The BBC last week published some of the wartime recordings of William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, among its archives, and what a curiosity they are. Joyce, who was born in New York and brought up in Galway, began broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Germany in 1939, and listening to these recordings is a lesson in the strange, unforeseeable evolution of propaganda.

Consider this broadcast, for instance, from February 1940, and see if you too are at a loss to understand the intent: "The British ministry of misinformation has been conducting a systematic campaign of frightening British women and girls about the danger of being injured by splinters from German bombs," read Lord Haw Haw. "The women have reacted to these suggestions and alarms by requesting their milliners to shape the spring and summer hats out of very thin tin plate which is covered with silk, velvet or other draping material." If this is sarcasm, it's as limp as nylon hose. Could this possibly pass for propaganda today?

The last recording Joyce made before Germany's surrender is probably the most perplexing, and is eerily poignant. It was discovered in a captured German tape recorder, having been recorded on 30 April 1945, but it may not have been broadcast.

In it, Joyce sounds so drunk as to be on the point of passing out. If there is a script, he is evidently not reading from it. He laments the annihilation of the Nazi war effort, warning Britain that the bolshevism will now march across Europe, without the "German legions" to defend against it.

"Day in and day out I have called the attention of the British people to the menace from the east which confronted them and if they will not hear – if they are determined not to hear – then the fate that overcomes them in the end will be the fate they have merited," he slurs, at one point even pounding the table for emphasis.

He concludes with a leave-taking: "I say to you in these last words – you may not hear from me again for a few months – I say, ich liebe Deutschland, heil Hitler, and farewell". Joyce was captured at the end of the war and hanged for treason in January 1946. You can listen to the broadcasts at www.bbc.co.uk/ archive/hawhaw/index.shtml

Meanwhile, back to the war at home. I refer, of course, to the war between the sexes, where the combatants come and go and the armaments keep changing and the front line keeps moving, and where the only constant, really, is John Waters, who materialises from time to time in a fervid trance, like a berserker.

Monday's Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1) became the latest theatre in a drawn-out war between Waters and Niall Crowley, former head of the Equality Authority. This battle has been waged, until now, in the pages of Village magazine, where it extends to 7,000 words, so maybe we should convey our thanks to the Pat Kenny show team for saving us all the trouble of reading it.

Waters believes, as everybody must know by now, that men's rights have become secondary to those of women, and the Equality Authority is partly to blame for this, as it is nothing more than "a feminist movement". Niall Crowley did not get much chance to refute this; he could barely get a word in edgeways. As ever, Waters was unreasonable and angry to the edge of hysteria. As ever, the words "what is this really about?" sprang to mind.

Soon the conversation turned to family law, Waters' bugbear. He dismissed as "a whitewash" Carol Coulter's research, published last year in 'Family Law in Practice', in which she found no evidence of bias against fathers in the family law courts. He also dismissed Carol Coulter as "a feminist".

Sensibly, Carol Coulter was invited on the programme the next day to defend her research. Sensibly, John Waters was not brought back on to roar at her. Coulter admitted there was discrimination in the family law courts, to do with the kind of lawyers a man could afford. She said custody tended to be awarded to women in most cases for the sake of continuity, because the women had been the primary carer before the marriage broke down.

Anecdotally, mind, those who work in family law will tell you that the situation for fathers actually is more or less hopeless. Anecdotally, there are people who will tell you that the treatment of fathers in intact relationships isn't all that wholesome either. It isn't that Waters doesn't have a case; it's that, instead of laying it out, he spends half an hour shouting over Pat Kenny. If I were a subjugated father, I would tell him to stop wrecking the propaganda for everyone else.

etynan@tribune.ie