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. . . .

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.