Up in a bar above my Gmail this morning is the following quote that Google saw fit to share with me:
Quote of the Day - Ezra Pound - "A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
Well, no he doesn't.
This is more feel-good Leftist garbage that few people really stop to think about, and I call "bullshit" on it.
Maybe no one cares, but at least one person on the internet will have seen that quote and called it out for the utter crap it is.
Does "any mode of expression" include placing people into ghettos, or starving them, or confiscating the means of
wealth production, or controlling the distribution of goods? Apparently Pound thought Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were
geniuses.
From Wikipedia:
Outraged by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.[2]
Hitler thought he was a genius and had the right to do monstrous things. Stalin and Mussolini thought that they knew better than everyone else and also had the right to dispose of people who got in the way of their grand schemes. Friedrich Neitzsche wrote about "The Superman", man so far above his fellows in intellectual abilities that he was no longer constrained by their morality and was instead compelled to act according to his own sense of right or wrong, which could differ wildly and nightmarishly from societal norms. Hitler was a big Nietzsche fan. Nietzsche apparently enabled Hitler and made Hitler feel justified in the horrors he was committing.
Today, we have a political class composed mainly of elitists who know little of the everyday struggles of average citizens, whom they hold in contempt. These professional politicians routinely lie to their "bosses" with utter impunity. They steal, cheat, and sometimes murder, but do not bear the same punishments as average citizens. Their job performance is often poor, when it is not negligent, and yet they are employed again and again. Maybe they are geniuses only because the electorate has become so dull, but this sad state still does not permit them "any mode of expression". It does not permit them free reign to incite class warfare and racial or gender-based animosity in order to keep their power.
The genius who thinks himself beyond consequence thinks himself a god, and the price for hubris is very high. This type of romanticism for hubris is not to be encouraged.
So "bullshit", Google, on your choice of crap to pollute my inbox with. No more Communist sympathizers, no more Nazi apologists, no more Totalitarian collusionists do I want to hear about or from. I sense you're wanting some of that unchecked power for yourselves. I don't think you're one of "the good guys".
Bullshit, Google.
