sigh I feel this comments section is just going to reiterate the culture war rather than address the article, the book it's reviewing, the Chinese poems "translated", other works of Pound, or Pound's actual relationship to Fascism.
Notable in there is the ancestor of Qanon, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a notorious racial libel whose circulation was a contributing factor to the Holocaust.
Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Rothschilds" but in an age before social media at least it seems to have taken him on the order of a decade to radicalise.
(on the other hand, Vorticism to Fascism may have been a simpler route? What about the gripping hand?)
> Vorticism to Fascism may have been a simpler route?
You're going to have to explain that one?
The racial hatred, especially anti-semitism, appears to have been the really characteristic (and dangerous) trait of European mid-20th century Fascism. It's not immediately obvious how that links to abstract art.
High Modernism on the other hand has always had a sort of small-t totalitarianism in it; the sweeping away of the old and its replacement with standardised, mechanised ways of living that erase individuality. Le Corbusier's unrealised plan to sweep away Haussmann's Paris and replace it with tower blocks reminds me of Speer's plan to do the same with Berlin, although Speer was aiming for kitch neoclassical rather than modern - can't have fascism without fasces on every building.
(The other analysis I'm fond of is fascism as the colonialism of the interior; Hitler's annexation of slavic states was because all the other convenient nonwhite states were already occupied by British, French or ex-Spanish colonies. Likewise Japan's expansion into Dutch and American colonies in search of oil and rubber.)
Also gives a bit of the flavour that "history is more or less bunk" and Tomorrow Belongs to Me.[1]
Weil notes that although german fascists and communists had divergent political ends (for in the end they were planning to be rid of each other) they both agreed the first step to their (respective) Project Community of Tomorrow involved disempowering german social democrats.
[1] to be fair, the young are generally correct that the future belongs to them, and I doubt any gradualist artistic manifesto would go over very well (although it might make an excellent concept piece!)
What do we want?
Incremental adaptation!
When do we want it?
In due course!
(note to self: read https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf and ponder: if the vorticists had had HTML, would they have bought the domain www.blastorble.ss and offered a javascript-driven single-page interactive manifesto?)
> Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
Ideologically, it's a pretty giant gulf. Mechanically, there are some socialist models that are similar (corporatism is the key similarity there, though not all socialist models embrace corporatism in practice, and fewer do by name.)
OTOH, fascism isn't a long mechanical walk from lots of modern government forms.
And yet, both Hitler and Stalin easily steered their parties from socialism to natialism in the same exact time period. As far as ideology goes, both ideas embrase the core Rousseau's tenant of submission to "General Will" and complete, totalitarian primacy of state over a person.
Of course, all government should always be suspect of overstepping it's boundaries, but I still think that countries with common law don't fall into centralized tyranny as easily.
Mussolini, arguably the inventor of modern fascism, began his political life as a socialist; to his last days, he maintained a belief in the role of the State to direct development and economic output.
In many ways, the economic policies of Fascism (and Nazism later) might well be described as "socialist policies run by - and for - oligarchic capitalists".
Weil uses "Hitlerite" to describe pre-war germany, having reserved Fascism for italy. HN consensus seems to be that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives was when the oligarchic capitalist N wing triumphed over the S wing of the NSDAP.
It looks like postwar Nazis didn't have much to consistently complain about regarding the retroactivity of Nuremberg trials:
> "Concerned with presenting the massacre as legally sanctioned, Hitler had the cabinet approve a measure on July 3 that declared, "The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defence by the State."[55] Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner, a conservative who had been Bavarian Justice Minister in the years of the Weimar Republic, demonstrated his loyalty to the new regime by drafting the statute, which added a legal veneer to the purge.[k] Signed into law by Hitler, Gürtner, and Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, the "Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence" retroactively legalized the murders committed during the purge.[56] Germany's legal establishment further capitulated to the regime when the country's leading legal scholar, Carl Schmitt, wrote an article defending Hitler's July 13 speech. It was named "The Führer Upholds the Law."[57][58]"
> In many ways, the economic policies of Fascism (and Nazism later) might well be described as "socialist policies run by - and for - oligarchic capitalists".
