Sir, - Through the looking-glass we go with James Evans, whose letter about Francis Stuart (October 24th) is a catalogue of unsupported (and unsupportable) claims and faulty logic. Its incoherence will have been evident to the casual reader, and my initial instinct was to let it speak for itself. But given the level of confusion that has bedevilled public debate on this subject, one probably shouldn't take anything for granted.
"It seems extraordinary to me," Mr Evans writes, "that anyone should want to continue demonising Francis Stuart with labels of pro-Nazi and anti-Semite after conclusive proof to the contrary." He is entitled to the eccentric view that my essay (October 7th), and Fintan O'Toole's review of the book that I have edited (October 14th), are exercises in labelling and demonisation (though it is rather unfair of him to fail to point out that, far from "continuing to demonise" Stuart, Mr O'Toole has defended him against his more outspoken detractors on several occasions in the past). Obviously Mr Evans hasn't read either article very closely.
More bizarre is the claim that there has been "conclusive proof" that Stuart was neither pro-Nazi nor anti-Semitic. If I wished to be rhetorically mischievous I would invite Mr Evans to produce this "proof"; but of course it does not exist. In a manoeuvre that is all too typical of public discussion of this topic, Mr Evans points out that "there was plenty of Nazi sympathy and anti-Semitism in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s", yet he indignantly denies, on the basis of his phantom "proof", that Stuart held such views himself. His claim, in essence, is this: Francis Stuart was not pro-Nazi, nor anti-Semitic; but if he was, well, sure, they were all at it. Lest anyone be misled, I do not claim in my essay, nor in my introduction to The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, that Stuart's sympathy for Nazi Germany and pre-war anti-Semitism were unique, or even unusual.
Finally, Mr Evans denies that Francis Stuart was "a Nazi collaborator". "That", he writes, "implies approval of the Holocaust, which in Francis Stuart's case would be inconceivable." The logic is perfectly backward: Stuart could not have approved of the Holocaust, hence he could not have collaborated with the Nazis. Mr Evans should have familiarised himself with the chronology of the Holocaust, and of Stuart's involvement in IRA-German co-operation and German propaganda starting early in 1940, before favouring your readers with his analysis. - Yours, etc.,
Brendan Barrington, Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1.