CHUCKMAN COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
Vikings were not
Nazis, anti-racists tell Swedish white supremacist groups
'White nationalists
don't get to reinvent what Viking culture is,' says campaigner
Who thinks he can speak for the Vikings?
This is ridiculous.
They were not a people who left detailed records.
As far as the Nazis, they represented a self-declared form
of new primitivism and barbarism.
Hitler openly admired the barbarism of earlier times, at
least as it is represented in myths and legends. He of course was a great
admirer of Wagner's operas.
He regarded barbarism, at least as organized under the
oversight of a man of destiny, as he very much saw himself, as a form of
strength.
Of course, it was not quite a complete form of barbarism
because so far as we understand early barbaric societies, they did not wear
uniforms or march in organized fashion.
And the story of his rise to power, complete with its street
fights and thuggery, would have tended to validate his beliefs.
Germany of the 1920s-early 1930s was chaotic with gangs of
every description out on the streets fighting opponents. Left and Right behaved
this way. Many had uniformed corps such as Hitler's SA or Brownshirts.
He believed it was weakness to embrace modern conventions of
morality and ethics and civility, only pretending to regard them in various
situations as a political convenience. Christianity was very much viewed in
this light, but politically he understood he could not openly fight with all
the churches. He saw Germany as evolving away from Christianity.
