Being away from Pound has renewed my affections for him. I was on a series of vacations – one visiting family followed by another with my significant other. On each, I made the decision to leave my computer behind.
While lounging in Florida and doing little of value, I came across a quote by the poet Robert Duncan, noting that in the Cantos ‘all ages are contemporaneous.’
This reminded me of the immense scope of Pound’s achievement and the huge challenge its existence presents to future poets, much as Proust and Joyce challenged future novelists in regards to the scope available to the writer, no matter how quotidian his subject (Joyce, a single eventful, though hardly world shattering, day in the life of two Dubliners; Proust, the life of an upper middle class Parisian interacting with his contemporaries).
Today’s Canto is a strident and attention demanding jeremiad. Indeed, it is almost a sermon.
He rails against ‘usura’ and the troubles it has caused, using a style drawn from King James Bible.
The very end, though, diverges to a modernist (postmodernist) stunt of unexpectedly shifting tone and and style, thusly:
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied
without regard to production; often without regard to the
possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici
bank.)
the coffee philosopher 
That last stanza in his poem is the most powerful and shocking.
And also, it is central to his life, I believe. He was spruikling against usury and the ‘international jew’ on Italian radio, which was what got him done for treason – he got interned in a US sanitorium for many years after the end of WWII.
I agree with him that usury breeds death and destruction and produces nothing of life. It’s entirely parasitic. About jews, I think it’s tricky how language has been stifled regarding the Khazarian ‘jewish’ role in central banking all over the world. (Khazarians are not semites, but a Turkic race that adopted Judaism in the 7th century as a way to keep their Crimean Kingdom of Khazar neutral in between the Russian Orthodox North and the Ottoman Islamic South).
When one takes a look at the historical roster of governors of the various Federal Reserve branches – 80 % of those positions over the last 99 years have been Khazarian ‘jews’.
They are not Judeans, but have adopted the religion of Judeans.
But it matters not a whole lot in the scheme of things. Usury is practiced by people of all shapes and colour and claims to religion.
It is in ALL instances destructive and parasitic.
Death to usury!
I find your statistic about Khazarian Jews dubious, to say the least, and putting it in quotation makes – ‘jews’ – does not make it sound any better.
The roots of European Jews and their descendants in the finance industry dates back to the middle ages and two factors. First, Christians were not supposed to charge interest of any kind (any interest was considered usury), which made finding the necessary capital for trade – especially international trade – difficult, to say the least.
Secondly, one of the aspects of Europe’s long history of truly despicable anti-semitism was a medieval ban on Jews owning property in much of the continent. Unable to legally participate in the agricultural economy that dominated the economic landscape, trade and then later, banking, were the only industries open to people of the Jewish faith.
Then, anti-semitic Christians turned around and committed acts of violence against Jewish families and communities because those communities were involved in trade and banking (which they were involved with because of… well, you see the vicious circle going here).
I don’t love Pound because he masked his anti-semitism in twisted views on the banking industry.
It’s ok to doubt – but will you investigate the statement whether to affirm or assuage your doubt? I strongly encourage you to do so.
The word ‘semite’ doesn’t indicate Jewish religion, but geographic origin = southwestern Asia. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/semite
Palestinians and native Sephardic Jews can be considered semites, but Yiddish speaking Jews of mixed Eastern European (from Turkic descent) and German heritage cannot be considered semites (unless Akkadians means present day Turkey – in which case I’ve come full circle). The word ‘anti-semitism’ is a misnomer and misplaced, by you and all others who use it to mean anti-jewish. I think the difference is important when we consider that there’s quite a solid history of racism perpetuated against the Sephardic Jews by the settling European Jews. ie: it’s not only muslim semites that were misplaced in the resettlement.
Regarding the enduring misnomer of ‘anti-semitism’ We can talk about origins til the cows come home. In world history invasions and wars are perpetrated by all stripes: Israelis kicking out Canaanites under Moses, Arabs kicking out Christians and Jews in the name of Mahommed, Templar Knight killing all and sundry in the Crusades with the blessing of the Pope – none of it is reasonable nor is today’s state of Israel, that enforces apartheid conditions with deadly force.
