>Robert K makes these interesting remarks about Hitler >forcing people to take extreme positions on what up to >Nazism might have been just their run-of-the-mill, >"banal" antisemitism. Either they regarded Hitler as >the evil guy, or the Jews as evil. > >But, Robert, you leave out alternative reaction #3, the >most common: complete apathy. > >==Dan P Um, this was actually my speculation rather than Robert's. Except for the first few lines, Robert's whole letter was simply a quote of mine. Perhaps I made the remarks you're responding to overly general. I should probably have restricted myself to comments on Pound rather than speaking of society as a whole. I certainly make no claim to be a social historian. But what I meant is that my impression is that before the War, anti-semitism was pretty much taken for granted and not a matter of any great controversy among a large part of the (non-Jewish) population in Europe and the United States. This was what I meant by the word "banal." If I'm incorrect in this impression, I'd certainly like to be corrected by those who are more expert than myself. Before the War, Pound was apparently only mildly anti-semitic. As someone has already mentioned, in the blacked-out lines in Canto 52 he said that it was unreasonable to hold the average Jew responsible for the crimes (as he saw it) of the Rothschilds and other Jewish major bankers and financiers. However as word of Hitler's treatment of the Jews become widespread in the late Thirties and early Forties (which Pound would certainly have known about via broadcasts over the BBC), my speculation is that Pound would have found a casual anti-semitism less and less defensible. One choice would have been for him to have backed off from his anti-semitism, which I think is what most people confronted with this conflict in feelings did. Or he could resolve the cognitive dissonance by developing even stronger justifications for his anti-semitism, thus intensifying it. I have no special knowledge to justify my speculation here. But it's the only hypothesis I can come up with which seems consistent with the known facts.