'We can't let racists re-define Viking culture'

[PHDNM]

'We can't let racists re-define Viking culture'

When a Swedish neo-Nazi group staged a demonstration in the country's second largest city last weekend, they were by far outnumbered by counter-demonstrators.

One of the groups which protested the march was Vikingar Mot Rasism (Vikings Against Racism), a network set up by Viking fans to challenge the use of Viking symbols by white nationalists.

"Viking enthusiasts get mistaken for racists and Nazis all the time, and we're very uncomfortable with that. White nationalists don't get to reinvent what Viking culture is," says Solvej von Malmborg, an admin for the network's Facebook group who was at the march.

https://www.thelocal.se/20171006/we-...-runes-swedish

[Cristiano viejo]

Vikings were a bunch of rapist who became famous "fighting" against monks and priests.
Viking culture, what the fuck...

[Magnolia]

It's their journey. Nobody is able to tell them which direction is right for their society.
They have to examine their system of values by fire.

[MissMischief]

Very interesting article about this topic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...=.00b7b1c1af5d

Stories of the Vikings, both in Scandinavia and in North America, have long contained the potential to feed inventions of an imaginary racist past.

European racists have long wanted to believe in a pure-white, hermetically sealed Middle Ages. Today, anti-refugee protesters in Europe dress up as Vikings and Crusaders. North American hate groups invoke the Norse god Odin and Vinland. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the rise of Odinism in 2009, including the founding of the Vinland Folk Resistance.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Wolves of Vinland and the allegedly affiliated Operation Werewolf present white supremacists with a combination biker gang, weightlifting club and militia. One individual who routinely shares Operation Werewolf social media posts, responded in 2012 to an article about the (untrue) legend of Viking colonization of Minnesota and southern Canada by writing on Facebook, “Our History is not a hoax. Hail Vinland!!!”

But even the Vikings of Europe did not exist in pure white racial isolation.

The Vikings, or rather the conglomeration of Scandinavian peoples we’ve come to call Vikings, conquered and colonized where they found weak powers in the disorganized west of Europe. To the east, they also tapped into rich multicultural trading networks — fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.

In fact, the whole notion of a pure white medieval Europe, so important to white supremacists today, is false. The fixation on skin color is largely a modern phenomenon, alien to a Europe dependent on a Mediterranean world composed of people with varying shades of brown skin.

It’s not that medievals lacked prejudice or hate, but our hang-ups and divisions were not theirs. Medieval Europe was not isolated from the broader world, but rather participated in a “Global Middle Ages” that linked great Eurasian and African cultures through the movement of things and people (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not). One of the vectors of those connections was, of course, the very same Vikings now serving as fodder for American hate.

[Linebacker]

Vikings were an extremely closed and clan society,xenophopic of other cultures and even other Viking clans when it came to the bloodlines of their own.

[Oneeye]

It's role playing. None of them are "culturally viking."

[Arduti]

Vikings were a bunch of rapist who became famous "fighting" against monks and priests.
Viking culture, what the fuck...

That's a Hollywood education if I ever saw one.
Joke.