Quisling Talk : Making Tergiversation

MAKING TERGIVERSATION

Forget making conversation,
or working rooms to set up connection;
the thing to be to win your war
is to be a tergiversationor:

A backslider, a traitor.
A turncoat, your deserter.
And a capricious apostate
with a volte-face.

Her word she would unsay
Qualify, flatter, make caprice;
Her side she would betray
Jilt, rat, people-please.

Aa Double-dealer
Fifth columnist;
A feel-good preacher
A Second secessionist.

He who would recant
He who renounces, rescinds;
Who quietly resiles, a plant,
As weathercock to all winds.

Side changer in a cricket game.
The plough's unsharing retractor.
The tell-tale who knows no shame.
In a consensus jury, the abjurer.

Quitter, Deserter;
Denier, deviationist.
Tergiversator;
Resiling recidivist.

Quisling

Quisling: a person who collaborates with an enemy. After Vidkun Qisling, Norwegian war-time leader of a Nazi collaborationist regime during the WW2.

Image: Vidkun Quisling on the cover of Dahl's biography

QUISLING

Imagine
that your life's
achievement is

to give the world
a brand new word for
grovelling traitor

(a nomen of shame)
for that new word
is your name!

* * *


Quisling

1. From WW2 - The Times' editorial asserted: "To writers, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor... they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous."

2. Citation (Quisling Quote] : " A vile race of Quislings -to use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries- is hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves."

- Winston Churchill, address to the Allied Delegates at St. James's Palace on 21 June 1941

In Tolerances

"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” ―Thomas Mann

IN TOLERANCES

The Plus or Minus
without which
this blithe tolerance
comes a bitch

needs be whatever
checks that Tolerance
in courage scrupled better
to our Deliverance

for its Tolerances
surely must be
wide set to such distances
pilgrim-reached justly

as Tolerance is meant
to reach Intolerance
with firm good judgment
as it meets ill variance.

My First University: The Pride Before The Shame

MY FIRST UNIVERSITY : THE PRIDE BEFORE THE SHAME

From taking night high school
classes in Prahran
after years of working since
finishing the technicians Leaving Certificate
course in metallurgy
with turning and fitting
at Ferntree Gully Technical School,
and my traditional
staunchly religious
and conservative peasant small-farm upbringing,
at least
after I realised that you had to
tell the examiners what they wanted to hear
(which was a leftist take on language and ideas and history)
if you wanted to get good marks,
and in that way
I so gained results
high scoring enough to give me entrance
into Monash University
to do an Arts Degree
in English, History, Philosophy & Politics.

So when I first went
to university
in 1977 and sat in
my tutorials in Politics 101,
or was it in Philosophy 101 ?
in the Ming (Menzies) Wing at Clayton Campus,
I was proud to be there,
coming from such a background as mine,
a background like no other.

I was lonely, for
I had no peer.
So I went to that campus
like an alien as if
to gain an advantage
- gathering intelligence
on them.

But then, I
was surprised to find
a fellow inmate in those classes
who was of another class again.

Gavril was someone who
held deeply conservative views
and had still got in to university
somehow against the odds,
odds that soon showed their hand
in the fact that the tutor a
nd all the other class of inmates
in that tutorial except me
attacked Gavril every time
he opened his clever mouth
with a telling
and pertinent conservative critique
of some aspect of the leftist dogma
and line that was being peddled
as objective truth.

For I was silent.

Gavril's brilliant but
lonely stance often became a strident one.
Which made him seem less cultured
in other's eyes. And even,
shame-facedly, in mine.

But the bullying irked me,
as the closed-ranks cabal
forceful mindset of the tutorial class
frightened me.

I was troubled so far
I did not sit the exams
intending to desert
that war and drop out.

I now regret that.
And I wonder what became
of Gavril whom I should have befriended,
but did not because I was confused
about what to believe.

As I see it now my silence
was a thing of cowardice
of which I am now ashamed.

Now, too late,
I would be Gavril's supporter.
His friend.

A Profound Fault

" To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault."

- Robert Conquest, historian of Soviet-era Russia

A PROFOUND FAULT

Like the gift of San Andreas
Come its time
The self-congratulations of the new pious
Joining the mime
Cracks with more than mere crazes on the vase
Of such Californicated souls
As this our human clay returns to its older base
Mere things of the rank mold
Which deserve the earth to open in its quake
As wrong urns do their unmake.

-

Sss

Sss

Courage
in
the politically correct
is
like empathy in a cat
on the prowl,
a hiss
that rings a warning
like the letter s
in
the word island.

You Say You Love

YOU SAY YOU LOVE

You say you love the sun but hide
in the shade when it shines.

You say you love the rain but open
your umbrella every time it rains.

You say you love the wind but close
the window each time there is a breeze.

That’s why it scares me when
you say you love me.

* * *
- in translation
from the German of Anonymous