations of > Pound's politics. > That does sound interesting -- but the phrase might fit a large majority of intellectuals attracted to various 'fascist' movements -- including those Nazis who were eliminated in (? I don't recall for sure the name) "The Night of the Long Knives. Whatever the motives of the initiators and leaders (Mussolini, Hitler, Goering, etc etc etc) the mass following (or a major element in that mass following) of 'fascist' movements were responding to various sorts of populist rhetoric, and intellectuals tended to be attracted either in the same way (I think this was Pound's case) at a more sophisticated level _or_ were attracted by the appeal some fascist movements at least seem to make to the idea of the "authentic" ("lonely," "superior," "alienated in a sophisticated way") individual. Consider Yeats's breathtakingly beautiful celebration of killing for the hell of it (with the killing concealed under euphemisms such as "guard") in "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death." The poem only concentrates on the airman's lonely death -- but that is a death achieved only by participating in a mass slaughter which even the airman (Yeats) concedes or claims is pointless. Carrol P.S. Note I corrected the spelling in the subject line. Kerry and Kerrey are two different politicians.