Friday 5 November 2010

PRESERVING THE MEMORY AND THE TEACHING OF EZRA POUND

 A very leonine Ezra in 1920

Ezra Pound is among the most remarkable men of the last 120 years. He made his name as a poet and guided W. B. Yeats, T.S. Elliot and E. Hemingway on their way to the Noble Prize (back when it meant something). His final student was the remarkable revisionist historian, Eustace Mullins who passed away last year.

Born in Idaho, Pound left the United States for Europe in 1908. In London he found an audience of educated people who appreciated his poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespeare, a descendant of the playwright. Pound also befriended some of the most brilliant artists of the time and watched them butchered in the First World War.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a sculptor and one of Ezra’s best friends, was one of these sacrifices. The Great War changed Pound’s outlook on life ~ no longer content with his artistic endeavors alone, he wanted to find out why that war happened.

The answer he got bought him 12 years as a political prisoner in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Anacostia, just across the river from the Capitol in Washington D.C. Pound was never put on trial but was branded a traitor by the post-war American media.

What answer did Pound find? It was nothing we do not know today, it is common. However at that time this knowledge was extremely dangerous. Pound discovered that Our wars begin and end at the instigation of the international financial houses. The bankers make money on fighting and rebuilding by controlling credit. They colonize nations and have no loyalty to their host countries’ youth or culture. No sacrifice is too great for their profit.

Much of Pound’s work chronicles the effect of this parasitic financial class on societies: from ancient China to modern-day Europe. Pound was a polyglot and scoured numerous (well-documented) sources for historical background. The education that Mullins’ work promises is delivered by the truckload in Pound’s writing. Pound often lists his sources at the end of his work ~ and they always check out.
 
PRESERVING THE MEMORY
AND THE TEACHING 
OF EZRA POUND

"Daring as never before, wastage as never before." 
~ painting and words by Ezra Pound.

Oct. 28, 2010

"Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs." ~ Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 1813

"I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." ~ Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor,Monticello, May 28, 1816

"Neither he (Benito Mussolini) nor T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) was interested in, nor bamboozled by money." ~ Ezra Pound, "Jefferson and/or Mussolini," p. 64

This Saturday, Oct. 30, will mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of poet/philosopher Ezra Pound in the frontier town of Hailey, in what was then the "Idaho territory" of the United States.

To honor his memory and perpetuate his campaign for justice in economics and against the authority of money in government and society, Independent History and Research is reprinting his classic text, "Jefferson and/or Mussolini," which has been out of print for forty years.

Pound's union of Jefferson, the small government populist, with Mussolini the Fascist, will certainly strike the reader as the oddest of  conjunctions. Prof. Alec Marsh decodes the paradox:
"Pound's critique of capitalism...is purely Populist, certainly not Fascist. Pound was against militarism...and had little interest in youth cults, mass spectacles or mystic Italian nationalism, which he seems to have accepted simply as the Italian way of doing things. 

What  fundamentally interested Pound in Italian Fascism was the possibility it offered for what Emilio Gentile has called 'the conquest of modernity.' That is, Pound admired the attempt by Mussolini to overcome and control the impersonal economic forces unleashed by modernization. 

Volitionist economics is an attempt to formulate a practical program for those who have the will to master the forces of modernity a will that Mussolini  had in abundance....It seems clear that the man, not the party, interests Pound. And Pound is interested because he thinks that Mussolini might enact the economic reforms necessary to restore social  justice..." ("Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of  Jefferson").

If one knows anything of the history of western civilization's struggle against usury, from the ancient Greeks to the medieval Catholics, from  William Shakespeare to C.H. Douglas, a glaring contradiction will be found not in a conjunction of an American and an Italian revolutionary, but in the appropriation of Jefferson by Glenn Beck, the Fox TV disciple of the greed-is-good Khazar-capitalist, Ayn Rand.

Beck has plenty of friends in Pound's native state. In Idaho we have a tabloid called the "Capitalist Papers" which is where the Tea Party and well-intentioned patriots like Phil Hart advertise and are afforded a forum.

Raul Labrador, Idaho’s “conservative” Republican candidate for Congress, is a shill for the corporate transfer of America's wealth to China. His campaign is against "Obamacare" and government spending (except for spending on the national police state and overseas neocon empire). Nancy  Pelosi is his cuss word; Ben Bernanke gets a pass.

