RELENTLESS REBECCA

by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (Liberty Bell, July 1988)

The New Meaning of Treason, which I cited in the foregoing article [see Liberty Bell, June 1988], is a peculiar book. It poses a psychological problem of some interest.

Cicily Fairfield, later Mrs. Henry Maxwell Andrews, chose to call herself "Rebecca West," taking the name of the heroine of one of Ibsen's tedious "problem plays" about restless women, although she presumably did not intend to dominate a man, ruin his marriage and his life, and finally force him to leap with her into a mill-stream. Under that name she wrote a number of novels. I read two of them decades ago and they so little impressed me that I cannot recall the titles. I also read some literary criticism of the kind in which the critic tells us much more about himself than about the subject of his essay.

In 1946 she published serially in an American magazine for the "smart set," The New Yorker, articles that were published as a book, The Meaning of Treason, in the following year.

This consisted principally of a disgraceful attempt to denigrate and vilify William Joyce, the brilliant young man, probably an American citizen in strict legality, whom the British hanged for having tried to save Britain from the morass in which she is now slowly perishing.

Rebecca West's shameful defamation of Joyce in 1946 could be forgiven as the outcry of a woman made hysterical by the hardships and terror the population of England had undergone in the war by which they destroyed their Empire and even their own nation to please the secret enemies who were their masters. In 1946, of course, events had not yet proved that Joyce had been absolutely right when he predicted England's future shortly before his execution; and it was still hoped that the book he wrote before his death, Twilight Over England, could be kept from the Jews' Aryan victims. (It was eventually published in this country and is available from Liberty Bell Publications, $5.00 + postage.)

In 1946, Britons were still under the spell of the rhetorical eloquence and histrionic oratory of Winston Churchill, and, of course, they did not know that the vicious War Criminal had inflicted suffering, death, and ruin on them to gratify his gigantically bloated ego and the Jews who paid him. The English did not even know that after he had forced the Germans to begin the bombing of British cities, the old coward had scuttled to a place of safety before each bombing raid, since his Intelligence service read the German signals and orders and told him in advance of the time and target of each raid. They did not know that when they listened to his oratory over the radio, they were often listening to an actor who had been trained to imitate the voice of the drunken old bum who, at that moment, was lying in an alcoholic stupor at home; they may even have been listening to a text that had been made coherent by the ghost-writer whom he employed for his quasi-historical essays. All this, although partly known to observers who had access to officially concealed information, was first disclosed to the public by the courage and impeccable research of David Irving in the first volume of his Churchill's War.

In 1946, the British imagined they had won the war and that they still had left something of an empire and could become again a great nation. They did not suspect that Churchill had been the dupe and patsy of the great American War Criminal, who had from the first planned to destroy Britain as zealously as he plotted the destruction of Germany. Although a courageous clergyman, Peter H. Nicoll, tried to warn them, his privately printed booklet, Britain's Blunder, was kept from the public, and Englishmen did not yet know they had helped destroy their only real friend in Europe to deliver the continent to their implacable enemies.

After 1946, however, the British gradually came to the realization that they had lost their empire and bankrupted themselves; that they had become a second-rate or even third-rate nation that had to dance at the command of its financial and political masters in Washington; and that they had indeed precipitated and participated in the Suicide of Europe, which perhaps had been also the suicide of their race and of all Western civilization. And despite the Jews' great hoaxes, intelligent men came gradually to see ever more clearly that they had been deceived, victimized, and ruined by cunning liars.

In 1946, as I have said, an English woman, who must herself have suffered some measure of hardship and privation, and who had doubtless had to mourn many relatives and friends, could be forgiven for her understandably hysterical hatred of William Joyce and her urge to avenge her own sorrows by shamelessly defaming him.

By 1964, however, she, if capable of observation and reflection, must have attained some perspective and even equanimity. Eighteen years deaden even the most violent grief and make past hardship something that one may even be glad to have had. It is extremely odd, therefore, that in 1964 Rebecca West republished her scream of eighteen years before as the first part of the present book.