It would be more accurate to to describe it as oligarchic capitalist policies executed through corporatist institutions (which is very close to the non-Leninist socialist critique of Leninist-style Communism); the similarity to state-heavy forms of socialism isn't socialist policies, but corporatist institutions — that party, state, labor unions, and firms, and any other institutions permitted in society are expected, even if they have nominally separate character, to be coordinated and working together with a unified vision toward a unified goal.
Also at the end of WWII when Mussolini was deposed he became head of the Italian Social Republic[0], not named by accident.
The party that ended up as the parliamentary right in Italy was called Movimento Sociale Italiano[1] ("italian social movement).
One of the fascist mottos was “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.” (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State).
This not not to say of course that fascism and socialism are the same, they are not, just that they shared a lot of background ideas.
For those that aren't going to click the link: he was a Conservative initially before becoming an independent and he had radical policies to reduce unemployment that weren't popular in the then laissez-faire Labour party (or Conservatives really) such as tariffs to protect British industries from 'international finance', state nationalisation of main industries, and plans for a corporate state by merging businesses, workers, and the government into one. He was also against free trade being noted as saying he was trying to challenge the '50-year-old system of free trade which exposes industry in the home market to the chaos of world conditions, such as price fluctuation, dumping, and the competition of sweated labour'.
After the split from Labour and failing to see success in his own New Party he went on a study tour of Italy and it's here you see the sharp turn towards the right wing and the formation of the BUP which was obviously authoritarian corporate fascism, strongly anti-Communist, and frequently clashed with Jewish groups.
As dragonwriter notes in his posts in this thread, corporatism is something that's sometimes shared among these ideologies but the gulf between those ideologies can still be pretty large, authoritarian nationalism inherently excludes certain groups in societies and is worlds apart from some other forms of socialism even if the goal of both is to end or reduce class conflict.
> There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism.
This is really rather shoddy guilt-by-association - and second degree association at that.
He's a valuable critic and I am certainly grateful to him for i) turning me onto a number of European poets from times and tongues I would not otherwise have turned my attention to, and ii) for sharpening my concept of what poetry is and should be. I don't know what it means to talk of 'cancelling' a writer from a century ago but not to have his work would certainly be a loss.
> This is really rather shoddy guilt-by-association - and second degree association at that.
Really? I was always told that the Futurists tried to position themselves as the official artists of Fascism (but they were sadly not conservative enough).
I think it would be a loss, because up until today I had thought broad-mindedness was sufficient protection against fascism. In Pound we have someone who railed against provincialism and secondary sources in early work, yet wound up broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda for Mussolini.
ABC of Reading (ch 3. p 42):
> "One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."
> "When it comes to the question of poetry, a great many people don't even want to know that their own country does not occupy ALL the available surface of the planet. The idea seems in some way to insult them."
I at least will study him, to figure out how he wound up there. It appears it may have been via antisemitism, through the christian/muslim anti-interest tradition. It may have been because he thought fascists rewarded artists better than democracies. It may have been other paths. I don't know yet.
(I still think self-deprecating humour may be an antidote: fascists are Serious People doing Serious Things, and I haven't been aware of any thick anthologies of famous fascist comedies. But after today I'm no longer so sure they don't exist.)
Now halfway through ...Kulchur and not sure I'll do more than skim the rest. While ABC had structure, Kulchur is reminiscent of a series of blog posts put into print.
The proximal cause of his support for Fascism is obvious, on p.249:
> "Mussolini has told his people that poetry
is a necessity to the state, and
Carlo Delcroix is convinced that
poets ought to "occupy themselves
with these matters",
namely credit, the nature of money,
monetary issue etc."
and p.250:
> "Civilization becomes admirable
when people begin to prefer a little
of the best to a great deal of the
pasty."
