Sunday 4 April 2010

The Poet (Ezra Pound)





The poet (Ezra Pound).



They came for the poet with a pen,
And a signature upon a form,
And a term that sealed his fate,
Mad, they called him for his words.

But the poet wasn’t mad, he was saner,
Than any of the politicians,
With their maps and machines,
And their poisonous dreams,
That saw war as sane and reasonable.

They could see it in his eyes,
Only truth and no lies,
So they put him in a cage,
For twenty five days,
Until the poetry became pain,
And the light within dimmed,
In the ruins of European civilisation.










http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound


Pound remained in Italy, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. He made several radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his scant political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. When Pound spoke on Italian radio, he gave a series of talks on political and cultural matters, art and patronage and economic theories. Pound believed that economics was the core issue for the cause of World War II. Specifically, his talks were largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the war.


Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels (the national debt indeed rose astronomically because of the wars). He advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He favored government issued currency[20] with no interest to pay, preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764.[citation needed] Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of Thomas Jefferson, as well as with Benjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.
















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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The life of Ezra Pound would make a brilliant movie with the post war machinations to get him sectioned into an asylum. If I had the money I would love to do movies on some of our 20 th century PC " villains".One of the most interesting would be a movie on Karl Brandt the "Nazi doctor". Hanged after the war by the good old US of A. He had wanted to work with Albert Schweizer in Africa as a missionary doctor but got swept up in the events of the 20 th century. Actually a thoroughly decent and kind man who only supported euthanasia for those who were pityfully suffering with such awful mental and physical deformities; he was actually an idealist.
His words on the scaffold are true today as they were in 1947;
"It is not surprising that the nation which in the face of the history of humanity will forever have to bear the guilt for hiroshima and Nagasaki, that this nation attempts to hide itself behind moral superlatives. She does not bend the law; justice has never been there, what dictates is power. And this power wants victims."

Anonymous said...

hey Lee, i just spotted this article about David Yelland, editor of the Sun, read this claim...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/04/david-yelland-sun-alcoholic-book

" I was untouchable. I was cocooned and protected, a "made man", an unelected member of a tiny elite that runs the country and never has to pay a price."

" I had the prime minister on the phone agreeing with me. "

" I had a BlackBerry with the mobile numbers of most of the Cabinet, the Murdoch family and a chunk of the British elite."

zoomraker said...

German Banks were making interest payments to the Bank of England right the way through WW2!

War is the most profitable business there is.

The war in Afghanistan is not meant to be won, it's meant to go on for as long as possible so that as much wealth as possible can be taken from the tax payer and transferred to the Banks who are funding the war through loans.

Anonymous said...

Guilt for Hiroshima & Nagasaki ?
On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and million or so Japanese civilians who would have died in the impending invasion of the Japanese Islands; on behalf of the millions of children and grandchildren of these people who were then fortunate enough to be born, I declare America has no guilt.

Today the bond of friendship between Americans and Japanese is strong. The only guilt that exists emanates from the knowledge that the actual war itself was so stupid. Both peoples deserved better.

Anonymous said...

The Japanese had actively sought to surrender in July 1945 and had contacted the Soviets to open negotiations. The US dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima for the same reason they wiped out the city of Dresden to show who was boss. The US imperium will fall one day and British boys will no longer have to die in Afghanistan for US oil interests.

Anonymous said...

You still think the US is the saviour of the world;

http://www.collateralmurder.org.