CHARLES BEREZIN
265
claim for Pound when he says that in the following quotation from
one of Pound's radio broadcasts for Mussolini, "Pound had at least
dissociated himself from Dachau and Buchenwald, the gas-chambers
and the cattle-trains":
Don't start a pogrom. That is, not an old style killing of small jews.
That system is no good, whatever. Of course, if some man had a
stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom at the top ... there might
be something to say for it. But on the whole, legal measures are
preferable. The 60 Kikes who started this war might be sent to St.
Helena, as a measure of world-prophylaxis, and some hyper-Kikes or
non-Jewish Kikes along with them .
Pound has hardly dissociated himself from the gas-chambers. The
pogrom is "no good, whatever" not because it is immoral, but because
it is ineffective. Pound feels that eliminating only the "big jews" would
be sufficient. But he is still advocating a "system" of
judenrein,
i.e., a
system for ridding the world of Jewish influences. Pound's phrase
"world-prophylaxis" is a distinct echo of the offensive German term.
Neither does Pound specifically abjure murder. He merely says "legal
measures are preferable." Emery wishes to dissociate Pound's words
from the acts of the Holocaust. But the Holocaust was a feature of the
doctrine that Pound accepted and propounded. The
judenrein
concept
lies very much behind Pound's words.
There is another danger in this dissociation type of apology.
Emery ends his discussion of Pound's anti-Semitism, saying:
I have made somewhat more of this matter and of Pound's Fascist
sympathies than I should have liked to do.
It
may be argued that,
seen in their proper perspective and in strict terms of literary
criticism, they are of minor importance. The critical evaluation of
the
Faerie Queen
or of
Paradise Lost
does not hinge upon the anti–
Catholicism or anti-monarchism of their authors.
Emery's "terms of literary criticism" are perhaps too strict if they do
not admit ideology
to
be an important component of Pound's work (or
of Spenser's or Milton's, for that matter), and his perspective is hardly
proper if it allows him to think that the vulgarity of Pound's remarks is
an unimportant feature. But Emery's statement manifests an even
grosser historical blindness than considering anti-Semitism and fas–
cism unimportant. Anti-Catholicism and anti-monarchism, as well as
their respective opponents, were the representative ideologies of coher–
ent sets of interests, backed by governmental structures and military
power. Emery implies that Judaism is just such a coherent set of
