Norway Victims Not Socialists You Can Demonize

No surprise that the true nature of "socialist" flew right past a greedy, self-centered, anti-American repug like whasisname.

John Nichols at The Nation:

The young people who gathered at the camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya were the opposite of Hitler Youth. In fact, they were the direct descendants, individually and ideologically, of the courageous young socialists who played such a vital role in the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis.

The campers who were attacked were members of the Norway’s Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF), the Workers’ Youth League that is the youth wing of the country’s social democratic Labour Party. In the aftermath of World War II, the Oslo Trade Union Confederation purchased the island and given as a gift to the AUF in recognition of the sacrifices that young socialists had made in the struggle against fascism.

When Hitler’s Nazi armies invaded and occupied Norway in 1940, they banned the AUF and imprisoned its leader, Gunnar Sand. His successor as head of the AUF, Trygve Bratteli, led the Labour Party’s crisis committee following the Nazi invasion of Norway before his arrest by the Germans in 1942. Imprisoned in a series of concentration camps, he was liberated in April, 1945, Bratteli returned to Norway as a hero who led the AUF in the postwar years and eventually became Norway’s prime minister.

So Beck has got things exactly wrong with his reference to “Hitler Youth.”
But what he really got wrong was the notion that there is something wrong, something “disturbing,” something foreign, about young socialists gathering to listen to music, to dance, to swim and play sports and to imagine a better world.

This is an international tradition. And it is an American tradition.

SNIP

The truth is entirely opposite what Beck says. The young people who gathered on Utoya did so as champions of ideals that inspired young Americans a century ago, that inspired those who opposed Hitler seven decades ago and that inspire those who challenge the bigotry and violence of modern-day neo-Nazis, fascists and extreme-right fanatics.

Liberals know that virtually every step of social progress in this country in the past 150 years can be traced back to the socialist movement. People who demonize socialists are the ones on the wrong side.