
Stuck with Pound - portobello
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/stuck-with-pound/
======
pjc50
_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.

A refresher on the latter: [https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/coming-
to-terms-wi...](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/coming-to-terms-
with-ezra-pounds-politics/)

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.

~~~
082349872349872
His later writing wasn't far removed from Qanon:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208047)

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necovek
The web site is inaccessible to me:

"Your access to this service has been limited. (HTTP response code 503)"

"Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security
reasons."

~~~
jwilk
Archived copy:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200818060518/https://kirkcente...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200818060518/https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/stuck-
with-pound/)

------
Jun8
If you are interested in translation of poetry, Douglas Hofstadter's _Le Ton
beau de Marot_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot))
is a fantastic read.

------
082349872349872
Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we
invented editors. and manners.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265)

Edit: skimming
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound](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?)

~~~
golergka
Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.

~~~
toyg
You're being downvoted but this is correct.

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".

~~~
gadders
Britain's own failed Mussolini, Oswald Mosley was a Labour MP before he became
a fascist:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley#Crossing_the_flo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley#Crossing_the_floor)

~~~
Aengeuad
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.

