Quisling is a word you didn’t hear very often, but has come back into the modern political lexicon. Strangely, its resurgance is due to George Galloway and the anti-war movement, who apply it to left-wing trade unionists and other progressives in Iraq trying to build a civil society.
The word quisling means a person who is a traitor to their country or collaborates with their country’s enemies. It comes from the behaviour of a Norwegian fascist politician Vidkun Quisling, who collaborated with the Nazis. It seems a little unfair, not to mention historically inaccurate, to be equating leftwing trade unionists with Vidkun Quisling, although I suppose if you think Bush=Hitler then it is no great leap of the imagination.
Vidkun Quisling in court at Oslo.The other infamous traitor of World War II was William Joyce, also known as Lord Haw Haw, who spent most of the war broadcasting Nazi Propaganda (some of it when intoxicated) from Berlin. He was captured on May 29th 1945 by the Second army on the Danish-German border near Flensburg. When questioned he made a movement with his right hand, as though going for a gun, and was promptly shot in the leg. He was treated at Luneberg for two weeks, then flown to England for trial.
Lord Haw Haw photographed shortly after his capture.Both were executed.
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Two factoids. I present them without comment.
1) Quisling (as I found out last night at the pub while talking to a Norwegian NATO guy) still holds the record for the highest score/results at the Norwegian Military Academy.
2) Joyce was murdered. He was an Eire citizen and thus cannot have been guilty of Treason. Judicial murder.
Quisling’s coup was intended to see he and his followers (plus a suspiciously large number of German “Tourists”) in charge, who would then invite in the German army. Unfortunately, his armed fascist assault on Oslo was rebuffed by the Norwegian police, and he had to wait for the German paratroopers in jail.
These left wing unions you refer to [the IFTU] are affiliated with the Iraqi Communist party. They supported Saddam to the hilt when he was in power – describing him as “progressive and patriotic†and even having two ministers in his Ba’athist Cabinet. I don’t know about Quislings, but they sound a bit like the Germans who suddenly became anti-Nazis and democrats in May 1945.
Michael,
You might like to read Hitchens on the Iraqi Communist Party:
“There came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Iraqi Communist party realized the horrific mistake it had made in joining the Baath party’s Revolutionary Command Council. The Communists in Baghdad, as I can testify from personal experience and interviews at the time, began to protest–too late–at the unbelievable cruelty of Saddam’s purge of the army and the state: a prelude to his seizure of total power in a full-blown fascist coup. The consequence of this, in Britain, was the setting-up of a group named CARDRI: the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. Many democratic socialists and liberals supported this organization, but there was no doubting that its letterhead and its active staff were Communist volunteers. And Galloway joined it. At the time, it is at least half true to say, the United States distinctly preferred Saddam’s Iraq to Khomeini’s Iran, and acted accordingly. Thus a leftist could attack Saddam for being, among other things, an American client. We ought not to forget the shame of American policy at that time, because the preference for Saddam outlived the war with Iran, and continued into the postwar Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds. In today’s “antiwar” movement, you may still hear the echoes of that filthy compromise, in the pseudo-ironic jibe that “we” used to be Saddam’s ally.
By the way Germany is now a successful democratic state, so let’s not dismiss the IFTU’s efforts in Iraq. The fact they are being attacked by Baathist thugs now somewhat undermines your argument.
Erm, that photo of Haw Haw shortly before is capture…..
He looks pretty much captured already to me.
Doh! Learn to read Tim, learn to read. I blame the heat, it’s getting warm out here.