This war is part of the age-old struggle between the usurer and the rest of mankind: between the usurer and peasant, the usurer and producer, and finally between the usurer and the merchant, between usurocracy and the mercantilist system - Ezra Pound, March 25, 1943
Thirty years before Jane Fonda's notorious trip to Vietnam, another American artist spoke out against American involvement in a foreign war. Ezra Pound, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, was also one of America's most committed fascists. Between 1941 and 1943 he made hundreds of shortwave broadcasts from Rome to the United States praising Mussolini, Hitler and fascism. His poetry is among the most subtle and complex in the English language: his broadcasts were notorious for their crudity, vulgarity and anti-Semitic frothing at the mouth.
Fonda went on to marry media mogul Ted Turner; Pound paid a far higher price for his political convictions. After spending 13 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane (currently home to Reagan-shooter John Hinckley), he returned to Italy, where he died a recluse in relative obscurity.
I do not want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go get slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism - Pound, December 7, 1941
After the horrors of World War I, art and politics had become inextricably entwined for many. No longer were artists content merely to observe the world: now they wanted to change it. Most espoused one of the various flavors of Marxism; Pound opted instead for fascism. Drawing on his version of Confucianism, Pound sought a government where the state could be represented in the person of a wise leader who was simultaneously above the people and of the people. After a 1933 meeting with Mussolini, he decided that he had found his man. Like the fascists, Pound bemoaned a world where men and women had become alienated from each other and from the soil. He rejected the Marxist idea that people were slaves to economic and material forces, and saw Fascism as the triumph of spirit over crass materialism and commercialism … and, ultimately, against Judaism.
the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle
in gt/ proportion and go to salable slaughter
with the maximum of docility - Pound, from Cantos, (Canto LXXIV)
In the beginning Mussolini's fascism was far less anti-Semitic than Hitler's National Socialism; the Grand Rabbi of Rome was an early member of the Fascist Party. This did little to discourage Pound, who had long hated Jews. He enthusiastically supported efforts by Mussolini to implement anti-Jewish statutes based on the Nuremberg Laws. By 1943, his broadcasts would praise Hitler's efforts to root out Jewish influence in Europe, and would advocate pogroms against "the Jews at the top."
Is there a RACE left in England? Has it ANY will left to survive? You can carry slaughter to Ireland. Will that save you? I doubt it. Nothing can save you, save a purge. Nothing can save you, save an affirmation that you are English. Whore Belisha is NOT. Isaccs is not. No Sassoon is an Englishman, racially. No Rothschild is English, no Strakosch is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Khan, Baruch, Schiff, Sieff, or Solomon was ever yet bom Anglo-Saxon. And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your empire, and it is this filth that elects your politicians. - Pound, March 15, 1942.
In retrospect, Pound's sentiments about Jews and fascism were not that far from many of his American contemporaries. Fr. Charles Coughlin's radio broadcasts regularly railed against "international bankers;" a 1942 poll showed that Americans considered "Germany, Japan and Jews," in that order, to be the greatest threats facing the American way of life. Leading American artists like T.S. Eliot (who dedicated "The Waste Land" to Pound) and F. Scott Fitzgerald railed against "Jewish corruption" in art and culture. What separated Pound from his fellows was his support for Mussolini and Hitler after Pearl Harbor, when American troops were fighting in Europe.
As the war progressed, Pound's philosophy showed the same descent into nihilism which characterized so much of the fascist enterprise. Much as Nazism descended from the blue-eyed heroism of Triumph of the Will into the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Pound's support of the Human Spirit untrammeled by crass commercialism descended into rants against "kikery." It is unclear how his opinions developed after fascism's defeat. Arrested by partisans in 1945, and awaiting trial and a potential death sentence for treason, he penned the Pisan Cantos, considered by many to be among his greatest poems. Confined in a mental hospital, he was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his work. During his incarceration, he would correspond with numerous artists and poets, including a fair number of Jews. While in Italy, he would refer to his earlier anti-Semitism as "suburban" and state that his life had been "a big botch."
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