May 9: Ezra Pound, Fascist Broadcaster

“[Y]ou would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphillis than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs,” said poet Ezra Pound on Italian radio on this date in 1942, in one of 120 broadcasts he made on behalf of the fascist cause during World War II. In this particular broadcast, Pound focused (like a precursor of Glenn Beck) on the gold standard and the purity of American money. All American wars, he argued, were campaigns to fight “the kikified usurers . . . to git an honest day’s pay for a day’s real work by the people,” and “to have the government money run honest” — and it would make ” any young man more American if he sticks to seein’ American history FIRST before swallowin’ exotic perversions.” Pound, a world-renowned literary figure, would be arrested for treason after the war and spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. In 1949, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his “Pisan Cantos,” which he wrote while interred in an army prison camp. To read any number of Pound’s broadcasts, click here.

“You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. . . . Corrupting the whole earth, you have lost yourselves to yourselves. And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.” —Ezra Pound, Mach 15, 1942