Sir Basil and Ezra Pound

Sir Basil and Ezra Pound

There was a certain Sir Basil Zaharoff, born Zenos Metevsky (1850-1928), who was a munitions magnate with interests in oil, international banking and several newspapers. Zaharoff started off by selling arms for Nordenfeldt and eventually took control of the company and merged with Maxim, who had invented the machine gun. Then in 1913 he took over Vickers-Amstrong, the largest munitions company in Europe, and also held controlling shares in the German company Krupp, which specialised in barbed wire, which would prove extremely useful, as it was needed for in the construction of prison camps. Shortly after the First World War he expanded into South America; this short stanza from Ezra Pound’s Canto XXXVIII bears witness to Zaharoff’s activities there:

 

Don’t buy until you get ours.

And he went over the boarder

And he said to the other side:

The other side has more munitions. Don’t buy

Until you get ours.

And Akers made a large profit and imported gold into England.

 

Metevsky, now well known as Basil Zaharhoff, was finally arrested on fraud charges, as he had embezzled huge sums of money from companies in which he held the controlling shares; not unlike our modern day Bernie Madoff. Zaharhoff, being more imaginative, managed to escape, and is reputed to have been sitting in a Wiener Café watching his own funeral after his body had been removed from the back door of the Garbola Prison in Athens that had meant to be holding him. At the time he owned the controlling shares in Humbers, a pseudonym for Vickers, the German based arms company.

With another clip from Pound, this time from Canto XVIII, we will hear from one Mr. Giddings, salesman for Humbers:

 

“Peace! Pieyce!!” said Mr. Giddings,

“Universal? Not while yew got tew billions ov money,”

Said Mr. Giddings, “invested in the man-u-facture

“Of war machinery…”

The charismatic Sir Basil well preceded the time of the post World War II arms build-up, and the courageous, yet ultimately ineffectual warning of American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he made his famous State of the Union address proclaiming the inherent dangers of an unrestrained “military industrial complex” that would view war as far too profitable to be left in the hands of politicians let alone the voting public. 

On the eve of the Great War, Zaharhoff was an Englishman in England, and was awarded the Knight Grand Cross, while when in France he was a Frenchman and was raised to be Grand Officier of the Legion d’Honneur. He changed his name and even ended up with an aristocratic title. He changed his religion and was awarded the Order of Jesus Christ of Portugal. The Allied Forces were deeply indebted to the man who had used his immense banking network, together with his vast arms manufacturing empire that stretched across Europe, to facilitate the war effort.

While his newspapers beat the war-drums across all of Europe and the Americas, “EVIL HUN ON THE RISE”, his armaments manufacturing companies were working around the clock to get the world ready for a war that he would personally, together with J. P. Morgan and a handful of others, help finance. It was of no significance that Kaiser Wilhelm II neared desperation in his numerous attempts (including a personal visit to England wearing his British officer’s uniform as a sign of respect) to persuade his grandmother, Queen Victoria, not to go to war with Germany. But the die had been cast as the PM and his cabinet ministers had convinced the Her Majesty that the Empire needed the war to sustain its economic hegemony in Europe, as well as around the world.

After the war Zaharoff moved into the lucrative oil business, and partnering up with British Shell and US Standard Oil, formed joint ventures with the American investment houses Kuhn-Lohb and J.P. Morgan. At the end of his life he bought the Casino of Monte Carlo and married a Bourbon princess.  Rising from a modest start as a simple money-changer in his hometown of Salonika, to become one of the most influential men of his time, Sir Basil remains a monument to the unbounded success of a man who could deftly work ‘credit based’ capital creation, together with the fractional reserve system, and tie them into the most lucrative business opportunities of the age.

The international bankers and investment brokers of today seem all too grey and painfully dull compared to Sir Basil and the men of his generation. The Rothschilds, collectively more powerful than Sir Basil, may have bankrupted European aristocracy, and impoverished a continent, but then they did give back numerous art museums and opera houses. I suppose with all that wealth one needs some culture and entertainment. Who knows, maybe Bernie will make a daring escape. The one thing I admire about him is that with the huge sum of fifty-something billion USDs he did not put it back into derivative products and stocks. He knew better. Bernie Madoff bought real estate, gold reserves, luxury yachts and priceless works of art.

All these years later we can still hear the strong cadence of Ezra Pound as his poem echoes across that immense divide between the oligarchs of today and the rest of the world’s population. From the powerful Usury Canto, XLV:

“With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting,

that design may cover their face”.

 

“...with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling”.

 

“Usura rusteth the chisel

It rusteth the craft and the craftman

It gnaweth the thread in the loom”.

 

“Usura slayeth the child in the womb

It stayeth the young man’s courting

It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

between young bride and her bridegroom

                        CONTRA NATURAM”

 

Robert Luongo teaches Shakespeare and Rhetoric at Dallas College in Cape Town, established in 2005 as a college of leadership under the aegis of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.