Reviewing Daniel Swift’s The Bughouse, a biography of Ezra Pound’s later years, Adam Kirsch examines the dangerous ideas of the American modernist poet and traitor, and argues that they not be ignored:

Pound lived in Italy throughout the fascist period, and he was an ardent admirer of Mussolini, in whom he saw a reincarnation of the Renaissance patron-warlords he wrote about. During World War II, Pound—still a U.S. citizen, although he had lived in Europe since 1908—made numerous propaganda broadcasts in English on Rome Radio, aimed at convincing American soldiers of the perfidy of capitalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Jews, among other targets.

This made him a traitor, and at the end of the war he was captured by a band of Italian partisans and turned over to the U.S. army. He was imprisoned at Pisa, first in a cage, then in a tent; and it was in these piteous conditions that he wrote the lines [later included in one of his major works, The Cantos] that sound so much like an apology. . . . Perhaps all his fantasies of poetry hand in hand with power were just so much “vanity,” [these verses seem to imply]. Yet it was hard to give up the fantasy, and [the poetry he wrote at the time] also contains some of his most virulently anti-Semitic and pro-fascist verse. . . .

Swift [also] draws the reader’s attention to the toxic legacy of Pound—the racist drivel he continued to write during his [postwar] incarceration, and the white-supremacist disciples who formed another contingent of visitors to the mental hospital [to which an American court had sentenced him to live for the remainder of his life]. While Swift is on the whole quite sympathetic to Pound as a man and a poet, his portrait does not shy away from Pound’s essential ugliness—his petty, banal prejudices, his monomania, his conspiracy theorizing, his admiration of violence and oppression. . . .

In the 1930s, enough people did share Pound’s anti-Semitism and fascism that [those ideas] became world-historically important, rather than individually disturbing. [That is why] his case calls for stringent judgment. . . .

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.