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EZRA POUND 229
prestige and unique position by staying neutral. Neutral, while
other powers exhausted themselves. And she did not. Who are the
lunatics? Was there a deliberate plot? That is what should concern
you."
It is amazing that Ezra Pound, in 1943, should have been able
to predict so accurately the postwar situation. Was it treason for
him to warn his native land that she "must be strong enough to
bear the strength of Russia" in the postwar world? Churchill said
it in 1946, at Fulton, Missouri, but Ezra Pound had already said
it in 1943. He continued in this vein with subsequent broadcasts.
April 27, 1943. Preparing Another:
"Oh, yes, another ten- or twenty-year war, between the United
States and Slavic Russia. It'll start just as soon as this one shows
signs of relaxing.
". . . I quote Jefferson. 'But with respect to future debts would
it not be wise and just for the nation to declare in the Constitution
that they are forming, that neither the legislature nor the nation
itself can validly contract more debt than they may pay within
their own age, or within the term of 34 years.' "
May 2, 1943:
". . . The artist does not need to own property, it usually bores
him, bores him, but he wants to own his tools. No, not even that,
he wants the right to use the tools of his craft."
May 4, 1943:
". . . Just why the campus Communist, the starry-eyed idealist
Communist, or realist Communists . . . should suppose that Stalin
is leading to a world revolution, instead of playing power politics
on the old Romanoff model, I'll leave to you."
May 8, 1943:
" 'Religion, the opium of the people,' said Lenin. The late
William B. Yeats countered that by saying, 'Science, opium of the
suburb.'