Counterfeit Kulchur

Abstract

‘An education,’ said Ezra Pound (Guide to Kulchur, New York: New Directions, 1970, 52), ‘consists in “getting wise” in the rawest and hardest boiled sense of that bit of argot’. In American gangster dialect, circa 1930 ‘getting wise’ means wising up to the way the world really works. To be educated in Pound's terms is to realize that the world is run by gangs, that power is a ‘symbiosis of public government, organized crime and private wealth with deep connections’ to both (P. D. Scott, Deep Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, 74); that the legitimated overworld of politics, multi-national corporations and international finance is linked in myriad ways the underworld, a situation that remains unchanged today. Pound's importance, even his nobility, lies in his unremitting attempt to ‘wise us up’ and to promote a benign underworld of artists as the true bearers of culture in a world increasingly dominated by criminal greed. That this attempt led him astray politically and morally there can be no doubt, but his allegiance to Mussolini, his eventual anti-Semitism and his steady course rightwards from the mid-1930s onward, should not blind us to what he saw as his mission, which was nothing less than to save what was salvageable from the wreckage of twentieth-century Europe. Necessarily then, Pound's great work, The Cantos, is both the secret history of the world and a utopian program relying throughout on information and beliefs outside the mainstream. As many readers have noted the poem has aspects of a muck-raking project and as such is invested in ‘secret history.’ By necessity, this aspect of history in the poem is documented throughout by evidence culled from unofficial and in many cases apocryphal sources that compromise the integrity of his epic project. The most obvious of these are The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which enter the source field of the poem relatively late, in The Pisan Cantos, but this notorious forgery will not be discussed here. Rather, this essay connects Pound's concept of ‘the great bass,’ which he articulates in Guide to Kulchur to Peter Dale Scott's thinking about ‘deep politics’ and ‘parapolitics’ – concepts that have a clear relevance to the idea of secret history.