“THE TRAITORS”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26677, 24 January 1948, Page 9

“THE TRAITORS”

The Moral Defects of Fascism By Rebecca West (World Copyright Reserved) In this article Rebecca West turns to analyse the hidden motives of • the traitors. She finds that they are misfits in society and also that they are a new phenomenon in history.

There are several growths from the Fascist stem. Of these William Joyce could represent but one. He had nothing in common with the rank and file of Fascism, which was drawn from the mindless, traditionless, possessionless urban populations that are the children of the machine. Those have wholly lost their sense of process. They have forgotten that whatever is not natural is artificial, and that artifice is the fruit of thought and effort and conflict with matter. To them a loaf of bread is something they can buy at a bakery; they do not think of the earth and the weather and the plough and the wheat and the harvest and the threshers and the mill. To them light and heat are what they summon by putting a match to a gas jet or a finger to a switch; they do not think of coal and the pithead and the shaft and the dynamo. Simple Men They therefore believe that all benefits can be obtained by quite small efforts, and they cannot understand why Governments have not already given them full employment, preferably of a light character, high wages, cheap food, free recreations; and they therefore will work to put into power any men who say that they will be able to conjure up those goods by command. Such simplicity is infantile, and must be tainted by the first ugly brutishness of the infantile mind; so cruelty is inevitably an associate of the demand for dictatorship. William Joyce had no tie with this kind of Fascist, whom he regarded cynically as the medium in which he had to work. His Irish peasant background had given him a sound enough understanding of process. The kind of Fascist he represented was the leader drawn from the small, uninfluential home, as distinct from 'the leader drawn from the armed forces or from the aristocracy. Of the older types, the professional soldier whp turns his arms against his own kind * and seizes political power is old as man. The aristocrat who has a flaw in him which is recognised by his own kind, but who will not accept their verdict on him, and tries to rush over their dead bodies to the place in the council chamber which they deny him, he. too. is a most familiar figure. From the earliest recorded time he, on our island, has had again and again to be told to stop pushing; and on the Continent, he has revisited again and again, choosing the name of Wallenstein for one of his most positive reincarnations. But the Fascist leader drawn from the small uninfluential home is new as our own century. He is the man who, whatever his origins had been, if he had been born in favourable and not in unfavourable circumstances, could not in any age, nor in any place, have been given a position of power by the community, because of some innate flaw in his character. The Pretence Till now he could pretend that the cause of this failure lay not in himself but in his stars. He could maintain, with a fair measure of truth, that it was impossible for him or any other man without fortune, or useful connections, to become a national leader; and nobody could disprove his claim. He could go to hik grave, therefore, in the rounded contentment of a genius who could have saved his country had he but been permitted. But now this simple and profound order of satisfaction, which benefited millions, has been destroyed by the development of the democratic system. It is no longer true that any person of political talent can be debarred from exercising it by poor or medi-

ocre origins. Joyce was born and bred in much easier circumstances than Ernest Bevin or Herbert Morrison or Ellen Wilkinson, and if he could not rise to the same heights flic reason must be in his inferiority to them. He knew, too, that intellectually he was probably not inferior to them, for his academic attainments suggested that he had at least the foundations of a good mind. Therefore he was forced to search in other fields for the cause of his inacceptability, which he must have recognised immediately it declared itself, possibly in the days when he tried to become an army officer, for he was as sensitive as he was coarse. Moral Defect He was bound to suspect that it was a moral deficiency which rendered him unattractive. It might have been that he was in his secret heart not truly trustworthy, and that the world had spied it out. Beyond all doubt William Joyce was not prevented from winning political eminence by external circumstances, nor by intellectual inferiority, nor by moral baseness. There was but one other possible impediment. It must be that he was rejected because he did not please. But that is what none of us can bear; to realise that we do not please, that we liked, that we are noUf loved. Rather than make that admission, William Joyce would tear out by the roots the process by which, throughout the ages, the leaders of the State have been accorded their leadership. If the masses would not like him and choose him as their leader, then he would find a few men who liked him and they would help him to seize power. It is for this reason that Fascism develops its international character. The leaders must look outside their couutry for supporters. Treason is inherent in Fascism-

country for supporters. Treason is inhappy in the practice of religion during the ages of faith has in these modern times a need for participation in politics which is strong as the need for food, for shelter, for sex. It feeds his soul, it keeps it from the wind, it drives out that terrible companion. loneliness. “To End Poverty ”

During the ages of faith he would have known ecstasy in bending the knee to a Cardinal and saved his pennies in the vain hope that before he died they might pay for a pilgrimage to Rome. Such men, strayed into our age, find Cardinal and saint and God in the political leader, who wears authority and directs hierarchy, who promises them his devotion, assures them that he. can conceive no higher end than serving them, and prophesies that he shall never tire of it.

They continually refer, in accents of assumed passion, to motives which do indeed pre-occupy some people, but not them. The chief of these is the desire to end poverty. William Joyce had never in his life known what it was to be hungry or cold or workless, and did not belong to the altruistic type which torments itself over the plight of others. His was another hunger, another chill, another kind of unemployment. But the only people in the generation before him who attacked the governing ciass had been poor or altruist, and since their attack had been successful, their vocabulary held a tang of victory. So William Joyce and his kind borrowed their phrases, and spoke of economics when they thought of religion. But William Joyce pretended nothing at his trials. His faint smile said simply, “ I am what I am.”