Lord Haw-Haw’s treason trial and the killing of Reyaad Khan
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Version 0 of 1. “The case was straightforward,” writes Rafael Behr about the trial and execution of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw (Death penalty by drone strike is a challenge for liberal minds, 9 September). To the contrary, it was anything but. There was no doubt that Joyce was an extreme fascist and antisemite, for whom Mosley had been too moderate, and who had spent the war in Berlin broadcasting violent propaganda, although also becoming something of a figure of fun to the British people. The question was whether he was a British subject, the essential condition for a charge of treason as opposed to any other crime. He was born in New York, the son of an Irish father naturalised as an American citizen. The family returned to Ireland and Joyce came to England when young, when he more than once falsely claimed to be a British citizen for reasons of personal advantage, and he obtained a British passport in 1934 by claiming, again falsely, to have been born in Galway. When Joyce was captured, brought to London, and tried for treason in September 1945, the prosecution, led by Sir Hartley Shawcross, attorney general in the new Labour government, made the very tenuous claim that, even though Joyce had plainly never never held legitimate British nationality, and had not retained his passport in Germany, his original (although fraudulent) possession of a passport showed that he had placed himself “under the protection of the British crown” and thus owed allegiance in return. On that basis, as AJP Taylor drily put it, “Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine”.Geoffrey Wheatcroft Bath • Our government’s killing of Reyaad Khan (Drone strikes are a dangerous precedent, says UN official, 10 September) made me think of Georgi Markov and Alexander Litvinenko. In those cases, we believe, a government identified one of its own citizens as an enemy. It then took covert action to kill that person while he was in another country with whom it was not at war. Tolstoy was once asked whether any difference remained between the cause of revolution and the cause of counter-revolution once both sides adopted the same repressive behaviour. He replied that there was still a difference – the difference between cat shit and dog shit.John WeeksWeston Lullingfields, Shropshire |