Portrait of a Fascist: Rebecca West’s “Radio Treason”
Out February 11 from McNally Editions.
Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany by Rebecca West (McNally Editions, February 11, 2025; Originally published, 1945)
In her famous 1941 Harper’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?,” Dorothy Thompson introduces us to the hypothetical “Mr. C,” an “embittered intellectual” from humble origins who has managed to work his way into the world of “important” people yet still finds himself relegated to the fringe, unable to obtain the power and regard to which he feels entitled.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him… He would laugh to see heads roll.
It’s this characterization I kept coming back to when reading Rebecca West’s extraordinary profile of William Joyce, Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany.
Joyce was an American-born Irishman who so desperately wanted to be British that he ended up siding with the Nazis. Between 1939 and 1945, he was the English-speaking voice for “Germany Calling,” a Nazi radio program beamed across the channel to sap British morale. For six years, Joyce—known to his unwilling listeners as “Lord Haw-Haw” for his affected, posh accent—taunted and teased Londoners who suffered under the Blitz and relayed false information of devastating Allied losses in the hopes of turning the British public against the war:
An old man told [West] that he was [attending the trial] because he had turned on the wireless one night during the V-i blitz when he came back from seeing his grandchildren’s bodies in the mortuary and had heard Haw-Haw’s voice. ‘There he was, mocking me,’ he said.
When he was caught, he was brought to London, tried, and hanged for treason. Though not the only English radio turncoat, he was the most prominent. His trial and execution were a sensation in battered, post-war London, and West was there to cover it for The New Yorker.
But Radio Treason is more than a mere procedural. While West does delve into the details of the case against Joyce, she’s far more interested in the man himself, and what his story says about not just the rise of, but also the frustratingly enduring appeal of, fascism.
She writes:
The life of William Joyce is worthwhile studying in detail because he represents a type of revolutionary who is for the moment obsolete, though it is possible, if the later models fail, that he may yet be found in currency again.
This is just one of the passages in which it feels as though West is speaking to us through time with a disconcerting prescience. Her portrait of Joyce is fascinating, frustrating, and familiar.
For all his pretensions to power, William Joyce comes off as a born bootlicker. From the get go, it seems, Joyce was attracted to crisp uniforms and casual brutality. As a teenager in Galway, he went so far as to volunteer as an informant for the notorious Black and Tans, helping them identify Irish Republican rebels agitating against British oppression. At age 14, he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of an Irish Republican priest. His neighbors, scandalized by such treachery, burned his family’s house down. They fled to England.
Once there, he fell in with Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Through talent and guile, he rose to become Mosley’s deputy, but was viewed skeptically by his aristocratic boss (“a queer little bog-trotter with a brogue,” West writes). Mosley viewed him and those like him, the rank-and-file rabble of the fascist movement, as little more than a means to an end. Looking back, Mosley’s wife would later lament: “We didn’t know how we were going to get rid of all those dreadful common people we had had to use to get power.”
Same as it ever was.
By the time the war broke out, British fascism offered little opportunity for advancement; so Joyce slipped away to Germany with visions of returning to London triumphantly, at the head of a column of Wehrmacht troops, to finally take his rightful place at the top of whatever was left over after the Luftwaffe was done with it. Instead, he ended up in a pretty janky radio propaganda unit, surrounded by fellow Quislings whose pathetic faults and foibles West summarizes with devastating drollness. It must’ve been torture for the prideful Joyce, but he made the most of his time there, venting his spleen at the country that refused to recognize his greatness and stifled his desire to have unlimited power over those he believed were his lessers.
What’s fascinating about Radio Treason is that West reveals there might’ve been another way for Joyce. He was an accomplished student and a well-regarded tutor, much appreciated by his pupils. He could’ve lived a happy, modest life as an educator. But it wasn’t enough for him. He had bigger ideas. “Spiessbürger is the German word for it,” writes West. “He was loaded with frustrated ambition.”
