Quisling's Children

Anti-jihad writer Bruce Bawer is getting a rough ride in his adopted land. He's one of the few there willing to criticize its totalitarian speech codes, which stifle free speech, especially critcism of Islam, and to shine a light on its endemic Zionhass. In a new e-book he draws a direct line between these aspects of life in modern Norway and its lost years under Hitler:

To live in Oslo in the early twenty-first century is to frequently encounter plaques reminding you that, within living memory, this city was under Nazi rule. In one building the Gestapo carried out acts of torture. In another, Resistance members hid out, maintaining radio contact with the British military. In another, Jews were discovered hiding, then carted off.

There were Norwegian Nazis – not just collaborators, but full-fledged Nazis, who avidly embraced the Nazi ideology. Hitler, after all, considered Scandinavians part of the Master Race. In more than one Norwegian bar with which I am familiar, the walls are papered with wartime copies of newspapers, the articles in which demonstrate that there were plenty of journalists who did not shrink from transmitting Nazi propaganda about America, Britain, and of course Jews.

When the war ended, these Norwegian Nazis did not dissolve into the ether – nor did the widespread enthusiasm for totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, the strong state and strict limits on free speech. A generation after the war, many of the most influential figures in Norwegian society were self-declared Maoists and Stalinists. Today, although members of the cultural elite tend to be more careful about openly declaring allegiance to Communist tyrants, being an outright Communist is still no bar to being a respected member of Norway’s cultural establishment. (Members of the Rødt, or Red, Party hold important positions in several major cultural institutions.) Write the most sickeningly anti-Semitic article this side of Der Stürmer, and you will still be welcome in the corridors of Norwegian cultural power. Call publicly for strictly enforced limits on free speech about Islam, and your peers will hail you as a hero.

To deny that there is a disturbing degree of continuity between all this and what went on in Norway during World War II is to shove one’s head in the sand.