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Excerpts from:
"The Quisling Effect
Government is not the only destroyer of freedom
By Claire Wolfe
© Backwoods Home Magazine.
www.backwoodshome.com 1-800-835-2418
The word "quisling" has a naturally slimy sound. Even if you didn't know what it meant, you'd know it was something unsavory, undesirable, or at best, something weak. Not many people realize that (as with martinet, sandwich, and boycott), the word came to us from a man's name.
Vidkun Quisling was a twentieth-century Norwegian politician and head of Norway's home-grown form of Nazism, the Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) Party. He went so far as to urge Hitler to invade his country in hopes of becoming Norway's supreme leader. Hitler did. And Quisling did -- for exactly five days. The Nazis quickly placed him in a figurehead position while one of their own actually ran the country. Within months of the war's end, Quisling got his just desserts. He was executed by firing squad. And a new word entered the dictionary, not only in English, but in many other languages.
The identification of Quisling with dirty deeds is so strong that when I encountered an article that mentioned humanitarian acts Quisling had committed in the 1920s, it was as if I'd just read, "Ted Bundy heroically feeds the poor in Calcutta," or "Jeffrey Dahmer rescues kitten from burning building."
How typical is this? Your ISP meekly enables all e-mail and Web activity to be easily monitored by the FBI, not because the law says they must, but because the FBI unilaterally decrees that they should. Online commerce companies, led by the 800-pound mine canary eBay, announce that they will turn over any customer record to any law enforcement agent, without asking for a subpoena, search warrant, or even an explanation of probable cause. Saks department store sends a notice to charge account customers, saying it will no longer accept more than $350 in cash payments. Even though that amount is far, far below the federal government's own "suspicious" cash reporting limits, Saks is scared, Saks has decided to be overly cautious. Saks' lawyers have no doubt advised the company to prepare for a future in which even $400 is a sign that a loyal Saks customer is a terrorist or drug dealer.
Banks demand detailed information about you and the origins of your deposits. Following 9-11, one supermarket chain, in a "patriotic" gesture, even turned over its entire database of customer purchasing records to the federal government for "anti-terrorism" records. (And yes, the type of food you buy and how you buy it really is part of the government's profiling of your terrorist potential.)
It must have been a lot like this in Stalinist Russia. But nevertheless, in each case, these businesses are following their own momentary self interest -- just as we are when we run a background check or enter a caller's name in a database. In relationships with "security scared" businesses, your legal rights, or for that matter their own long-term self interest (assuming freedom is in the long-term interest of every private enterprise), are easy casualties.
(The very concept that the federal government has a right to order private businesses to do anything is another matter. But we've long ago accepted that state of affairs as normal, however abnormal and unfree it really is.)
The definition of a quisling: "a traitor who serves as the puppet of the enemy occupying his or her country."
If you believe that the behemoth now squatting on the banks of the Potomac is constitutional or in some other fashion legitimate, then the definition of quisling doesn't apply to anyone who bows to that government's will -- even when, by bowing or "complying," we diminish our own and our children's freedom. By those terms, the loss of freedom itself is "legitimate," and heaven help us all."
"The Quisling Effect
Government is not the only destroyer of freedom
By Claire Wolfe
© Backwoods Home Magazine.
www.backwoodshome.com 1-800-835-2418
The word "quisling" has a naturally slimy sound. Even if you didn't know what it meant, you'd know it was something unsavory, undesirable, or at best, something weak. Not many people realize that (as with martinet, sandwich, and boycott), the word came to us from a man's name.
Vidkun Quisling was a twentieth-century Norwegian politician and head of Norway's home-grown form of Nazism, the Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) Party. He went so far as to urge Hitler to invade his country in hopes of becoming Norway's supreme leader. Hitler did. And Quisling did -- for exactly five days. The Nazis quickly placed him in a figurehead position while one of their own actually ran the country. Within months of the war's end, Quisling got his just desserts. He was executed by firing squad. And a new word entered the dictionary, not only in English, but in many other languages.
The identification of Quisling with dirty deeds is so strong that when I encountered an article that mentioned humanitarian acts Quisling had committed in the 1920s, it was as if I'd just read, "Ted Bundy heroically feeds the poor in Calcutta," or "Jeffrey Dahmer rescues kitten from burning building."
How typical is this? Your ISP meekly enables all e-mail and Web activity to be easily monitored by the FBI, not because the law says they must, but because the FBI unilaterally decrees that they should. Online commerce companies, led by the 800-pound mine canary eBay, announce that they will turn over any customer record to any law enforcement agent, without asking for a subpoena, search warrant, or even an explanation of probable cause. Saks department store sends a notice to charge account customers, saying it will no longer accept more than $350 in cash payments. Even though that amount is far, far below the federal government's own "suspicious" cash reporting limits, Saks is scared, Saks has decided to be overly cautious. Saks' lawyers have no doubt advised the company to prepare for a future in which even $400 is a sign that a loyal Saks customer is a terrorist or drug dealer.
Banks demand detailed information about you and the origins of your deposits. Following 9-11, one supermarket chain, in a "patriotic" gesture, even turned over its entire database of customer purchasing records to the federal government for "anti-terrorism" records. (And yes, the type of food you buy and how you buy it really is part of the government's profiling of your terrorist potential.)
It must have been a lot like this in Stalinist Russia. But nevertheless, in each case, these businesses are following their own momentary self interest -- just as we are when we run a background check or enter a caller's name in a database. In relationships with "security scared" businesses, your legal rights, or for that matter their own long-term self interest (assuming freedom is in the long-term interest of every private enterprise), are easy casualties.
(The very concept that the federal government has a right to order private businesses to do anything is another matter. But we've long ago accepted that state of affairs as normal, however abnormal and unfree it really is.)
The definition of a quisling: "a traitor who serves as the puppet of the enemy occupying his or her country."
If you believe that the behemoth now squatting on the banks of the Potomac is constitutional or in some other fashion legitimate, then the definition of quisling doesn't apply to anyone who bows to that government's will -- even when, by bowing or "complying," we diminish our own and our children's freedom. By those terms, the loss of freedom itself is "legitimate," and heaven help us all."
You go there girl! 
