Ezra Pound on Hitler's Economic Policies

Abstract

ZRA POUND'S remarks about mix praise of some of his ideas IG with a distrust of his personality. Yeats in I934 reported a remark of Pound's which is typical: All the . . . modern statesmen were more or less scoundrels except 'Mussolini and that hysterical imitator of his Hitler.'' (unlike the contemporary leaders of other countries) was honest, but he was unbalanced. There is a more negative judgment in The Newv English Weekly for 5 January I933: Hitler sets up a parody, a sickly and unpleasant parody of fascism.2 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, published in I935, Pound's hopes rest mainly on a strong Italy, not on Germany, stuck in the bog of the seventeenth century, with lots of crusted old militars yelling to get back siph'litic Bill [the Kaiser] and lots more wanting pogroms; the at least one whom he there says he greatly admires is Leo Frobenius, not Hitler.3 Pound's lifelong admiration was the Mediterranean, not the Nordic world. Pound's most favorable remarks about are on his financial policy. He considered his statement that the Germans had been to 'accept credits' as evidence that the Fiihrer was on to the tricks of the bankers; the corrupt newspapers lying about the nature of Social Credit had been forced to report this insightful remark.4 In I938 Pound endorsed a recent statement of Hitler's about money, Germany's money was based on German productivity.; Pound himself often expressed the view that sound money is based not on gold or any other currency but on the national product.