A few weeks ago I talked to a young friend who mentioned with real sorrow in his voice how he, engaged in our struggle, had no real heroes on which to model and strengthen himself. As if by serendipity, I received a rather lengthy essay, summarized by Michael Walsh of Britain. I am bringing it to you in four parts.
I consider it a rather poignant story that gives us a human dimension and not just a sordid statistic. The story is of a young couple in love against the turmoils in Europe - a story with a very tragic end, and only one of many that played out in the grim, grim postwar days as the real "victors" took revenge on the vanquished.
The story has meaning today because the young man whose life ended in a judicial lynching, was an American.
THE MARTYRDOM OF WILLIAM JOYCE By Michael Walsh
It was a bitterly cold morning on January 3rd 1946. In a small chapel in Galway, Ireland, mass was being said for an American citizen about to be hanged in England's grim Wandsworth Prison. The condemned prisoner was still writing his farewell notes as the liturgy began (...)
The Consecretion of this mass with others was timed to coincide with the young American's departing soul at 9:00 am. The baying mob, given a spurious legitimacy by England's judiciary, had dragged the infamous gallows of Tyburn into the 20th Century. And so the soul of William Joyce, who had fought so tenaciously for the racial security and Christian integrity of Europe, was separated from his mortal existence.
A FAMILY TREE TO BE PROUD OF
Born on the morning of 24th April 1906 at 1377 Herkimer Street in New York, the intellectually gifted William Joyce had a family tree to be proud of. Theirs was a family whose merits had given an entire region of Galway their name, "Joyce's Country".
Their roots traced back to William the Conqueror's colonisation of medieval England and the later crusades. Among Joyce's descendents were three archbishops, three founders of the Dominican College at Louvain, several mayors of Galway, an historian, a nineteenth century poet-physician, an American revivalist preacher, and the noted author and poet James Joyce.
William's father, Michael Joyce, as a twenty-year old British citizen (Ireland was then ruled from Westminster) had emigrated to the United States in 1888. Four years later he renounced his British citizenship and became an American citizen. He was very successful in his trade and returned to Ireland in 1909 to live in comfort.
SORRY, YOU ARE NOT BRITISH
Fiercely loyal to the Crown and proudly pro-British, the Galway County Inspector of Police was unstinting in his praise of Michael Joyce who now, through lapse, considered he was again a British citizen.
Not so, the Chief Constable of Lancashire informed him. He and his wife Gertrude were formally cautioned against the provisions of the Aliens Restriction Order (8th July 1917). Michael and his wife were now in no doubt as to theirs and their sons' nationality. They were citizens of the United States of America.
At the conclusion of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (8th December 1921) when the twenty-six counties of Eire gained independence, Michael Joyce, no doubt due to his anti-Republican sympathies, removed himself to England to dedicate himself to King and Empire. William was then fifteen.
There was never any doubt as to his son's similar loyalty to the Crown, an excess of which caused him to lie about his age when enrolling in the Regular Army at sixteen. He was ejected after four months' service when his true age was revealed.
ACADEMICALLY BRILLIANT
The young Joyce joined the Officer Training Corps. It was through the OTC college system that the dedicated and highly cerebral student acquired BAs in Latin, French, English and History. Later on, in 1927 he obtained First Class Honours in English. In terms of his academic brilliance William Joyce's achievements have never been bettered.
His close friend John Angus MacNab described how Joyce could quote Virgil and Horace freely. Besides being able to speak German, he spoke French fairly well, and some Italian. He was not only gifted in mathematics but had a flair for teaching it. He was also widely read in history, philosophy, theology, psychology, theoretical physics and chemistry, economics, law, medicine, anatomy and physiology. He played the piano by ear.
INTERNATIONAL UPHEAVAL
This was a period of international upheaval and uncertainty. The "Russian" Revolution and bitter civil war were now over. Events had delivered that great nation to the tyranny of international Jewish revolutionaries. Bankers such as New York-based Kuhn, Loeb and co., who shared their ilk and presumably the ensuing opportunity for profit, had financed these revolutionaries.
Europe was horrified at what appeared to be the relentless flames of revolution licking at their own shores. Winston Churchill was on record as saying:
"It may well be that this same astounding (Jewish) race may at the present time be in the actual process of providing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible . . . at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire". (1)
SLASHED FROM MOUTH TO EAR
Against this background the young William Joyce on 6th December 1923 joined Miss Linton-Orman's British Fascisti Limited; an organisation set up to counter red revolutionary activity. Joyce was soon to come face to face (literally) with red revolutionaries. During an election meeting a Communist thug leaped on the eighteen-year old activist's back and with an open razor slashed him from mouth to ear. It was a scar that Joyce carried with him to gallows.
During this period of international upheaval, membership of a Fascist organisation and the defence of the British Empire were one and the same thing. Indeed it was so in Germany, Italy and many other European nations then battling against the Communist struggle for world domination. The political event, which Joyce was defending when attacked, was an election meeting for the Unionist Parliamentary candidate, Jack Lazarus.
FASCIST RESPECTABILITY
In 1933, the Financial Times brought out a special eight-page supplement under the caption: 'The Renaissance of Italy: Fascism's Gift of Order and Progress.' As late as 11th November 1938 Winston Churchill opined: "Of Italian Fascism, Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilised society. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism." (2).