We all make mistakes in judgement of contemporary events, and it is honorable to let the written record stand as part of the historical record, but it is quite another thing perversely to reaffirm errors that have become not only untenable, but absurd. In 1964, even the most brazen professional liar would have wanted to disavow such nonsense as the assertion that if Germany had not been destroyed, "few characteristically British people would have survived... They would have died in British versions of Buchenwald and Belsen." (1)
 
 
 

(1. This preposterous statement was, of course, inspired by one of Churchill's cleverest propaganda tricks, his ostentatious organization of an "underground resistance" in England to continue the war by guerrilla tactics, if the island was occupied by the Germans. David Lampe's The Last Ditch (New York, Putnam, 1968), gives the details of the underground "resistance" that Churchill elaborately and even blatantly organized throughout the island. (The publisher's blurb calls it one of the "best kept secrets," which was true only in the sense that the exact location of huge stores of arms and ammunition for use after the German occupation, the location of secret radio transmitters for the underground's communications, and the like were kept secret, while all available men and many women were enlisted and rehearsed in "battalions" for the vividly imagined "last ditch" fight. "We shall fight...on the beaches... We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender," the dire War Monger had declaimed.) Lampe's description of the preparations for the "underground" are probably accurate, but his book is a propaganda job, doubtless of Judaic inspiration. He tries to justify the elaborate ploy, with its great waste of military equipment, resources, and human energy, by repeating the propaganda that accompanied it, about all the horrible things the wicked Germans would do to the British population when they occupied the island -- propaganda that is absurd, given Hitler's well-known esteem and liking for the English, and it becomes simply silly when one remembers the chivalrous generosity with which he made it possible for the British Army to escape at Dunkirk.)

 
 

The second part of the book, first published in 1964, deals with Soviet espionage in Britain, and is of some value. It is well-written and contains much useful information about the careers of the Soviet agents in Britain, although it conceals the fact that they were almost all Jews. (Even a Morris Cohen is unblushingly described as "of Russian origin.") I first learned from the book, for example, that the infamous spy, Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed to the Soviet so many secrets of atomic warfare, had a father (a Jew, of course), who spent the war quite comfortably in Germany, constantly conspiring, under the guise of Christianity, to sabotage and defeat that nation, and that the wicked Germans were so negligent that they did not include him among the millions or billions of God's darlings whom they gassed or incinerated or parboiled or vaporized; he thus survived to publish a crackpot book in which he boasted that old Jesus had kept watch over him to preserve his holy hide.

Although Rebecca West portrays the spies as sympathetically as possible, she does disclose the highly significant fact that before they were recruited into their "sensitive" positions, almost all of them had known records which, even assuming that they were as innocent as lambs of evil intentions, should have precluded their employment in any capacity in a governmental agency; but she pretends to be so naive as to believe that it was merely bureaucratic confusion and incompetence that put them in highly confidential positions and thus made possible their treachery.

She also refrains from noticing that although poor Joyce and some other "Fascists" were hanged, the Soviet secret agents, whether Jewish spies or British traitors, either escaped or were, at most, given moderate terms of imprisonment, when they were not simply freed and "exchanged" in deals with the Soviets.

This raises some questions about Cicily Fairfield. When I read the part of the present book she wrote in 1946, I assumed, as I have said, she was just a temperamental and overwrought Englishwoman, and when I met, around 1956, her illegitimate son by H.G. Wells, he seemed to my unpracticed eye a typical Briton. It was only after reading the present book that I began to wonder whether she might not be, at least partly, a Jewess. It may be that a very little research would confirm or disprove my suspicion, but I cannot now take the time for it.

The New Meaning of Treason was reprinted in 1985 in a new edition which, by the way, provides a good illustration of the present plight of what was once a great nation. It is published in the "very British" Penguin Series from its headquarters in Middlesex, but it had to be printed in Singapore.
 

This article originally appeared in Liberty Bell magazine, published monthly by George P. Dietz from September 1973 to February 1999. For reprint information please write to Liberty Bell Publications, Post Office Box 21, Reedy WV 25270 USA.

Copyright ©2001 Kevin Alfred Strom.  Back to Revilo P. Oliver Index