"You can only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power – he's free again."
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Le Petit Robert: COLLABORATION, n.f. Travail en commun. Association. Aide, appui, concours, coopération, participation.
Collaboration in a negative connotation is an active or passive surrender to an overarching regime which removes freedom and liberty and replaces it with an ordered command mechanism to modify or influence your behavior.
One can consider the British Loyalists in the American colonies to be collaborators and their fates on occasion were quite ghastly. This can happen as a result of foreign occupation or a replacement of statist forces over time through elections, coups and administrative fiat in an increasingly tyrannical government.
The state is a remora (HGR: parasiet) that needs a host to survive and convincing the host that the relationship is beneficial to both parties is the key to the remora’s survival.
If Obamunism provides one salutary service to the nation, it is a televised demonstration project on how gangster government (is that redundant?) thrives in an environment where the rule of force trumps the rule of law. On your own counsel, is your acceptance and compliance voluntary or a submission to staying one step ahead of the jailer?
Defining Collaboration (HGR: vichy perspective)
The dictionary (HGR: Petit Robert) definition of collaboration above has positive connotations: cooperation, working together, reciprocal support, mutual assistance. This, of course, was the spin that Vichy ministers put on the word during les années noires. The Vichy régime were convinced that a favourable relationship with a Germany that was going to conquer Europe would be secured through collaboration. German and France, two independant states working together to secure a better tomorrow for Europe.
The dictionary definitions above express little, however, of the connotations of the word collaboration for many during and after the war. For much of the French population, the term became synonymous with betrayal, selling out to the enemy and supporting its cause and interests over those of France. The word collabo (collaborator) - frequently prefaced with the adjective sale (dirty) - was the worst insult.
The different connotations of collaboration get to the heart of issues that historians have been debating since the war. To what extent was collaboration a genuinely reciprocal arrangement between France and Germany? What was the specific nature of Vichy collaboration? Whose interests did it serve? These lecture notes will consider these very issues.
artikel collaboration
"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance"
~ Thomas Paine
Artikel "Life in Vichy America"
