The latest exploits of Tucker Carlson – the execrable oft-fired buffoon who’s been licking Putin’s shoes and lauding Moscow groceries – have prompted me to trek down memory lane and pay a visit to Lord Haw Haw.
Now you’re asking, “Who the hell was that?”
His real name was William Joyce, an American by birth who was so enamored of the Nazis that he defected to Germany and found his calling as a broadcaster during World War II. He beamed his radio show to Britain (his signature opening: “Germany calling! Germany calling!”); his routine shtick was to laud the fascist way of life. The British nicknamed him “Lord Haw Haw,” but on any given night early in the war he drew six million listeners in the U.K.
It’s a tad unfair to link Tucker with Lord Haw Haw – the latter became a German citizen; the former has no plans to defect to Russia – but some eerie parallels apply: a glamorization of authoritarianism, hostility to facts, rationalizations of violence, condemnations of the West…all of it delivered with “gentlemanly indignation,” a common description of Haw Haw’s tonality at the time. Sounds like Tucker, too.
Lord Haw Haw, in his writings and broadcasts, trumpeted the purported superiority of the clean, efficient Nazi lifestyle over what he called the West’s “old system…the horrors of freedom in democracy.” He praised Hitler’s “sacred struggle to free the world” from western capitalism. (William Shirer, the famed American correspondent who was based in Berlin until the Nazis kicked him out, often drank schnaps with Lord Haw Haw. Shirer wrote in his diary that Haw Haw’s views were “Nazi nonsense,” but also said that “if you can get over your initial revulsion at his being a traitor, you find him an amusing and even intelligent fellow.”)
Now here’s a Tucker Carlson mashup from his Moscow foray: “The Moscow subway is perfectly clean and orderly…Every subway station is nicer than anything in our country…Coming to a Russian grocery store, seeing how things cost and how they live, it will radicalize you against our leaders…The most radicalizing thing I would just say for me in the eight days I spent in Moscow was not simply the leader of the country, who of course is impressive…What was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been, and it is so much nicer than any city in my country…Every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”
Phew! No need for me to sift through all that garbage, except to point out that (1) Tucker’s praise for low Russian food prices skips the fact that Russia’s per capita GDP is $15,000, whereas our per capital GDP is $75,000, and (2) Tucker’s fascistic rationalization of violence (“Leadership requires killing people”) is especially squirm-worthy now that the leader he finds so “impressive” has killed Russia’s leading dissident.
Alas, lots of credulous American dolts will repost Tucker’s videos and pump them into our polluted disinformation stream. But a Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, got it right the other day when he said, “The Soviets had a term for people like Tucker: Useful idiots.” That’s the verdict on Tucker in the mainstream.
He won’t suffer the punishment that was ultimately meted out to Lord Haw Haw – captured at war’s end, the guy was strung up by the neck in a London prison – but hopefully Tucker will be condemned by history as just another thug-worshipping crank who failed to slime our western way of life. And personally, I think that any American city is “nicer” than a place where dissidents on the street are crushed like bugs.