Abstract
Treating the five years before the outbreak of World War II, this chapter considers Pound’s turn toward writing gratis propaganda on behalf of Fascist Italy and the British Union of Fascists. Textual discussion of 65 texts written between winter 1935–36 and spring 1940 is also treated with an eye to the synergy between Pound’s propaganda and ideological points raised by European fascist movements, ranging from the invasion of Abyssinia to the increased endorsement of anti-Semitism in the later 1930s. Pound’s propaganda writings for the BUF (Action, British Union Quarterly) and Fascist Italy (the British-Italian Bulletin), respectively, are further contextualized through his extensive correspondence with leading figures in both movements.
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Notes
Ezra Pound, “Europe MCMXXXVI: Reflections Written on the Eve of a New Era”, Globe 1/2 (May 1937), Lea Baechler et al., eds., Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, 11 volumes (Garland, London: 1991), VII: 192; hereafter EPPP.
Pound to W.E. Woodward, 14 July 1935, Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940 (University of Florida Press, Gainesville: 2001), 155; hereafter Preda/EPEC.
Achille Bossi, Notes by an Italian on the Abyssinian Question (CAUR, Rome: n.d. [1936]), 60, Foligno Collection, Taylorian Library, University of Oxford, 1241; hereafter Foligno/TL.
H. C. Hopkinson, Fair Play for Italy (CAUR, Rome: n.d. [1936]), 4, 8, Foligno/TL, 1198.
Richard Pankhurst, “Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia: A History of their Discussion, from the League of Nations to the United Nations”, Northeast African Studies 6/1–2 (1999), 83; see also John Gooch, “Re-conquest and Suppression: Fascist Italy’s Pacification of Libya and Ethiopia, 1922–1939”, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/6 (2005).
Alberto Pirelli, Considerations on the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict (Istituto per gli stuid di Politica Internazionale, Roma: 1936), 11, 7, 17, Foligno/TL 1231.
Pound to Harold W. Thompson (April 1936), cited in Cameron McWhirter, “‘Dear Poet-General and Walloper’: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Harold W. Thompson 1936–9”, Paideuma 29/3–4 (2001), 116.
Pound to Sen. James Pope, 9 January 1936, YBL 41/1751; see also Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 137–138. I am grateful to Alec Marsh for his assistance with this letter.
Herbert Vivian, Fascist Italy (A. Melrose, London: 1936), 62. In conclusion, Vivian maintains: “Fascism, however beneficent, must be regarded as a revolution and the revolution continues for the satisfaction of the vital interests of the country”, 277. Needless to say, similar views on the “Corporate State” as the “Promised Land” were advanced in Vivian’s article for the British-Italian Bulletin’s Christmas Special, revealingly entitled “Hysteria in England: Reborn Italy Abused, The Geneva Fantasy” 1/8, 27 December 1935.
See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy; Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, London: 2008), ch. 2; and Pound, “A Good Surgeon Does Not Always Amputate”, 24 October 1936, B-IB 2139.
Galeazzo Ciano, cited in W. Vincent Arnold, The Illusion of Victory: Fascist Propaganda and the Second World War (Peter Lang, New York: 1998), 1; italics in original.
Pound, “A Social Creditor Serves Notice”, Fascist Quarterly 2/4 (October 1936), 495, 492.
Pound to Thomson, 3 April 1938, Preda/EPEC, 213. For details on Angus MacNab and the National Socialist League, see Thomas Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–1939: Politics, Ideology, Culture (Manchester University Press, Manchester: 2000), 138ff.
Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (UCL Press, London: 1995), 305.
Other assessments of the BUF include Gary Love, “‘What’s the Big Idea?’ Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists and Generic Fascism”, Journal of Contemporary History 42/3 (2007); Philip Coupland, “The Blackshirted Utopians”, reprinted in Griffin and Feldman, vol. IV (Routledge, London: 2004)
and more generally, Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (Pimlico, London: 2005), 126fF.
Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (Vintage, London: 1996), 182.
Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound Stock (Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1970), 303;
and Pound, “‘The Criterion’ Passes”, British Union Quarterly 3/2 (1939), 72.
Ezra Pound, “Canto LII”, The Cantos (Faber, London: 1998), 257–258; and Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (University of California Press, London: 1980), 199–202. That Pound’s use of the term “neschek” was intended to link Judaism to usury is clarified in the long unpublished “Addendum for C” (c. 1941), commencing: The Evil is Usury, neschek the serpent neschek whose name is known, the defiler beyond race and against race. (The Cantos, 798; italics in original)
Pound’s letter to James Laughlin on 1 December 1936 suggests that the term ‘usura’ was to some degree tactical: “the line to take as in my “USURERS have no RACE”, Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Faber, London: 1988), 533; hereafter Carpenter/ASC.
Pound, “The ‘Criterion’ Passes”, 67; and Pound, What is Money for? (Greater Britain Publications, London: 1939), 10–11.
Julie V. Gottlieb, “Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticization of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda”, The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far-Right in Britain, eds., Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (I.B. Tauris, London: 2004), 11;
and A.R. Thomson, The Coming Corporate State (Greater Britain Publications, London: 1939), 21. See also Matthew McMurray, “Alexander Raven Thomson, Philosopher of the British Union of Fascists”, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 17/1 (2012).
See, respectively, Pound, “Social Credit Asses”, Action, 18 November 1937; Pound, “The Free Dumb of the Press”, ibid., 9 December 1937; Pound, “Thought Resistance”, ibid., 16 December 1937; Pound, “Why Parliament’s Gone to Hell”, ibid., 30 December 1937; Pound, “Toward an Economic Orthology”, British Union Quarterly 1/4 (1937), 20; and L.C.G., “Books Read”, Action, 2 December 1937.
WK.A.J. Chambers-Hunter, “British Union and Social Credit” (Greater Britain Publications, London: n.d. [1939]), 3, 5.
Pound, “Banks are a Blessing”, British Union Quarterly 3/1 (1939), 52.
Pound, “Why Parliament’s Gone to Hell”; Pound, “Bury the Corpse!”, ibid., 10 March 1938; and Oswald Mosley, Taxation and the People (Abbey Supplies, London: n.d. [1939]), 3, 8.
William Joyce, Fascism and Jewry (B.U.F. Publications, London: n.d. [1936]), 3;
E. G. Clarke, The British Union and the Jews, 7 (Greater Britain Publications, London: n.d. [1937?]), 7;
Anonymous, Britain and Jewry (Greater Britain Publications, London, n.d. [1939]), 4;
and Pound, “The Revolution Betrayed”, British Union Quarterly 2/1 (1938), 38.
Pound, “Infamy of Taxes”, Action, 4 June 1938. For a groundbreaking account of Nazi Germany’s growing influence upon western European fascist movements in the 19305, see Dietrich Orlow, The Lure of Fascism in Western Europe: German Nazis, Dutch and French Fascists, 1933–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke: 2009), esp. chs. 4–6.
Ben D. Kimpel and T.C. Duncan Eaves, “Ezra Pound on Hitler’s Economic Policies”, American Literature 55/1 (1983), 48.
Richard Thurlow, “The Security Service and British Fascism”, British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, eds., Nigel Copsey and David Renton (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke: 2005), 39–40.
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© 2013 Matthew Feldman
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Feldman, M. (2013). Unpaid Propaganda ‘for a Decent Europe’, 1935–40. In: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345516_3
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