Quislings
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn… some name, and that’s not even including his surname. Old Vidkun was an interesting fellah. During World War II he led the Nazi-collaborating, puppet Government in Norway. After the defeat of Hitler, he was arrested, tried and executed by firing squad. His surname lives on, describing any treacherous or traitorous individual… Quisling. The 1930s and 40s were a tumultuous time. The battles between the far-right nationalists and the far-left communists raged across Europe. In Spain, a bloody civil war left the country riven and under the iron fist of General Franco. In Italy, Mussolini rose to power in a silly hat and a black shirt. In Britain, Oswald Mosley marched his Blackshirts in to Cable Street and was soundly thumped by a motley crew of Irish and Jewish protestors, rag-tag socialists and anarchists.
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Across the rest of Europe, neo-fascists formed their own battalions, and of course Adolf decided to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. We didn’t escape the far-right here in Ireland, though I’m sure Fine Gael would be delighted to forget all about Eoin O’Duffy, that party’s first leader. The Blueshirts marched up and down, made a lot of noise and 700 of them boarded a ship to Spain, to fight for Franco. Franco didn’t think much of them, as he sent them home again. I’m sure you’ve read some or all of this in various books or seen it all on the TV, but occasionally it’s good to remind ourselves of history. It’s also good to remind ourselves that prejudice is a dangerous thing, and human idiocy is always lurking around the corner, looking for a moment to leap in to the limelight. The last few days have demonstrated that casual racism is alive and well, just look at the Sun Newspaper. The far-right is rising again across Europe and the US, and no more so than in our nearest neighbour, where Brexit seems to have uncovered a morass of disaffected and spiteful humanity.
And I think the key word is disaffected. We are at a crossroads in politics. The old political order lost its connection with many people. Over the last couple of decades, the political establishments saw power as an end in itself. They forgot they were servants of the folk who elected them. This disaffection seems to have polarised us citizens into left and right-wing factions, which are too reminiscent of the 1930s for comfort. The Left appears intent on splitting hairs on every single point of social and economic policy, rendering them weak and ineffective. The Right is probably just as disparate but they at least have common cause and that is anti-establishment… and anti-pretty much everything else.
It’s an easy position to take, an easy position to vote for and an easy position to espouse of you want to get a few million folk to vote for you. It’s a philosophy of us, the chosen ones, verses the interlopers and people who are different. We’ll start with the refugees, the liberal media, the lefties, the pinkos, the writers and artists. We’ll scream and shout and hammer vitriol with our keyboards of war. Then we might burn some books and, as a favourite song of mine reminds us, the smell of burnt books is not unlike human hair. Our hope as human beings is to join together, condemn, fight and ultimately defeat the haters. Difference is a something to be celebrated, not condemned. Anyone living on this island in the 1970s should be all too aware of what an ‘us and them’ mentality can do. The far-right idiots of this world would dearly love us to fail. Their power is drawn from our inaction and the stoked embers of fascism, a political movement that sent millions of human beings to the gas chambers. I urge you, dear reader, don’t be a Quisling too.
