Ezra Pound and the Legacy of Italian Fascism with scholar Ted Dyer, MA
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- Опубликовано: 20 июл 2023
- The first talk in the Ezra Pound Lecture Series examines Italian fascism and how it differs from Nazism, Pound’s attraction to Mussolini and his indictment for treason following World War II.
Lecture starts at 6:50
I would love to spend four semesters with Professor Dyer. I wish hundreds of millions cared about culture, literature, and political ideology in a precise manner. The question about politics and translation was stimulating. I loved it.
Thank you for this series!
Thank you Prof. Dyer for more than adequately filling in this seriously wanting gap.
Great lecture. Thank you very much!
That makes me feel better. Pound wasn’t a Nazi he was an Italian Fascist. Much better.
True, he wasn't a Nazi. However, he was still an admirer of Hitler, and an anti-Semite. That's fairly close, if you ask me. And in case you think these claims are baseless, I encourage you to read Pound's economic writings. Not to diminish his brilliance as a poet, but we cannot sweep those character flaws under the rug.
@@Corvid-Conquest I am being sarcastic.
@@geinikan1kan Well, I look like a fool now. In my defense, I just came off a video with comments praising him for "speaking the truth". Now, I definitely respect Pound as a poet, but he was rather off in other areas.
It's 40 minutes in, can we get to Ezra Pound? Lol
that lady sounds rude. sarcastic questions are pathetic
Pound was opposed to usury: by extension, the usurers.
Good lecture!
Eustace Mullins is his protege.
‘How many news paper editors do you know that has a gun in their office?’ Funny question to ask an American audience - given that there are more guns than inhabitants - every single editor should by simple deduction have a gun or more… but perhaps not in the office ?
Mentally unfit for trial? Hahaha. They wouldn't dare put Pound on trial for fear of what he might say. Hear his wartime broadcasts and it's obvious.
People usually call the German form of fascism "Nazism," not "fascism."
These 2 are very different!
While I think Pound did a wrong thing by agreeing to work for Radio Rome during a time when the U.S and Italy were at war, I think the charge of treason was unfair and untrue. In his broadcasts, he never asked his listeners in the U.S. commit acts of sabotage and espionage, and he never asked American soldiers not to do their duty or refuse to fight. The only requests he made to his listeners was that they write to their congressmen and urge them to vote for a negotiated peace with the Axis powers, and that hey vote against the Democrats, including President Roosevelt, in the 1942 and 1944 elections. I don't see how this can be construed as treason. Also, many of his former colleagues at Radio Rome testified by affidavit that he was never ordered or directed to make these broadcasts by his superiors at Radio Rome, that they were not a part of his official duties, which only involved reporting on cultural matters. (Books, movies, etc., mainly in Italy). His supervisors not only did not ask him to make these broadcasts, but they only agreed to let him make them when he repeatedly begged them to do them. This at any rate is what these witnesses said. They also claimed that Pound's frequent references to little-known medieval texts and poetry, may have been secret coded messages to American soldiers. They halted his broadcasts several times while they examined this possibility, although they always accepted Pound's explanations and "aquitted" him. For Pound to make broadcasts expressing sympathy for America's enemies, was unethical and disloyal. But it certainly doesn't rise to the level of treason.
He openly advocated for the assassination of FDR by lynch mob, I don't know how you could be more treasonous.
First of all Italian fascism had much more liberty than you have in United States today.
Roosevelt was a fascist, just like Mussolini if you look at what he did during the great depression
I suggest you actually visit planet earth
@@alberg6290 no, he is quite right
@@findbridge1790 I guess so, forgot how Roosevelt had main political opponent assassinated and was able to stack Supreme court and had his own army of blackshirts--------absurd comparison
People talk and write constantly about War II and the Holocaust. Literally thousands of books. Claims that people to talk about something is a familiar trope by people who want you believe that they are demonstrating great courage in discussing a supposedly "banned" or "forbidden" topic. In this instance, the presenter's claims are sheer nonsense.
