From
1945 through 1958 America's iconoclastic poet--the flamboyant Ezra Pound,
one of the most influential individuals of his generation--was held in a
Washington, D.C. mental institution, accused of treason.
Pound had merely done what he had always done--spoken his
mind. Unfortunately for Pound, however, he had made the error of criticizing
the American government in a series of broadcasts from Italy during World
War II. For that he was made to pay the price.
The July 1995 issue of The Barnes Review told the story of
Pound's travails. Here, however, TBR presents a fascinating in-depth
overview of precisely what Pound had to say in those now-infamous
broadcasts. Was Pound a traitor--or a prophet? Read his words and judge for
yourself. by Michael Collins Piper
American students have been taught by scandalized
educators that famed American poet and philosopher Ezra Pound delivered
"treasonous" English-language radio broadcasts from Italy
(directed to both Americans and to the British) during World War II.
However, as noted by Robe rt H. Walker, an editor for the Greenwood Press:
"Thousands of people have heard about them, scores have been affected
by them, yet but a handful has ever heard or read them."
This ignorance of Pound's most controversial political
rhetoric is ironic, inasmuch as: "No other American--and only a few
individuals throughout the world--has left such a strong mark on so many
aspects of the 20th century: from poetry to economics, from theater to
philosophy, from politics to pedagogy, from Provencal to Chinese. If Pound
was not always totally accepted, at least he was unavoidably there."
One critic called Pound's broadcasts a "confused
mixture of fascist apologetics, economic theory, anti-Semitism, literary
judgment and memory".
Another described them as "an unholy mixture of
ambiguity, obscurity, inappropriate subject matters [and]
vituperation,"adding (grudgingly) there were "a few pearls of
unexpected wisdom."
Despite all the furor over Pound's broadcasts--which were
heard between January of 1941 through July of 1943--it was not until 1978
that afull-length 465-page compendium of transcriptions of the broadcasts
was assembled by Prof. Leonard Doob of Yale University in association with
aforementioned Greenwood Press. Published under the title "Ezra Pound
Speaking"--Radio Speeches of World War II, the volume provides the
reader a comprehensive look at Pound's philosophy as it was presented by the
poet him self in what Robert Walker, who wrote the foreword to the
compendium, descri bes as "that flair for dramatic hyperbole."
What follows is an attempt to synthesize Pound's extensive
verbal parries. Most of what is appears here has never been printed anywhere
except in the compendium of Pound's wartime broadcasts. Thus, for the first
time ever--for a popular audience--here is what Pound really had to say, not
what his critics claim he said.
When he was broadcasting from Italy during wartime, Pound
evidently pondered the possibility of one day compiling transcriptions of
his broadcasts (or at least expected--quite correctly--that one day the
transcripts would be compiled by someone else). He hoped the broadcasts
would show a consistent thread once they were committed to print.
Pound recognized relaying such a massive amount of
information about so many seemingly unrelated subjects might be confusing
listeners less widely read than he. However, the poet also had very firm
ideas about the need of his listeners to be able to synthesize the broad
range of material that appeared in his colorful lectures.
Pound was sure his remarks on radio were not seditious,
but were strictly informational and dedicated to traditional principles of
Americanism--including the Constitution, in particular. In response to media
claims that he was a fascist propagandist, Pound had this to say:
"If anyone takes the trouble to record and examine
the series of talks I have made over this radio it will be found I have used
three sorts of material: historical facts; convictions of experienced men,
based on fact; and the fruits of my own experience. The facts . . . mostly
antedate the fascist era and cannot be considered as improvisations trumped
up to meet present requirements. Neither can the beliefs of Washington, John
Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln be laughed off as mere
fascist propa ganda. And even my own observations date largely before the
opening of the present hostilities.
"I defend the particularly American, North American,
United States heritage. If anybody can find anything hostile to the
Constitution of the U.S.A. in these speeches, it would greatly interest me
to know what. It may be bizarre, eccentric, quaint, old-fashioned of me to
refer to that document, but I wish more Americans would at least read it. It
is not light and easy reading but it contains several points of interest,
whereby some of our present officials could, if they but would, profit
greatly."
