I thought this might be relavent: I've been doing some reading on Pound in Italy: Hamilton's _The Appeal of Fascism_ is an intelligent look at the political and philosophical climate of Europe and the contributions made by various intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike--philosophers, poets, painters and sculptors included. T. S. Eliot spoke favorably of Sir Oswald Mosley, a fascists in Britain; I believe W. B. Yeats actually declared himself a fascist against the rising tide of socialism and futurism: two schools of thought and politics that were focused upon the dismantling of cultural connections with the past. One futurist in Italy, Marinetti, wanted to ". . . burn all gondolas and 'fill the stinking little canals' of Venice 'with the ruins of crumbling, leprous palaces' [a widely circulating view at the time]." The attitude that I get from most intelligent sources tends to characterize the philosophical climate as obviously threatening to neoclassicists, modernists like Pound and Wyndham Lewis--its an attitude which seems to be difficult for ("20/20") hindsight. Joyce makes an interesting comment: "Not to like it [Italy] because of Mussolini would be just as absurd as to hate England because of Henry the Eighth"; which is to say that they had a whole other attitude over there (in Europe) at all; Americans probably wouldn't fathom such an idea at the time.