"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

had been necessary to allow a large measure of autonomy.

The Norwegians, who many centuries earlier had been the terror of the European coastal peoples, had in recent times earned a
reputation for peaceable common sense. Like several others of the former small democracies, they of had attained a higher level
of social development than their mightier neighbours. In particular they had fostered intelligence. After their Conquest by the
Fourth Reich their remarkable fund of superior minds had stood them in good stead. They had successfully forced their
conquerors into allowing them a sort of 'dominion status'. In this condition they had been able to carry on much of their former
social life while fulfilling the functions which the conquerors demanded of them. Two influences, however gradually combined
to change their docility into energy and berserk fury. One was the cumulative effect of their experience of German domination.
Contact with their foreign masters filled them with contempt and indignation. The other influence was the knowledge that under
German exploitation their country had become the world's greatest generator of tidal power, and that this power was being used
for imperial, not human, ends.

The German dictatorship had, indeed, treated the Norwegians in a very special manner. Other conquered peoples had been simply
enslaved or actually exterminated. The British, for instance, had been reduced to serfdom under a German landed aristocracy.
The Poles and Czechs and most of the French had been persecuted, prevented from mating and procreating, and finally even
sterilized, until their stock had been completely destroyed. But the Scandinavian peoples were in a class apart. The Nordic myth
had a strong hold on the German people. It was impossible to pretend that the Norwegians were not Nordic, more Nordic than the
Germans, who were in fact of very mixed stock. Moreover Norwegian maritime prowess was necessary to the German rulers; and
many Norwegian sailors were given responsible positions for the training of Germans and even the control of German ships.
Finally, the exploitation of tidal power in the fjords had produced a large class of Norwegian technicians with highly specialized
skill. Thus little by little the small Norwegian people attained for itself a privileged positionin the German Empire. Prosperity and
relative immunity from German tyranny had not brought acceptance of foreign domination. The Norwegians had preserved their
independent spirit while other subject peoples had been utterly cowed by torture.

The initial fervour of the old Hitlerian faith had long since spent itself. Gone was the crazy zeal which had led millions of
carefully indoctrinated young Germans to welcome death for the fatherland to drive their tanks not only over the fleeing refugees
but over their own wounded, and to support a cruel tyranny throughout Europe. The German ruling minority was by now merely
a highly organized, mechanically efficient, ruthless, but rather dull-witted and rather tired and cynical bureaucracy. The German
people, who claimed to have taken over from the British the coveted 'white man's' burden, were in fact the docile serfs of a harsh
and uninspired tyranny.

There came a time when the Reich was seriously divided over the question of succession to the semi-divine post of Fuhrer. (The
original Fuhrer, of course, was by now a mythical figure in the past, and the empire was sprinkled with gigantic monuments to his




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memory.) Suddenly the Norwegians, seizing the opportunity afforded by dissension in the German aristocracy, set in action a
long-prepared system of conspiracy. They seized the tidal generators and military centres, and declared Norway's independence.