Free speech - the populist right-wing version: Those of us who have been paying some attention to the uses and abuses of the rhetorical tropes surrounding free speech in populist and governing right-wing Progress Party (PP) circles in Norway will now that they are generally favorable towards free speech when it suits them and their interests. Upon coming to power in October 2013, the PP sub-contracted Prime Minister Erna Solberg to threaten anyone describing her coalition partners as a populist right-wing party (since they now wanted to be seen as a liberal party, liberal as in we are a liberal party because we say we are a liberal party, not because our actual politics has the least to do with liberalism), and threatened to remove state support for independent media outlets historically critical of the PP. Those efforts failed, and so the PP has resorted to threats and bullying against the Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), heavily subvened by Norwegian state funding, in order to get SAS to withdraw all items of its last issue of their in-flight Magazine SAS Traveller. The offending item is a measured article by the respected Swedish journalist Per Svensson on the historical lineages of the far right in Scandinavia. The former PP chairman Carl I. Hagen (1977-2006) appeared on his rhetorical high horse at the PPs favourite broadcasting channel TV2 two days ago, with not a single critical question asked by the TV2s utterly mediocre journalist, alleging that Svensson had linked him to both Vidkun Quisling and Adolf Hitler, threatening SAS with Finance Minister Siv Jensens purse should this happen again, and claiming that the PP had always represented the exact opposite of what Quisling represented. That suggests what many of us have suspected for years, namely that Hagens reading skills leave much to be desired, and that his knowledge of the PPs history is rather selective. For who, except for the funder of the PPs pre-cursor Anders Langes Party (ALP), namely Anders Lange (d. 1974, and still celebrated in PP circles), who in the interwar years belonged to the far-right Fedrelandslaget, was it that in his newspaper Hundeavisen in 1963 declared that any white person who opposes the apartheid regime [in South Africa] is a traitor to the white race? Nazism wasnt what Anders Lange represented, but it sure as hell wasnt the exact opposite of Nazism either. Meanwhile, the Norwegian liberal free speech fundamentalists, who for a number of years have been ever so keen on advancing far-right free speech in Norway have been eerily and predictably silent about all of this. So next time you hear the PP wax lyrical about the importance of free speech for a democratic society, remember that the proof is as ever in the pudding. boingboing.net/2014/12/07/where-to-host-history-of-scand.html
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 09:11:49 +0000