Pound's immediate concern was the war in
Europe--"this war on youth--on a generation" --which he described
as the natural result of the "age of the chief war pimps."
He hated the very idea that Americans were being primed
for war, and on the very day of Pearl Harbor he denounced the idea that
American boys should soon be marching off to war: "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," he added.
In Pound's view, the American government alliance with
British finance capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism was contrary to America's
tradition and heritage: "Why did you take up with those gangs?" he
rhetorically asked his listeners. "Two gangs. [The] Jews' gang in
London, and [the] Jew murderous gang over in Moscow? Do you like Mr.
Litvinov? [Soviet ambassador to Britain Meyer Wallach, alias Litvinov, born
1876.--Ed.] "Do the people from Delaware and Virginia and Connecticut
and Massachusetts. . . who live in painted, neat, white houses . . . do
these folks really approve [of] Mr. Litvinov and his gang, and all he stands
for?"
There was no reason for U.S. intervention abroad, he said:
"The place to defend the American heritage is on the American
continent. And no man who had any part in helping [Franklin] Delano
Roosevelt get the United States into [the war] has enough sense to win
anything . . . The men who wintered at Valley Forge did not suffer those
months of intense cold and hunger in the hope that . . . the union of the
colonies would one day be able to stir up wars between other countries in
order to sell them munitions."
What was the American tradition? According to Pound:
"The determination of our forbears to set up and maintain in the North
American continent a government better than any other. The determination to
govern ourselves internally, better than any other nation on earth. The idea
of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, to keep out of foreign shindies."
Of FDR's interventionism, he declared: "To send boys
from Omaha to Singapore to die for British monopoly and brutality is not the
act of an American patriot." However, Pound said: "Don't shoot the
President. I dare say he deserves worse, but . . . [a]ssassination only
makes more mess."
Pound saw the American national tradition being buried by
the aggressive new internationalism. According to Pound's harsh judgment:
"The American gangster did not spend his time shooting women and
children. he may have been misguided, but in general he spent his time
fighting superior forces at considerable risk to himself . . . not in
dropping booby traps for unwary infants. I therefore object to the modus in
which the American troops obey their high commander. This modus is not in
the spirit of Washington or of Stephen Decatur."
Pound hated war and detected a particular undercurrent in
the previous wars of history. Wars, he said, were destructive to
nation-states, but profitable for the special interests. Pound said
international bankers--Jewish bankers, in particular--were those who were
the primary beneficiaries of the profits of from war. He pulled no punches
when he decla red:
Sometime the Anglo-Saxon may awaken to the fact that . . .
nations are shoved into wars in order to destroy themselves, to break up
their structure, to destroy their social order, to destroy their
populations. And no more flaming and flagrant case appears in history than
our own American Civil War, said to be an occidental record for size of
armies employed and only surpassed by the more recent triumphs of [the
Warburg banking family:] the wars of 1914 and the present one.
Although World War II itself was much on Pound's mind, the
poet's primary concern, referenced repeatedly throughout his broadcasts, was
the issue of usury and the control of money and economy by private special
interests. "There is no freedom without economic freedom," he
said. "Freedom that does not include freedom from debt is plain bunkum.
It is fetid and foul logomachy to call such servitude freedom . . . Yes,
freedom from all sorts of debt, including debt at usurious interest."
Usury, he said, was a cause of war throughout history. In
Pound's view understanding the issue of usury was central to understanding
history: "Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing
whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing
of international wrangles.
"The usury system does no nation . . . any good
whatsoever. It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make no use
of nations in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife
between them and use the worst as flails against the best. It is the
usurer's game to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is
not pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit."
Pound thus traced the history of the current war:
"This war did not begin in 1939. It is not a unique
result of the infamous Versailles Treaty. It is impossible to understand it
without knowing at least a few precedent historic events, which mark the
cycle of combat. No man can understand it without knowing at least a few
facts and their chronological sequence. This war is part of the age-old
struggle between the usurer and the rest of mankind: between the usurer and
peasant, the usur er and producer, and finally between the usurer and the
merchant, between usurocracy and the mercantilist system . . .