Pound was definitely an antisemite, He made numerous antisemitic statements in his broadcasts. In one broadcast, he hinted broadly that he knew about the extermination campaign by the Nazis, and approved of it. On the other hand, his comments about Jews were very inconsistent. In some broadcasts he said he had no quarrel with American Jews. In another broadcast, he said that he had nothing against "little Jews," whose reputation has been unfairly maligned by the seventy 'big Jews," the Jewish international financiers, who are the only Jews responsible for poverty, wars, depressions, etc. I think that this is still antisemitism. But the degree of antisemitism that he expressed in the broadcasts, as well as in his poetry that he wrote during the fascist period. One might call him a confused, muddled antisemite. antisemite.
Do you have a source for claiming he hinted at German atrocities in one of his broadcasts?
Maybe the jews should be better people than usury subversive commie pornographers?
The truth is "anti-Semitism"?
Fool. Your accusations are of no consequence to history and much less to anyone not subnormal.
Thankyou Ezra Pound
Anti-Semitism of the most extreme form was central to National Socialism. By contrast, Italian Fascism was racist only in the conventional sense of early twentieth-century Europe and during its first two decades not normally anti-Semitic. In fact, Jews were the group that showed the most support for Fascism per capita in Italy in the early days. Much of the queasiness expressed here re these regimes is selective outrage. We're meant to shudder over their youth groups when the Boy Scouts of America were militarized and armed to shoot antiwar activists tearing down pro-WWI posters in NYC of all places, Germans being the largest non-English speaking immigrant group in America at the time, the war was IMMENSILY UNPOPULAR.. The penalty for reporting from the front during WWI in the so-called "liberal democracies" (Britain and France) was the death penalty. After our ally Russia spiraled into a Bolshevik hell it was Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the postwar period that saved Spain from a Stalinist holocaust after the communists had raped her gold reserves (the second largest in the world) and executed thousands of priests and nuns and burned innumerable churches to the ground (None other than George Orwell hides in a burnt out church when the Left turns on each other after the May Days). Imagine Catholic Spain like another basket case Venezuela or Cuba today.
Hitler didn't like Jews very much but the so-called "Holocaust" is an invented term - there is no mention of it before the Sixties - it is completely manufactured. If he wanted to exterminate them then why did he send over 50,000 to Palestine with piles of money (making him, in a sense, the Father of Israel). Why keep the Jews in Poland alive for years in a Ghetto there, why not liquidate them immediately? The Jews were just another group like the Russians, Marxists, gypsies, homosexuals Jehovah's Witnesses, etc that were put into the camps and died en masse, same as the Russians put tens of millions in their camps yet we're allies with them in WWII as the FDR admin and its fellow travelers and outright spies (he was the first prez to recognize the USSR formally reversing yrs and 3 presidents - he did so by ignoring the Holodomor starvation of the Ukrainians by the millions) never mentioned Soviet death camps (which Sartre later said were not to be mentioned because they were for love). Hitler is bad for getting prewar German lands back but we turn a blind eye to Stalin INVADING THE OTHER LARGER HALF OF POLAND and going into the Baltics, Finland, Hungary, E. Germany, etc shipping off hundreds of thousands of dissidents to sure death in Siberia and instituting Sovietization by suppressing national culture and executing undesirables. We spent half a century w/ thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us as well, not by Hitler, but by Russians.
Pound was far from the only one who brought up points like these. You may not have heard of Robinson Jeffers but pre-WWII he was the most famous American poet, more so than Eliot easily, but like Pound he was canceled for being antiwar. Gertrude Stein was of the right, not only a supporter of Vichy but actually working for Vichy. And it was none other than Library of Congress fellows T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Conrad Aiken, who gave the 1949 Bollingen Foundation prize to Ezra Pound for his 1948 Pisan Cantos, written during his barbaric captivity by US forces in Italy. The United States Congress passed a resolution that effectively discontinued the involvement of the Library of Congress with the prize after this brave act by these men. If you want to see a spectacular talk on Pound or Wyndham Lewis (another artist from the "right" side of the political aisle back then) look up Jonathan Bowden's incredible talks on them on RUclips, he also gave one on Eliot and H. P. Lovecraft - they're all phenomenal talks.