In some ways, it would be easy to feel empathy for Joyce. Like Thompson’s Mr. C, he faced both class and ethnic prejudice in London, and West recounts several occasions where people express surprise that he doesn’t conform to their stereotypical assumptions of what an Irishman should be like—not that it changed their opinions of him, of who he was or who he should be. As Thompson says of Mr. C, “He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery.” And perhaps that does explain the genesis of a man who, from a young age, sought to shed his stigmatized identity and cozy up to whatever authoritarian force presented itself to him.
West writes:
What could he ever have done but use his trick of gathering together other poor fellows luckless in the same way, so that they might overturn the sane community that was bound to reject them and substitute a mad one that would regard them kindly?
When one’s goals cannot be achieved through merit, when one’s rights cannot be upheld through the legal system, when one’s views cannot be realized through participation in democratic society, what else is left but force?
But while it may serve as an explanation, it’s also not an excuse. There was something deeper and darker at play, something that aligned him with the Black and Tans rather than the IRA, the BUF instead of Communists who stood against them at the Battle of Cable Street, the Axis over the Allies. There were many ways to pursue the reordering of society, the redress of social ills. But only fascism promised him what he desired most—to lord over others, to make others feel pain.
West identifies a chaotic strain in British fascism that, I think, is not so different from what motivates its contemporary analog here in the United States (or, perhaps, the “West” more broadly):
It had sprung up because people who, living in an established order, had no terror of disorder, had read too much in the newspapers about Mussolini and Hitler, and thought it would be exciting to create disorder on the same lines.
In short, it seemed like fun. What West identified 80 years ago has recently been classified by research as a genuine political tendency: the “Need for Chaos.”1
Radio Treason is a short book, but densely packed with exquisite writing and thought-provoking insights. More than once, I got goosebumps reading West’s powerful prose, such as when she describes the “long, sterile orgasm of the Nuremberg Rally…”
…where crowds, drunken with the great heat, entered into union with a man who was pure nihilism, who offered militarism and defeat, regulation and anarchy, power and ruin, the cancellation of all.
What’s perhaps most striking about Radio Treason is that it’s free from the sentimentality you often find in depictions of the World War II era in later media. There’s no joy in victory, only a weary relief. No hagiographic heroism is at play here. Joyce’s execution is no cause for celebration. If anything, it’s something of a validation for him.
West renders post-war London as a shattered place where “the sanest were a little mad and the half-mad quite demented.” It’s a world trying to piece itself back together after tearing itself apart, a complicated world full of complex people who are no better and no wiser than we are today. In this, it reminds me a lot of Norman Lewis’s Naples ‘44—a diary of the Allied occupation that is unflinching in its depiction of the messy, disorganized, and often distasteful reality of a country and a people at war. We do the past (and the present) a disservice when we smooth out its rough edges.
Indeed, many of those smoothed-out retrospective looks at the World War II era have made us complacent. We were led to believe that fascism had been defeated, that it was something that could be defeated, rather than a dark impulse that must be forever guarded against. The defeat of Nazi Germany may have tamped it down for a time, but it remained, smoldering, waiting for its moment. They knew better back then—West’s whole project with her book was to dissect Joyce so future readers could better understand where men like him come from and, ultimately, what must be done with them.
But it’s also a warning to those who are seduced by fascism’s empty promise of upending a system that has been unkind to them. There are William Joyces galore today, all across traditional, partisan, and social media, gleefully spewing their propaganda in service of people who (like Mosley, like Hitler) see them as little more than disposable tools, who would be rid of them as soon as it’s convenient to them. They mock those who agitate for a better, more egalitarian world because, ultimately, they believe they alone deserve to be on top. They believe that fascism will deliver that for them. But however understandable their reasons for turning against civilization may be, or however flawed the political order they rail against actually is, they will find little sympathy when all is said and done.
For while the roots of fascism may lie in genuine social distress, its branches lead to the hangman’s noose.
Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. His criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Millions, among others. His short fiction about aspiring ghosts, trivial psychics, and petty saboteurs has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, BULL, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ink In Thirds, and Uncharted (forthcoming). He is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.
“We hypothesize that some individuals are so disaffected with current society and their (perceived) status in it that they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to disrupt the established democratic ‘cosmos’ and start anew.”