"The present war dates at least from the founding of
the Bank of England at the end of the 17th century, 1694-8. Half a century
later, the London usurocracy shut down on the issue of paper money by the
Pennsylvania colony, A.D. 1750. This is not usually given prominence in the
U.S. school histories. The 13 colonies rebelled, quite successfully, 26
years later, A.D. 1776.
According to Pound, it was the money issue (above all)
that united the Allies during the second 20th-century war against Germany:
"Gold. Nothing else uniting the three governments, England, Russia,
United States of America. That is the interest--gold, usury, debt, monopoly,
class interest, and possibly gross indifference and contempt for
humanity."
Although "gold" was central to the world's
struggle, Pound still felt gold "is a coward. Gold is not the backbone
of nations. It is their ruin. A coward, at the first breath of danger gold
flows away, gold flows out of the country."
Pound perceived Germany under Hitler as a nation that
stood against the international money lenders and communist Russia under
Stalin as a system that stood against humanity itself. He told his
listeners:
"Now if you know anything whatsoever of modern Europe
and Asia, you know Hitler stands for putting men over machines. If you don't
know that, you know nothing. And beyond that you either know or do not know
that Stalin's regime considers humanity as nothing save raw material.
Deliver so many carloads of human material at the consumption point. That is
the logical result of materialism. If you assert that men are dirty, that
humanity is merely material, that is where you come out. And the old
Georgian train robb er [Josef Stalin--ed.] is perfectly logical. If all
things are merely material, man is material--and the system of anti-man
treats man as matter."
The real enemy, said Pound, was international capitalism.
All people everywhere were victims: "They're working day and night,
picking your pockets," he said. "Every day and all day and all
night picking your pockets and picking the Russian working man's
pockets."
Capital, however, he said, was "not international, it
is not hypernational. It is subnational. A quicksand under the nations,
destroying all nations, destroying all law and government, destroying the
nations, one at a time, Russian empire and Austria, 20 years past, France
yesterday, England today."
According to Pound, Americans had no idea why they were
being expected to fight in Britain's war with Germany: "Even Mr.
Churchill hasn't had the grass to tell the American people why he wants them
to die, to save what. He is fighting for the gold standard and monopoly.
Namely the power to starve the whole of mankind, and make it pay through the
nose before it can eat the fruit of its own labor."
As far as the English were concerned, in Pound's
broadcasts aimed at the British Isles he warned his listeners that although
Russian-style communist totalitarianism was a threat to British freedom, it
was not the biggest threat Britain faced:
You are threatened. You are threatened by the Russian
methods of administration. Those methods [are not] your sole danger. It is,
in fact, so far from being your sole danger that I have, in over two years
of talk over this radio, possibly never referred to it before. Usury has
gnawed into England since the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages,
mortgages on earls' estates; usury against the feudal nobility. Then there
were attacks on the common land, filchings of village common pasture. Then
there developed a usury system, an international usury system, from
Cromwell's time, ever increasing."
In the end, Pound suggested, it would be the big money
interests who would really win the war--not any particular nation-state--and
the foundation for future wars would be set in place: "The nomadic
parasites will shift out of London and into Manhattan. And this will be
presented under a camouflage of national slogans. It will be represented as
an American victory. It will not be an American victory. The moment is
serious. The moment is also confusing. It is confusing because there are two
sets of concurrent phenomena, namely, those connected with fighting this
war, and those which sow seeds for the next one."
Pound believed one of the major problems of the day--which
itself had contributed to war fever--was the manipulation of the press,
particularly in the United States: "I naturally mistrust newspaper news
from America," he declared. "I grope in the mass of lies, knowing
most of the sources are wholly untrustworthy."
According to Pound: "The United States has been
misinformed. The United States has been led down the garden path, and may be
down under the daisies. All through shutting out news.