Only later would the defeated British Empire genuflect to the triumphant airs of "The Internationale". William Joyce, reluctant to commit himself to existing anti-communist organizations, eventually opted for Oswald Mosley's newly formed British Union of Fascists. He remained sceptical, however, of Sir. Benito Mussolini (3) His scepticism was due to the Italian leader's apparent lack of concern at the threat posed by organised world Jewry. On the other hand he had the greatest admiration for Germany's recently elected leader, Adolf Hitler.
THE FORBIDDEN PASSPORT
Fired by the prospect of accompanying BUF leader Oswald Mosley to Germany with the possible opportunity of meeting the Fuhrer, the young Joyce was to unwittingly sign his own death warrant.
Realizing that as an American citizen it would be impossible to obtain a British passport, he lied about his place of birth to obtain the document. Obviously such a document is invalid but Britain's judiciary would later be happy to make an exception to the rule if it would provide opportunity for a legalized hanging. Ironically the proposed trip to Germany never did take place.
An excellent speaker, William Joyce often deputized for Oswald Mosley. He regularly addressed large audiences, including a major Fascist rally in Liverpool on the 26th November 1933 attended by an estimated 10,000 Fascists. Of him AK Chesterton wrote: "William Joyce, brilliant writer, speaker, and exponent of policy, has addressed hundreds of meetings, always at his best, always revealing the iron spirit of Fascism in his refusal to be intimidated by violent opposition."
John Beckett, the former Labour Member of Parliament, on attending a meeting addressed by Joyce said: "Within ten minutes of this twenty-eight year old youngster taking the platform, I knew that here was one of the dozen finest orators in the country."
"A SPEECH TERRIFYING IN ITS DYNAMIC FORCE"
Cecil Roberts, who heard Joyce at a political dinner in London's Park Lane Hotel, described the event years later:
"Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we were electrified by this man. I have been a connoisseur of speech-making for a quarter of a century, but never before, in any country, had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic."
During this period Oswald Mosley was speaking at the largest political rallies ever held in Britain. "We know that England is crying for a leader," William Joyce told a Brighton audience in 1934, "and that leader has emerged in the person of the greatest Englishman I have ever known, Sir Oswald Mosley." Joyce's political sympathies, however, were unambiguously in favour of National Socialism, and by 1936 he had coined the slogan: "If you love your country you are a National. If you love her people you are a Socialist. Therefore, be a National Socialist".
He was equally uncompromising on the Jewish question. Then as now (Lord Levy's donation to Labour Party funds!) it was usual for Jewish financial interests to buy a country by buying the party in power. In the summer of 1934 the British Union of Fascists was offered £300,000 by a Jewish businessman prominent in the tobacco trade. It was sufficient to finance the BUF for two years. Without consulting his party's leader, Joyce rejected the offer "with an impolite message."
WORKING CLASS HERO
Joyce, if nothing else, was an indomitable champion of the working class for whom all his efforts were directed. It was hardly surprising that he was as consistently scathing of Jewish capitalists and communists; not to mention the decadent English bootlickers who he described as "the parasites of Mayfair".
Joyce, by then divorced, knew one other great passion, his love for fellow party worker, Margaret Cairns White. Upon the announcement of their engagement, a mutual friend of them both said to her: "Well, I do hope you will be happy, but it may be uncomfortable being married to a genius. And William is a genius, you know!"
By 1937 the English establishment's enthusiasm for Fascism had waned. The Fleet Street-based propaganda machine, backed by Jewish interests, was in its ascendancy. The success of National Socialist Germany and Italian Fascism, rather than being seen as a template for European solidarity and revival, was now seen as a threat to British interests, the establishment and its aristocracy. (T)here were more readers of Fleet Street's poisonous press than there were readers of the British Union of Fascists' tabloid, The Fascist. The BBC, then as now, had always leaned towards Marxism.
Riding on the back of organized anti-Fascist propaganda and red violence, the government banned the wearing of political uniforms and torchlight processions. Their further tightening up of The Public Order Act hit - as intended - the Fascist movement hard.
BRITAIN BECOMES A DICTATORSHIP
As the police turned a Nelson's eye to red riots, the owners of public halls, most of them Labour authority controlled, denied venues to the Fascists. Their presses were seized and their members intimidated and harassed.
The war clouds were now looming, and the British Fascists last chance to form (a) peaceful alliance with burgeoning racial-nationalism in Europe was fading fast. There would be no more elections until 1945. (Britain in essence was an elected dictatorship from 1937 to 1940, a parliamentary dictatorship from 1940 to 1945).
On the retreat and burdened with unsustainable overheads the BUF staff was reduced by 80%. Within a month of his wedding to his Maria Callas look-alike bride, William Joyce was unemployed. His enforced redundancy owed much to his disenchantment with Mosley who he now privately referred to as "the bleeder". William Joyce was intolerant of weakness exemplified by Mosley's concessions to the then Government.
Tomorrow: Part II - "Going it alone"
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Thought for the Day:
"The highest that can be achieved is an heroic passage through life. Such a life is led by the man who, pursuing a purpose for the benefit of all, struggles against all too great difficulties, yet receives a poor reward or no reward at all."