I understand the dispicable European history of jewish / yiddish discrimination and I abhor it. We’re all human and we all should have rights to freedom, security and property.
Pounds anti-jewish ramblings I cannot endorse. He chose a side in the war and that side spewed racist propaganda. It’d have been better if he railed against usury solely rather than ‘usurious-jews’. He chose to be involved in the fight, and I feel Peace is won by not fighting at all; by being peaceful, in fact.
I don’t like to collectivise people. Humans are to be judged on how they conduct themselves individually, not which group they belong to. But by the same token, news agencies and most people tend to categorise and label people into groups for convenience of communication.
Eg White right-wing Militias, Mexican drug gangs, Black Pride organisations etc
Usurious bankers are not necessarily evil by virtue of their Yiddish background. The act of collecting usury is the evil, and for whatever reason, most international usurers speak Yiddish. (ie Rothschild, Lazard, Oppenheimer) It’s a fact.
But there is less political nervousness of talking about an Italian mafia or Chinese triad gang, isn’t there?
The way I see the paper money system is this:
It’s a giant fraudulent racket and an insiders’ club. It just so happens that many of the insiders speak Yiddish.
If one tries to unravel this little suppressed secret by asking questions directly to the racketeers as Aaron Russo did in his film ‘Freedom to Fascism’, one might hear, as Aaron did, a Yiddish answer: Se dir gornischt helfen
or
Nothing will help you.
I understand what “semitic” means – that Palestinians, for example, are a semitic peoples. And about various peoples kicking various other peoples (though I would question the Moses comparison – the archaeological evidence is that the Jewish kingdoms were relatively small and that the residents were Canaanites, albeit with a unique religion).
But seeing as how language essentially means what a society says it means, anti-semitic refers to prejudice towards people who are of the Jewish faith or are ethnically/tribally Jewish (to include the non-practicing).
We could also argue about what liberalism means – it originally referred to what we would now consider free market conservatism. But it doesn’t mean that I won’t pretend it does.
None of which is to say I am not also fascinated by the ancient history of Near and Middle East and the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms, like the Akkadians (which you mention) and Hittites, whose influence was so pervasive, yet also hard to find and understand with the passage of millenia and passage, movement, and syncretic tendencies of the peoples, civilizations and cultures of the region.
I am just not sure that Pound’s obsession with usury can be separated from his anti-semitism. There is too much of a ‘Protocols of Zion’ thing underlying it in Pound’s case for me to consider them separate.
On another note – what is it that drew you to Pound?
There’s a writer and researcher by the name of Eustace Mullins who was Pound’s protege, and then supporter and advocate while Pound was interned in the mental facility – which was an expedient way of locking him up for treason without needing a trial.
Mullins was in awe of Pound and followed his order to start investigating the Federal Reserve system. This was a massive undertaking that resulted in the book ‘Secrets of the Federal Reserve’.
Mullins had intended to be poet and writer like Pound, but became so entangled in this deep research that it became his life work.
Regarding the Protocols of Zion – it’s is obviously propaganda, hand delivered to Hitler as ‘evidence’ of an international plot.
This doesn’t mean that all of it is false. You can replace ‘jews’ with International Banking network, and ‘goyim’ with the common people and much of the information makes sense. Adding nonsense to truth has the effect of rendering all the truth contained within as false. This is the art of disinformation. I think the protocols contain some very important truths, but are so tainted to most people that even reading them becomes impossible. Try it! 😉
I state that it is NOT a jewish plot, but a very old idea – going back to Plato and maybe beyond – to establish a system of world control – a two tiered society; serfs and the ruling council.
