When Jon Michelet died on April 14 at the age of 73, it made the front page of the major Norwegian newspapers and led off the TV news reports. Michelet published books in a wide range of genres, but was perhaps most famous for his bestselling crime novels. His death, the media told us, was mourned by Norway’s entire literary community – and, in fact, by the Norwegian reading public. The obituaries were full of praise for his work and his collegiality. His death was called “a great loss for Norwegian literature.”

What wasn’t mentioned prominently – or at all – in the reports of his death was Michelet’s politics. He was, as it happens, a key figure in Norway’s Marxist-Leninist movement. From 1972 to 1976, he worked at the Oktober publishing house, which was run by a Maoist party called the Arbeidernes kommunistparti (AKP). During his last couple of years at Oktober, he ran the place. Later, police surveillance would result in the conclusion that he was, in fact, one of the leaders of AKP.

Later, for a time, Michelet was also on the board of the Rød Valgallianse, another Norwegian Communist party which would subsequently merge with AKP and another Communist party to form the current Communist party, Rødt, or Red. (The history of Communist parties in postwar Norway is a field of study in itself.)

In 1987, he told Aftenposten that he wished that Norway, during his lifetime, would admit a million immigrants. (Norway has a population of five million.) This, he explained, would result in “total social upheaval” of a kind that Rødt Valgallianse would welcome.

It gives something of an idea of Michelet’s personality that after leaving Oktober, in an effort at “self-proletarianization,” he got a job at a brewery.

In recent years, Michelet made millions on a series of books about Norwegian naval heroes. But although he was rich, he told a reporter in 2014 that “I still consider myself a Communist. Money can change people, but not me!” Indeed, after his death, Ingeri Engelstad, the current editor-in-chief at Oktober, praised him for his “solidarity” and “political engagement.”

In addition to his shelfful of books, Michelet bequeathed another gift to Norway: a daughter, Marte Michelet. The other day, in a memorial article about her father, she wrote: “Thank you for everything you gave us, everything you fought for, everything you taught us and inspired us to do.”

What did he give her, what did he teach her, what did he fight for? The answer is simple: Mao, Stalin, Communist totalitarianism. And Marte learned it all. She shares her father’s far-left politics to the hilt. After being a leader of the Communist youth group Rød Ungdom, she went on to become a newspaper columnist. In that role, she has used every dirty Stalinist trick in the book against her ideological opponents – routinely misrepresenting their views and calling them liars and racists. That’s what Daddy taught her: in the struggle for Communist utopia, no instrument is too low.  

So it is that Marte is routinely quick to describe ideological opponents as liars and racists. Instead of replying to logical arguments with her own logical arguments, she coins words like “burkaphobia.” As Human Rights Service put it in 2008, Marte seems to do her best “to destroy any possibility of factual debate about immigration.” In 2009, Hege Storhaug reported on Marte’s efforts at “character assassination” in response to writers whose politics she disagreed with. When writer Steinar Lem questioned Norway’s immigration policies, Marte didn’t engage with his actual assertions; instead, she charged that he “viewed Muslim children as foreign weeds.” As Rita Karlsen wrote in response to this reprehensible mudslinging: “Quite simply, Marte Michelet should be sent to a course in manners.” Alas, good manners and devout Communism make a really, really bad fit.