"Jefferson and/or Mussolini" is not a book we intend to distribute to Idaho ignoramuses and expect that they will have a "Eurkea!" moment  after reading it. It's not a book for the completely ignorant. Pound was old school. He dealt in what the Scholastics called "First principles." His thought patterns and arguments are lush with profundity, paradox and  poetry.

Pound was not a snob, however. Like Jefferson, he was a man of the people despite an I.Q. that was off the charts. 

He cared intensely for the welfare of the poor and the workers. He was big on common sense and intuition and he would cherish a vision of an Idaho mountaineer in 2010 trying to parse his prose by a wood-fired stove.

We're not promoting "Jefferson and/or Mussolini" as one of those  supposed "blockbuster eye-opener books!" which is guaranteed to generate instant enlightenment in the reader. 

WWI AND EUROPEAN SOCIETY ACCORDING TO EZRA THE SCRIBE:

"There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

 For a botched civilization.

These fought in any case,
and some believing
pro domo, in any case .....
Died some, pro patria,*
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

Since when is education anything other than a lifetime project?

Pound's book should be in the library of every person who aspires to be learned ~ we do advance that thesis and trust that it is not hyperbole.

There is no substitute for true education. 

One can obtain the appearance of learning by sitting at the feet of Glenn Beck and his chalkboard. Image and appearance are what modern America is all about. 

Mountebanks like Beck invoke the America of the past as a front for their support for anti-American usury banking and Israeli hot and cold foreign wars;  the latter now being waged against Iran, where sanctions are beginning to destabilize the economy of a nation rooted in opposition to usury, and which is a threat to no one except those who believe they have a license to murder Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at will.

From out of this nightmare arises the writer who gave us the "Pisan Cantos," the intellectual who wrote the "ABC of Reading," and the courageous campaigner for economic justice who penned "Jefferson and/or Mussolini."

Reading Pound's book is a journey into a great mind. We make no warranties concerning the degree to which it will "change your life" or "wake up your neighbors." The extent to which this book can exalt your spirit and stimulate your mind depends on the extent of your own personal character and ennoblement.

Let's face it, most of us are not spending our days making our way through the 100 Classic Books of Western Thought. Most of us spend our reading time on newspapers and the Internet. We haven't read Aristotle  or Augustine, Chaucer or Dickens, or if we did it was ages ago, in a stuffy classroom with a mediocre teacher, and from a motivation to pass a course rather than lift up our heart and mind.

Pound's little volume fills a two-fold void. First, it starts us on our peregrination back to the tried and true paths and founts of our  civilization which the Glenn Becks of our world have suppressed. 

Second, it serves as a sign of contradiction to the literati of America and Europe as they meet over the next days and weeks to celebrate the 125th birthday of a domesticated Ezra Pound, shorn of his lion's mane. 

 Locked up as an enemy of the state by the American government because he dared to think and speak of the unspoken, opposition politics and money.

They want to forget that there was a reason he was locked up for twelve years by the U.S. government and it has to do, then as now, with the life-and-death struggle with the Money Power, the evil which underlies every other evil (Matthew 6:24; 1 Timothy 6:10).

Alas, in this economy, our own publishing enterprise is no longer what it once was, as buyers and donors drop by the wayside. Therefore, we are no longer able to order a thousand copies of a book at a time, with the resulting advantageous economy of scale that such quantity purchases afford. In our straitened circumstances, wherein we are fighting to stave off bankruptcy, we have engaged the services of the print-on-demand publishing trade. By this means we finance the printing of books based on the advance orders we receive from individual readers.  

If you choose to order, please allow up to four weeks for delivery.

Overseas please allow up to five weeks (figuring an average of an extra week for air mail).

JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI (quality paperback; 138 pages), $17.95 plus postage and packing. (Please do not send just $17.95 or your order will be returned. You must also pay for shipping - see below).

You can order by credit card at this link:



Or you can pay with a US check or US Money order, as follows:
U.S. customers send $21.00 postpaid. Canadians send US$26.00 postpaid.
Foreign/Overseas send US $28.00.  Order from: Independent History and
Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EZRA!

May we never forget the price you paid for telling the truth about money!

The HOFFMAN WIRE is a public service of Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA

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