And it’s true what you say about ‘liberalism’. I don’t like when words lose their meaning. I like to use words as correctly as I can, but I know that others may construe them differently. Just, reduction and bastardization of language upsets me greatly. I don’t like to have my vocabulary reduced by a society that would chastise me for using politically incorrect words and recommend incorrect ones in their stead.
The Protocols of Zion is not some researched, rational document that speaks to some underlying truth, hidden beneath a racist exterior.
It is a racist document that played upon popularly held prejudices.
In fact, when the Protocols were first published and for decades and decades later – and for too many people, to this very day – your supposedly safe replacement of ‘International Banking’ would be widely understood and just another synonym for Jew or Jewish.
And the truth is, Pound knew this.
You can’t divorce these things with a thin layer of paint.
I am familiar with Mullins and his writings are nothing but crackpot conspiracy theories. He tries to blame things on the Rothschilds – and even a cursory glance at the vein of anti-Semitism that focuses on banking will show you that making use of that name is simply another way to add a thin layer of paint and make a de facto anti-Semitism sound reasoned and respectable.
I’m late to this party, and early to comment — because I’ve just started reading a book on Pound’s slide from economic radicalism to anti-Semitism — but it looks both commenters here have it wrong to some degree. Even only one chapter into the book, the author (Leon Surette) makes it pretty clear that Pound started with the economics, then proceeded to conspiracy theories of economics, and then went on into full-blown anti-Semitism.
(And, Surette argues, though I have yet to see his evidence, this is not necessarily a direct progression; each step did not inexorably lead to the next, and he could have gone off in other directions had circumstances differed. As I say, I haven’t seen the evidence Surette offers to back this up, but I’ve read his other books on Pound and the man is painstaking, thoughtful, and very thorough.)
All of that is to say that while Pound’s economic ramblings did contribute to his turning into a raging anti-Semite, they were not necessarily a direct path to anti-Semitism… and certainly were not a conscious cover dropped onto it, to make it more socially justifiable. Pound was pretty free with his castigation of “the jews” and at least by the 1930s, felt no embarrassment about spouting all kinds of nonsense about them.
Likewise, contrary to what chrispyt suggests (at least according to Surette) Mussolini’s Italy early on was not really all that markedly anti-Semitic; not until later, when Italy and Germany allied. Pound committed to fascism before that point. I’m not 100% clear on the chronology, not having finished the Surette yet, but the equation of fascist with anti-Semitic is not historically accurate, at least not for Italy at the time when this particular Canto was written.
I think it’s tricky ground. As I noted earlier, talking about “international banking/bankers” or “international finance/financiers” was widely understood as a stand-in for “Jew” and criticizing them widely understood and being a racial statement as well as an economic one.
It is true that Mussolini’s Italy was not particularly actively anti-semitic, but when you’re allied with mass murders, that line can seem blurry.
And keep in mind that Pound didn’t become fascist and then adopt their ideas, but rather became sympathetic Il Duce because he thought that Mussolini might put some of his wacky and, yes, racially tinged ideas into effect.
I don’t think that Pound thought through any of this very well, but I don’t think you can deny the racist implications of his ideas about finance.
(Though, duh, of course anti-Semitism was an important part of German fascism, and would be integrated into Italian fascism once the two regimes allied… but that comes at a time later than when this poem was written, and may not play so much of a role in Pound’s own adoption of anti-Semitism as other factors did. But again, I’ll have to see what Surette has to say about it.)
I don’t think that Pound thought through any of this very well, but I don’t think you can deny the racist implications of his ideas about finance.
Oh, absolutely not. In fact, it’s my understanding (and point, really) that he arrived at the racially-tinged ideas through his ideas about finance, rather than through Italian fascism. That is, that his route to anti-Semitism was via his economics studies, which unfortunately included the work of anti-Semites like Douglas… though it’s also worth noting that he resisted this anti-Semitism until 1931 or so.
