Blog : Philosémitisme

Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller (1915-2005), était un dramaturge américain, auteur notamment de "La Mort d'un Commis voyageur" et "Les sorcières de Harlem".  Dans son autobiographie "Timebends" (1987), Miller, qui était juif, évoque le jour où il entendit, pendant la guerre à la radio italienne, le poète américain Ezra Pound faire l'éloge d'Hitler et appeler à l'extermination des Juifs qu'il estimait responsables de la guerre et des problèmes de l'Europe:

"I must have been one of the few Americans who had actually heard an Ezra Pound broadcast from Axis Italy, and I could still recall the cold that had flowed into my heart while I was listening to him. Back during the war I had bought a new radio [?].  It had a powerful shortwave band, and one evening in our Willow Street house I turned it on and heard a clearly Midwestern voice. I assumed I had picked up an American station until the voice started talking about the necessity of killing the Jewish people. This was so arrantly vile and at the same time so calmly spoken that I thought at first it was some lame bad-taste satire by a desperate comic. But gradually the man's jolliness of spirit, his sheer ebullience, convinced and appalled me.

Left to herself, he blithely explained, Europe, composed as she was of closely interrelated peoples, would easily solve all her problems; it was purely the work of the Jews that this war had happened, for they were sworn to take vengeance on the gentiles while carrying out their plot to take over the entire world. The only solution, which he thanked God Hitler had had the intelligence to grasp, was to utterly destroy this hidden nation once and forever. [?]

[?] I was obviously one of those Jews who did not go into the gas without a complaint.  Pound had been calling for racial murder and, judging from the broadcast I had heard, would have happily killed me as a Jew if he could have. [?] I had been against men like Pound who stood for wrong, and I was proud of it." Ezra Pound le 26 mai 1945, photographié lors de son arrestation par les forces américaines.
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