Coriolanus - Shakespeare's Most Political Play

The Defence Rests

In re Ezra Pound

A Nation

That Will Not

Get itself Into Debt

Drives The Usurers

To Fury

The above quote is from Ezra Pound’s prose work The Enemy Is Ignorance.

I do not want to take up any serious student’s valuable time with the countering of acrimonious slander, but there are two predominant lies that are propagated about Ezra Pound, both of which attempt to tarnish the splendour of his work and his extraordinary genius, but most of all obfuscate the seminal theme of his lifelong effort to expose what he identified as the most pernicious injustice that had infected the world.

The first accusation is that he was a Fascist. He was not. He did support Mussolini and in particular certain of his ‘land reform initiatives’ such as the reclamation of previously unproductive land, the breaking-up of certain capitalist monopolies that were crippling the economy, and also his attempt to rein in the Church’s enormous wealth that they extracted from people who were suffering under the weight of extreme hardship.  It can be argued that Mussolini was something of a mountebank, as he frequently plagiarized Gabriele D’Annunzio, who at the end of the First World War was not only a literary legend but by then a military and political one as well. When D’Annunzio rallied the Italian nation to help rescue ‘their sister France’ during the First World War, Mussolini used the same words when France had been occupied by Germany under the Nazis. It was, nevertheless, the bellicose British Prime Minister who not only pushed Mussolini away, but into the arms of Hitler whom Il Duce is on record as saying he could not stand. On numerous occasions Pound very clearly expressed that Italian style Fascism was in no way suitable to the American psyche, and therefore, to the American people, while he did see it as beneficial to Italy at that time.

The second thing said about him was that he was rabidly anti-Semitic. He was not. An important note: Semitic is a linguistic classification not a racial one, and therefore, includes all the Arabic-speaking people of the world. It also includes any Aramaic-speaking people, the old form of which was spoken during the time of Jesus, peace be upon him, and is now the exclusive preserve of philologists, historians and archaeologists.

In Pound’s literary masterpiece, The Cantos, the name of Rothschild is used as an allegorical personification of usurers, those that practice riba, as it is referred to in Qur’anic Arabic, or neschek in Hebrew scripture, which appears in The Cantos explicitly as being non-racially directed.

The Evil is Usury, neschek

the serpent                                                         

neschek whose name is known, the defiler,

beyond race and against race

the defiler

Tόxos     hic mali medium est

In one place he refers to them as Stinkschuld. This is a potent metaphor as schuld in German means debt, and also, interestingly, guilt. It could, of course, as well be described as a pungent metaphor.

There is a direct reference to William Paterson, who founded the Bank of England in 1694.

Said Paterson:

Hath benefit of interest on all

the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing.

(Canto XLVI)

This line was taken from a letter found by Pound in the British Library and refers to the fractional reserve system whereby a bank can legally multiply what money it has and so lend out at interest money it does not actually have.  The ratio of tangible assets (real wealth) to credit currency is today astronomical and virtually incalculable. Paterson was a Scot.

There is an inspirational prose text by Pound called Guide to Kulchur. The dedication at the front of the book reads:

To

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

and

BASIL BUNTING

strugglers

In the

desert

Zukofsky was a second generation protégé of Pound and dedicated nearly all his life work as a poet to Ezra Pound. Zukofsky was born in 1904 and died in 1978. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who raised their family in New York’s Lower East Side. Pound helped him publish his first poems in a literary magazine called Exile.

During WWII while Pound was living in the fishing village of Rapallo the mayor announced that due to severe shortages caused by the war, the town’s orchestra would have to be disbanded. It was now 1940-41 and word of the terrible atrocities that were taking place in Germany and Poland had made their way to outside countries. Let us remember that even most Germans were not aware as to what was taking place. Pound literally went door to door to find sponsors for these people, realising that nearly a third of the orchestra were German and Polish Jews and subsequently what fate awaited them if they were repatriated in accordance with a bi-lateral agreement between Italy and Germany for anyone without a valid work permit. He did this despite the fact that people, himself included, were having a very hard time feeding their own families. Subsequently, the mayor was able to rescind his previous edict.

Ezra Pound took as the warp and woof of his masterwork, The Cantos, the theme of usury or usura as he wrote it.  He made war on riba!

Oh you who believe, fear God

and give up what remains of

your demand for usury, if you

are indeed are believers.

If you do not, take notice of War

 from God and His Messenger.

Qur’an: 2.275/279

They severely punished Pound, not only for his condemnation of usury itself, but more significantly, for his condemnation of those who practised it, and who have never forgotten or forgiven him for what he wrote and spoke. He was put in a wire cage at an American detention centre in Pisa, and then extradited to the United States on charges of treason. He was denied the right of habeas corpus, and spent over eleven and a half years in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. for the criminally insane. That is what was done to the most important poet of the twentieth century.

Remembering what Ezra Pound wrote - You defeat the bankers (drive them to fury) by not needing them.

As far as Ezra Pound’s political affiliations, he was notably a Jeffersonian. There are two salient quotes from Jefferson found in Pound’s writing. The first is: “I believe that the banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” The second quote that Pound used was: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

Philosophically Pound was a Confucian, and his brilliant translations of the master Kung, as Pound called him, are a testament to that. What follows is a segment from The Great Digest.

TA S’EU

“The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light that comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.”

As far as religion, he was adamant about “no Popery”, while he often expressed his enormous admiration for the architectural magnificence and beauty that expressed Christian transcendence made manifest by the superb craftsmanship of the artisans who built breathtaking structures, and the sublime artistry of those that painted the frescos that adorned them. One need only walk along the pathways of Venice or Rimini to witness what Pound so loved.

In The Cantos Pound singled out the theologian Johannes Scotus Erigena, condemned by Pope Honorius as a heretic, a follower of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) who he identified as a hero, as indeed Dante had done some centuries earlier although, according to Dante, was unable to enter Paradise as he was not a Christian. As a defender of the Canon Law of the Church against usury they should have canonised him and made him a saint, but the Vatican was enmeshed in banking and remained silent while Pound remained vilified and locked up in a madhouse. It was only Hemingway, in A Movable Feast, recalling his youth in Paris in the 1920s, who called him Saint Ezra on account of his indefatigable efforts on behalf of the literary and artist friends he so assiduously tried to help.

We are today experiencing the aftershocks of what has been called the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and even poor Bernie Madoff who stole 47 billion dollars that never actually existed, have entered the public discourse in a way that Rothschild, Sassoon and Sir Basil Zaharoff did in Pound’s era. A corrupt and flaccid political class has been inexorably exposed, and has left people unable to comprehend the ineluctable truth that their vaunted democratically elected leaders are simply not in charge. Pound had believed in the vision of men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, just as he celebrated the Monte dei Paschi (Mount of Grazing Lands) established by the Arch Duke Ferdinando in 1600 as being sufficient collateral for those who needed seed money at the start of the new growing season. The God-given abundance was in nature itself, and there was no un-natural increase by means of interest.

Pound also saw the time of the American Civil War (fought between 1861-1864) and the passing of the Banking Act that immediately followed and with it the handing over of political power to a mercantile class of profiteers, as the end of the great American experiment.

M’amour, m’amour

what do I love and

where are you?

That I lost my center

fighting the world.

The dreams clash

and are shattered –

and that I tried to make a paradiso

                                    terrestre.

Do not move

Let the wind speak

that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I have made

Let those I love try to forgive

what I have made. 

(From: Notes for CXVIII et seq.)

The defence rests its case.

Robert Luongo