Which, no, doesn’t get him a prize or anything. He still became a raging anti-Semite. But it may illuminate something about how he got there; that perhaps neither his economics studies nor his eventual interest in fascism and Mussolini in particular inevitably led to anti-Semitism. Maybe there were other factors in Pound. Those factors would certainly help in figuring out how millions of other people got sucked into fascism, into anti-Semitism, and so on, in societies that were neither absolutely totalitarian, nor anywhere near as anti-Semitic as during the Holocaust. (They were anti-Semitic, just not sustainedly, mass-murderously so.)
I think it’s just as relevant that Pound seems to have subscribed to historical–artistic, occult, and so on–conspiracy theories from his time in London onward. Surette has demonstrated not only that they were extremely fashionable then, but how deeply they informed Pound’s work and thinking from that time on. It suggests a predisposition to interest in, and belief in, conspiracy theories more generally. Pound was wrong (or dishonest) about a lot of economics and history, but he was right that there was immense profiteering going on in World War I, and that the Great Depression (like the late-19th century one that preceded it), bad as it was for many people, was not so terribly bad for the banks and the ultra-rich.
It’s just that this wasn’t so much a conspiracy as it was just how capitalism works, plain and simple. But for those interested in conspiracy theories, plain and simple explanations are never as enticing as a secret truth, a hidden mystery, and so on. Once Pound started thinking about economic conspiracy theories, I imagine the popular identification between “the Jews” and bankers was the fatal link… and not just for Pound. Because, while Pound was one of the few who obsessively and extensively detailed his conversion to anti-Semitism, it’s likely many people followed a similar route. (As I say, occultism and the like were pretty common in English intellectual circles… the number of big names Surette comes up with as examples in The Birth of Modernism is pretty astounding, really.)
And that’s the point for me in reading Pound: among other things, he’s a kind of document of how people get sucked into really obviously bad systems of thought. It can help put a human face on comparable stupidities in our own day.
But anyway, no, I would never seek to disclaim any racial implications of his ideas about finance, nor am I an apologist for those stupidities of Pound’s… I just am saying that the unfortunate development of those ideas seems to have been involved a more complex set of factors than a lot of people seem to realize now, at such a distance from the time.
By the way, I suspect that your sense of how Pound became a fascist (as a result of adopting Mussolini as a possible promulgator of his ideas) might also perhaps be a bit off.
From all I’ve read about him, he seems to have been fairly antimodern and pro-strong-man-leader from early on. I’d say his predisposition in that area probably was what attracted him to Mussolini and Mussolini’s fascism was more how Il Duce conformed to enough of the traits of a “great leader” from Pound’s anti-modern, anxious-about-masculinity, why-won’t-people-just-get-things-done kind of mindset than anything else. (And of course, Mussolini was anti-modern in his own right; it’s something of a zeitgeist issue on one level.) Of course Pound hoped he could get Mussolini to implement his ideas, but he didn’t seem waver in his respect and support for the dictator even when Mussolini didn’t… whereas with other leaders, he tended to excoriate them for not immediately realizing his economic, ahem, “genius” and implementing immediately. Honestly, Pound seems to have been something like the ultimate Mussolini fanboy, at least in the 30s… it sounds more like it’s primarily an emotional reaction than an intellectual.
And hey, lots of people felt an emotional reaction of that kind, if not as strongly as Pound: Mussolini was writing columns for the Hearst newspapers from 1931-35, as Surette notes (in Pound in Purgatory), and it was Mussolini, not Hearst, who ended that run. Plenty of people admired Mussolini at the time in America, and in fact a lot of people saw the New Deal as basically the American equivalent of a fascist intervention — also something Surette notes, though Adam Curtis elsewhere has noted how Goebbels (if I remember right) gave Roosevelt strong praise the time on the same grounds. So Pound’s attraction to Mussolini was hardly that unusual…
Anyway, I’m not an expert, just another person studying the poems and the man. But I’ll be reviewing the Surette book in the next week or two, in my Pound series on my blog, because I do regard Surette as an expert worth listening to on the subject. If you’re interested, I can try post a link from here when it’s up.