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by multjoy 309 days ago
He was also a virulent anti-semite
2 comments

Like Wagner and lots of other artists around that time. Agatha Christie's most famous novel? - Ten Little Niggers. Jean Genet was a convicted criminal. I try to separate the work from the artist, even if it's difficult.
OP doesn’t even acknowledge it.

Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:

>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.

That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.

I think it's a valid and important observation, but it's not incumbent on someone bring up T.S. Eliot to offer a disclaimer about it, and you shouldn't write a comment that implies otherwise.
Why? Who are you to say what I can, and cannot, write?
I mean, you do you, but it's not a reasonable complaint.
Which was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that time.
That doesn’t make it any better. They also had significant opposition.
Indeed, they had opposition. However, the way we have been taught history has been laundered to make us think that Nazi ideology never had a significant base of support outside of Germany, when the truth was that it was not only significant, but segregated American society under Jim Crow was in several ways a model for the Nazis.
US treatment of migrant workers under the Bracero program and US usage of Zyklon B on migrant workers as a delousing agent directly inspired Nazis. This came to a head at the so-called bath riots in 1917:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots

This has come up a couple times before on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38552760

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381708

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40382627

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40646876

TIL