“Outraged by the carnage of World War I, [Ezra]
Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and
throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and
wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley.”
Wikipedia,
Ezra Pound
However, 30 years later the German historian Fritz
Fischer proved that the war had been caused, not by usury and international capitalism, but instead by Germany’s
relentless militarism and overweening ambition.
Fritz Fischer (1908-1999) conclusively
demonstrated in the 1950s that Germany alone was to blame for the outbreak of
WWI. "Fischer was the first
historian who examined all of the Imperial German government archives in their
entirety and as a result ... instantly rendered obsolete every book previously
published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Fischer
So fascism was based on an assumption that was
later proved to be false.
This is the sort of preparatory work Pound performed
for the few years leading up to his decision on who was to blame for WW 1:
”… in January 1917, he had the first three
trial cantos, distilled down to one … published in Poetry.[66] He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines.
From 1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age under
the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The
Egoist and The Little Review – many of the latter directed against provincialism and
ignorance. However the volume of writing exhausted him and he feared he was
wasting his time writing outside poetry,[67] exclaiming that he "MUST stop writing so much
prose".[68]”
In other words Pound’s political ideas were
bullshit. They were based wholly on primitive instincts and whim, not on any
kind of research or reflection.
Ezra Pound is a shining example of blinkered ignorance whimsically
proclaiming supposedly profound truths designed to turn society into a wretched
zoo.