In between he's been a goldbug, railed against "international finance" (which, given his glowing reviews of Charles Coughlin, admiration of the medieval Church, and pining for the use of latin, not in the mass, but in academic publishing, all suggest he's never very far away from antisemitic dog whistles with his rants on usury), is convinced that radio has reshaped politics because it allows the sheeple to learn reality instead of the fake news, notes that the only knowledgable writers on economics are the non-economists (which goes well with his snark on LSE, less well with his rants against "cranks"), considers that the British Empire is decadent (and the US not much better: although they stayed out of the League of Nations, with Pound's approval, they've put Susan B. Anthony on a stamp, to his great disapproval), suggests that taxation is theft, and complains that neither US nor UK academia (people who chatter rather than do) are receptive to free inquiry by independent researchers, etc. all of which may be more distal causes.
In short, s/radio/social media/, give him Oakleys and an F-450[1], and he'd be right at home in 2020.
[1] we can imagine him in the cab (safely away from Dorothy, Marcella, and Olga?), stroking his goatee while telling us "[w]hat ultimately counts is the level of civilization. No decent man tortures prisoners. No clean man wd. tolerate the advertising atrocities between here and Genova. No man free of mental lice wd. tolerate the bank racket or the taxing system."
He may as well have been cancelled, as I'm utterly unfamiliar with him. Will report back on whether I got any useful bits out of "Guide to Kulchur" and "ABC of Reading" after I've read a bit of them.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish was certainly worth some reflection, although Pound's willingness to translate chinese poetry without knowing much chinese may show his practice (as is most of ours!) was not quite up to his preaching. (Edit: he leads "...Kulchur" by quoting 一以貫之[1], so he is stronger in chinese than I.)
Upon reflection: abstraction and instantiation are always dual, and just as we shouldn't exclusively fly abstract, neither should we exclusively rest concrete. There are more fascinating journeys to be had by skipping between both sides of the duality, passing between them adroitly, adjointly.
ABC of Reading is a good but extremely curmudgeonly guide to poetry in English through the ages. (He would rather have written a guide to european poetry, and it shows, but his publisher (Faber?) insisted it focus on English for the sake of accessibility.) A large part of it is basically an anthology with commentary. His commentary in it (as elsewhere) is maddeningly condensed and hermetic - one senses the insight within it without always being able to work out what he is saying. It's hard to say who it's for - in some sense it takes the shape of a kind of 'beginner's guide', but he doesn't exactly offer the friendly helping hand a beginner might wish for. No politics, fascist or otherwise, are anywhere to be seen in it.
I haven't read Guide To Kulchur but it seems like it edges towards the 'crazier' (late, fascist) side of Pound.
I think ABC doesn't have the friendly helping hand (but it does! he translates the first few...) because Pound is trying to imitate Aggasiz's technique, to force (though not going as far as banishing explication to the back of the book) the reader to engage with the primary texts.
I'm about 10% into Guide and it does have a bit of (pre-internet) crackpottery to it: he's veered off from Confucius into goldbuggery at the moment, and has his syntactic quirks, such as the modals wd. cd. and shd.
However, just as those latter abbreviations do make sense on their own terms (sound them out, which also explains kulchur), he is very well read, thinks for himself instead of regurgitating, and has kept my google tab incredibly busy. So I'm very likely to continue, to see where he winds up.
(A straight-up guess at this point: he wound up at fascism because he's looking for a universal system that not only explains how things are, but is also a modus vivendi, saying what people should do.
Personally, I see "Party On" as the balancing counterweight to that viewpoint. Many people in the twentieth century interpreted "Be Excellent To Each Other" to mean breaking eggs was OK as long as it was going to lead to an excellent omelette. But if one equally weights the injunction to Party On, one can't borrow uncertain utilities from the future to justify certain disutility now.
In any case, I take the scientific tack on How Things Are, which by and large is completely indifferent to What People Should Do for the simple reason that it is completely indifferent to People.)
A refresher on the latter: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/coming-to-terms-wi...
Notable in there is the ancestor of Qanon, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a notorious racial libel whose circulation was a contributing factor to the Holocaust.