There are many words with a high level of usage but a low level of understanding. Quisling is a good example of this. The term quisling was coined by the the Times in an editorial in April 1940, entitled "Quislings everywhere" after the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who assisted Nazi Germany as it conquered his own country so that he could rule the collaborationist Norwegian government himself. The term soon came into common use internationally. With the passing of time it had fallen into disuse again until more recently. Quisling, as synonymous with ‘traitor’, is one of the favourite terms of abuse used by cybernats to describe those who stand up for Scotland to remain part of the UK. It became their insult of choice during the independence referendum campaign back in 2014. They plumbed the very depths of abuse by using this and other hateful words to smear the character of young Mum of the Year, Clare Lally, who provides 24 hour a day care for her disabled daughter, for daring to speak out at the Better Together 100 Days Rally. They still pepper their vile posts with the term ‘quisling’ to this day although often now they resort to plain ‘traitor’ instead. Traitors and Faithful are the two categories of contestants in the popular TV game show ‘The Traitors’. The Cybernats have no doubts what side they are on.
There is of course an irony in any nationalist using that term to describe someone who disagrees with them. It has been well documented in the print media and on the internet that the SNP has a hidden past which fits more accurately with the description ‘quisling’ than any views expressed by a modern day supporter of the UK. MI5 documents were released recording the wartime conversations of leading Nationalist, Arthur Donaldson, who became SNP leader in the 1960s. Apparently he had been talking about setting himself up as some kind of Scottish "Quisling", in the event of a Nazi invasion of the UK. At its conference in 1939, SNP leader Andrew Dewar Gibb told party members that “imperial England” had no right “to criticise the actions of any other country [i.e. Germany]”. Hugh MacDiarmid, still hallowed as Scotland’s foremost nationalist poet and honoured by the wearing of white roses by SNP MPs at the State Opening of Parliament, argued in the 1930s that Nazism should be a model for Scottish socialist nationalists. In 1940 he wrote a poem admitting that if London should be destroyed by bombs, “I hardly care”. Professor Douglas Young was Chair of the SNP in 1940 when he was imprisoned for leading a group of Nationalists who refused conscription in an ‘English war’. If he had said he was a pacifist that would have been a principled position but his opposition had to be because it was an ‘English war’. I doubt if either Arthur Donaldson or Douglas Young had genuine Nazi sympathies but they couldn’t see past the nationalist’s paranoia and therefore saw their enemy’s enemy as their ‘friend’.
The 1930s is a period ‘whaur extremes meet’ as McDiarmid himself wrote. Ideologies of left and right sometimes became indistinguishable. The Labour Party had its Oswald Mosley, who with others then went off to form the fascist New Party and the blackshirts. The Tories had their appeasers of Germany along with sections of the establishment. Sir Thomas Moore, MP for Ayr for almost 40 years right up to 1964, spent the 1930s writing in support of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Daily Mail carried the front page story ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ by Lord Rothemere. We shouldn’t judge today’s political parties by their blackest moments in history. We shouldn’t judge the SNP by the shameful words of their early leaders. In the famous words that begin the Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ But George Bernard Shaw reminded us that ‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.’
It is legitimate to hold parties accountable for what their supporters do and say today. It was unacceptable for Dianne Abbott to write that ‘the prejudice experienced by Jewish people was similar to, but not the same as, racism’. The Conservatives should have returned all donations from donor Frank Hester after he said looking at Dianne Abbott made him ‘ hate all black women’. The SNP need to take ownership of the vile abuse dished out online by their cybernat trolls. It is frightening to think that not only do they spend their time posting crude, witless insults – they actually think that way. Someone recently described an internet troll’s mind as ‘a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness’. The real danger is when we choose to blot out the past from memory, to unlearn its lessons and begin to make apologies for those who do the same things all over again.