Ezra Pound wrote some of the last century’s most interesting, challenging and beautiful poetry. To his great credit, he was also a tireless champion of the work of other notable contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. On the debit side, he was one of the most repellently vicious anti-Semites that you’d never want to meet.
Feeling unappreciated by his countrymen, Pound spent most of his adult life in Europe, including lengthy spells in England, France and, eventually, Italy, where he became an unquestioning and vocal supporter of Mussolini. He stayed on in Italy after the start of the Second World War and continued, in print and on the wireless, to blame everything – literally everything - on Jews working behind the scenes, and supporting Hitler and “Old Mussy” (as he affectionately referred to Il Duce) against Roosevelt and Churchill, both of whom he despised.
At the end of the war, he was captured by the Allies and, instead of being tried for treason (as he undoubtedly deserved) he was declared insane and spent many years in asylums before being released to spend the rest of his life in Italy. He died in Venice in 1972 at the age of 87. Five years earlier, he had told the poet Alan Ginsberg, while lambasting his own Cantos, “…the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. All along that spoiled everything”.
Indeed. But reading that remark – made by a man who had carried on railing against Jews up till the age of 82 – left me wondering, not for the first time, why it is so often and so automatically Jews that Northern races single out for hatred (let’s leave aside Muslims for the purposes of this blog). Yes, they live amongst us, and, yes, they tend to be, on average, harder working and cleverer than us, and, apart, perhaps, from Sport, Jews tend to excel at just about anything they turn their hand to. And, of course, when given the opportunity, they add immeasurably to the culture of any society they’re a part of. All right, they tend to be disproportionately represented in professions we’ve grown to mistrust – in particular, banking and the law – but they’re also strong in the media, science, writing, music, medicine, teaching, retailing, and many other generally admired areas of endeavour. Also, on an already overloaded plus side, at a time when many European societies are starting to resent the perceived unwillingness of Muslims to assimilate, Jews do it brilliantly (when allowed). And the old canard that Jews didn’t much like fighting has been firmly and permanently shown to be nonsense – now they’re usually lambasted for being too eager to fight. (I realise that almost everything in this paragraph, no matter how positive, could be interpreted as racist - it’s a minefield.)
Anti-Semitism is once more on the rise across the globe. Nowadays, you don’t have to express hatred for Jews (which, of course, is still unacceptable) – you can bang on about the iniquities of Israel and convince yourself it’s the state you’re attacking, not the race. Of course not! Heaven forbid that any of us decent liberals would be sufficiently unevolved to be racist. That’s for shaven-headed thugs and mad old colonels.
The great psychiatrist and thinker, Jung, believed that we each contain within ourselves a “shadow”, comprising the less admirable aspects of ourselves, whose very existence we need to mask from our conscious minds. Part of the process of denial is attributing to others – specific individuals or whole professions or races– what we cannot consciously bear to accept in our own natures. Part of the process of denial is the tendency to project what we despise or fear about ourselves onto others.
When you’re a nice, smiley-faced, caring modern European, what do you do about those aspects of your nature which, if admitted, would prevent you feeling good about yourself? If, deep down, you sense avaricious, manipulative, tribalistic impulses in yourself, why not get rid of them by projecting them onto an entire race? Better still, your subconscious will do all the work for you, and you needn’t experience any conscious guilt.
I suspect that Jews have spent centuries acting as a projection screen for the unassimilable darknesses hidden in the psyches of other races. I’m pretty sure that this is at the root of all forms of racism, not just anti-Semitism, and that different aspects of the Shadow get projected onto different races. Rather than banning the expression of racial preferences, facing up to what lies buried in our own psyches might just help.
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