KING HAAKON AND NORWEGIAN PEOPLE
King Haakon and Norwegian People From The NEW YORK TIMES MANY centuries ago, when most of Europe was still in its Dark Ages, there was a Haakor. the Good tn Norway, and later a Haakon the...
...Most Norwegians now live under the hobnailed boot of the conqueror, their liberties gone, their property confiscated, their leading citizens subject to arbitrary arrest and execution from day to day...
...Today, in some unnamed village capital in the far north of Norway, another liaakon rallies his people and defies a foreign invader...
...By exhortation and by personal example (his modest, democratic monarch is giving Norway her first royal hero of modern times...
...But King Haakon still insists that he will not leave his Arctic capita) as long as one inch of his country remains Norwegian...
...Urrman propaganda has done nothing meaner in this war I huh to brand the whole Norwegian people as craven and disloyal to their country...
...At this rate his memory may vet outlast r-outshine' those of his Viking namt aak.es of 1< ago...
...As explorers who conquered the polar wastes, as seamen who braved the storms of every ocean, the Norwegians have shown enough collective bravrry to hold their heads high...
...The king's courage has been the courage of his |>eople...
...lie managed to do It in a country which has been Socialist In politics and radical In thought for most of the 35 years of his reign...
...the Good tn Norway, and later a Haakon the Great...
...They were simple, guileless, utterly unprepared for the blow that fell upon them last month...
...but history will not let the treachery of a few individualist blacken the good name of the Norwegian people...
...He was not born to the kingship...
...But the past six weeks have been his testing time, a "time of trial" which he and his people could not have Imagined In their wildest nightmares...
...If any nation deserves to be branded with treachery forever, it is not Norway but the nation which struck in the dead of night at a weak and unsusj)ccting neighbor, which hid armed men in the holds of merchant ships, and which then invented revolting excuses for brigandage and murder...
...he was just a second son, and a Danish prince at that, when Norway separated from Sweden and decided that It wanted a king...
...Without precedents or experience to guide him, he had to create a democratic monarchy out of nothing...
Vol. 10 • June 1940 • No. 23
