Review: The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound

The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert Casillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richly researched and annotated, this is a thorough analysis of Pound's embrace of antisemitism and a fascistic especially through his Cantos and radio addresses.

According to one unnamed observer, Pound became anti-Semitic through contagion; anti-Semitism was "in the air" in the teens and 1920s, and he caught a strain of it. Another explanation is that Pound's anti-Semitism derives from his American nativism and especially his Populism, for like Pound the Populists denounced the tyranny of Eastern banks and had strong agrarian and middle-class values. Other critics argue that Pound's anti-Semitism springs entirely or mainly from his hatred of usury, which he then mistakenly identified with the Jews. And others argue that it stems from his anti-monotheism and paganism, and is a "logical corollary" of these beliefs.

Pagans

Of all religions, Upward most associates Judaism with the idea of God as an absolute authority who, through fear and prohibitions, thwarts man's instincts and desires: "fear is the enemy that the Idealist has to fight," although "fear is the hardest word for him to understand." The remote and fearful Jewish God affronts human desire and intelligence: "If the Man Outside is a good man, then he cannot want us to fear him. He can only want us to live so that we need not fear him." Upward thus splits the idea of God into two conceptions, one an inaccessible and uncontrollable force, the other an indulgent being amenable to human control. The last of these, says Upward, is "the foe worth fighting, for when the Man Outside wrestles with us under this form he means us to prevail." No one is luckier than the Divine Man, whom the Man Outside has chosen to be his "privileged" servant, an "ambassador of the great King. "3

Pound likes Upward's idea that "the real God is neither a cad nor an imbecile" but an amiable being. "That is," Pound adds, "a fairly good ground for religion" (SP, 405). Like Upward and Zielinski, Pound distin-guishes between the good gods, indulgent and attractive to man, and the ugly and repressive Jehovah.4 The Greek gods are known by their "beauty," while "demons" are "unbeautiful" (SP, 47), and Jehovah, as repopularized by Calvin, is a "maniac sadist" (SP, 70). Pound believes that the Italian Catholic habit of "moderation" is attributable to such prayers as the one in an Italian schoolbook which supplicates God by referring to "the hilarity of thy face" (GK, 141). In numerous other instances Pound views divinity as an attribute possessed by favored human beings...

Fascism

In Pound's opinion the Italian Fascist guild and corporatist system is the antidote to an atomistic, deceitful, and usury-wracked parliamentarianism. Since, according to Pound, "Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely inside the sphere of their own trade or business", Fascism endows the "people by occupation and vocation with corporate powers", and thus installs them within an "organic" system of needs and functions. Mussolini, he says, "wants a council where every kind of man will be represented by some bloke of his own profession...". In the United States as well, "any or every state could organize its congressional representation on a corporate basis," whereby each profession "could have one representative". This idea, which Pound endorses for the United States as late as 1960, and which he shares with Mussolini, would overturn the concept of citizenship as it descends from the French Revolution. 51 Meanwhile, the American "big employer" should pursue a "corporate solution" in the Italian Fascist sense. Trade unions, however, should be denied legal status because they lack "RESPONSIBILITY" and are hence dysfunctional.

Although Guild Socialism, like Fascist syndicalism, had originally favored local and autonomous guilds, Guild Socialist theory gradually developed the idea of "joint management" in which all producers are partners of the state and the state is endowed with "coercive functions" in disputes between producers. 52 In Italian Fascism there similarly developed the conception of the state as the coordinator, supervisor, sometimes even the nullifier of social and economic conflict. The state was to integrate classes, reward the fulfilment of economic functions, place labor and capital on an "equal footing," and encourage economic "collaboration" between capital and labor within the corporation, all in the interests of the nation as a whole. 53 To quote Mussolini's Consegna of the Fascist year XI (1933): "Discipline the economic forces and equate them to the needs of the nation"...

Pauline Christianity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli...

Pagans

Nazism, as in Pound, this kind of thinking masks a pagan hatred of Christianity and justifies programmatic anti-Semitism. Rosenberg believed that Jesus' great personality had been obscured by "the sterility of Near Eastern, Jewish, and African life," in short, the brutality of sacrifice, and that Christianity had been corrupted by that "Jewish preacher of race-chaos, St. Paul." Thanks to St. Paul, the world was not elevated "because of the life of the Saviour, but because of His death...." "This," he adds, "is the sole motif of the Pauline Scriptures," against which Rosenberg praises a non-Jewish "positive Christianity," based on the example of Jesus' life. Hitler too de-mands "positive Christianity" in Mein Kampf and in the twenty-five points of the official Nazi programme.26 In view of these religious perversions, the swastika takes on a new significance. It represents not only the solar cycle but the ascendant solar god, who instead of dying on the cross rises with the immortal sun, source of Nature's energy and vitality. This is the symbol of "life affirmation" under which millions of Jews were exterminated.

If the swastika is thus quite different from the Christian cross, what then of the cross Pound mentions, which "turns with the sun"? Pound's probable meaning is determinable through Allen Upward's Divine Mystery, which Pound reviewed most enthusiastically, and which, though Upward himself has no connection with Nazism, is sometimes reminiscent of Nazi cultural speculation.

fascism

If Pound belongs within the fascist ideology, he likewise shares its massive confusion and contradictions, which are embodied in his metaphors and images, the form and content of his works. Repeatedly Pound's ideology is problematized and undercut by his text; our task has been in large part to reveal these hiatuses in meaning. Not the least of Pound's contradictions is the disparity between his hope of installing an homogeneous, "organic," and "totalitarian" culture around a single luminous image (a religious and ritual object such as the goddess of Terracina) and the poem's final status as an aggregate of some bright and other terrifying images, a work that approaches totality only through numerical inclusiveness rather than through the all-embracing mythical symbol. Besides mirroring the ideology and pol-icy of fascism, The Cantos mirror what fascism tried violently and desperately to overcome, the fragmentation of modern culture.

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