Transgender, Multicultural Vikings? Refuting Pseudoscience Parts I, II, and III By Brian Simpson Part II: Multicultural Vikings?
As pointed out by Robert Hampton, in his article, “Multicultural Vikings”:
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2019/04/multicultural-vikings/
the re-working of the past of White people, mainly Nordics/Northern Europeans, is part of the research agenda of the Left, to refute, the “white supremacist” imaginary past. Keep in mind that a “white supremacist” has been given a high re-definition, to include anyone with even a nanogram of pride in their northern European heritage.
Professor Dorothy Kim, in an op-ed article in Time magazine, gives it all away with the title: “White Supremacists have Weaponized an Imaginary Viking Past. It’s Time to Reclaim the Real History, Time, April 12, 2019, at
https://time.com/5569399/viking-history-white-nationalists/.
Thus, the Christchurch shooter allegedly made multiple medieval references, some involving Vikings. Yes, but the majority of references were Christian, mainly alluding to the Crusades. As we will see below, the Vikings have been taken by some woke folk to be Muslims, but apart from that absurdity, Vikings traded white Irish slaves to the Muslims, are were not anything like contemporary White nationalists on the Islam question at all.
In any case, Kim says that the far right is using Viking medievalism to create “narratives,” so the Left has to create “counter-narratives” as a show of force. And, Kim’s counter-narrative is that the Vikings were, “multicultural and multiracial.” They were not homogeneous seafarers as is often imagined.”
She sees the problems lying with the ideas expressed by the 19th century Romantic German nationalist Völkish movement, with the main sinners being the Brothers Grim, whose folk lore was a “dedication to racial white supremacy,” and Vilhelm Grǿnboch’s Vor Folke aet i Oldtiden (The Culture of the Teutons), which allegedly did the same sins with the past of the Teutons. Some writers of the Third Reich, such as Gustav Neckel, Bernhard Kummer, and Ottor Höfler did go down these Teutonic lines, but most Nazi ideology rejected “Odinism,” in favour of Christianity, and many Odinists of the time were quickly marched off to concentration camps, since their anti-industrialism and anti-modernity was perceived as a threat. So, there is by no means some straight path from Teutonic Romanticism, to Nazi fanaticism.
But what really worries Kim is the notion of Männebunde, “all-male warrior associations in so-called primitive societies,” and the “neo-pagan resurgence,” in the forms of eco-fascism and Odinism. Eco-fascism does not have any link to Odinism, and is an extremist response to modern, largely Left-wing environmentalism. Odinism, Kim depicts as a “form of white toxic masculinity based on the belief that the “barbaric” warriors of medieval Northern Europe functioned as a violent warrior comitatus.” Well, if they were not violent warriors, then what was all the raiding and killing of Christians about, from Lindisfarne (793 AD), onwards? And contemporary Odinism has many forms, with female leaders, such as Freya Aswynn, which would have been easy enough to Google.
There is no evidence advanced by Kim to support the claims of Viking multiculturalism, and multiracialism. But she does say, that Marvel film director, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok (2017), does the required job in deconstructing a “multiracial and post-colonial counternarrative.” Yes, the director is a Maori, but so what, given that these people, Once were Warriors (1994), and he captures the male warrior ethos of the Thor character well. While Thor’s hammer was destroyed by Thor’s evil sister, Hela, Thor, played by Aussie beefcake Chris Hemsworth, comes to realize that the hammer was just training wheels, and as for all of us, the real power lies within. And, in the sequel, Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Thor gets forged an even bigger, more phallic hammer, Stormbreaker. Further, in Thor:Ragnarok, two fight scenes have legendary rock group, Led Zepplin’s Immigration Song (1970) playing, an anthem to toxic masculinity if there ever was one, celebrating Viking conquest: “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands/ To fight the horde …”
Another article along the same lines is by Clare Downham, Senior Lecture University of Liverpool: “Vikings were Never the Pure-Bred Master Race White Supremacists like to Portray,” September 28, 2017, at:
Can we guess what line she will take? First, she says that the word “Viking” entered the English language in 1807 (old English had wicing 300 years earlier), at time of nationalism, and the Vikings were seen by the European colonists as “prototypes and ancestor figures.” That supposedly led to the idea of a “German master race,” so we get the Nazi theme pumped up again. But, while in part true, many non-Germans admired the Vikings, including some of America’s Founding Fathers, but, hey, today the Left sees them too as racists.
Downham does grant that the word Viking is “generally synonymous with Scandinavians from the ninth to the 11th centuries,” and that they had a distinctive language, and culture. That should be more than enough to constitute an identity group, but apparently not for Northern Europeans. Thus, Downham says that Vikings were defined by an activity, “mobility,” but much of the Scandinavian population did not “go-a-Viking.” True, most were farmers, but in some seasons, some farmers did grab and axe and head off with the rest of the Männebunde, leaving wifey to hold the fort at home. Sexist buggers that they were. When time travel is commercialized we need to send back basket loads of feminists to enlightened them.
Downham says that the terms used to describe the Vikings, such as “rus” did not have an ethnic connotation. Bad choice, since one of the many meanings of “rus” is red, naturally a reference to the red hair of many Vikings:
https://sonsofvikings.com/blogs/history/vikings-in-russia-the-rus-of-kiev-and-the-varangians
However, in a primarily white area, compared to the level of diversity today, it would not be natural to use ethnic qualities to refer to the Vikings, and more relevant names were used, such as “pagani” by Christians, and more generally, “pirati,” with an obvious meaning.
Downham claims that Viking mobility through use of the long boats, led to a “fusion of cultures with their ranks,” as the Viking success arose from their ability “to embrace and adapt from a wide range of cultures whether that be the Christian-Irish in the west or the Muslims of the Assasid Caliphate in the east.” Yes, the Vikings enslaved the Christian-Irish and sold them to the Muslims as slaves, especially women for the harems, with the fairest women being in hot demand as sex toys. Tens of thousands of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon men and women were sold to the Muslims by the Vikings: Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages, (Oxford, 1987). The enslavement of White Christians is clear evidence that the Vikings of the time were never any sort of proto-White nationalist group, but were before conversion, an anti-Christian pagan people, who were tribal. Perhaps that is problem enough for the Left.
It is true, as Downham notes that Vikings were not just “one hitters,” but that they stopped off at various places, sometimes to sit out strong stormy seasons at sea. And, it is also true that Vikings formed alliances with local peoples; why not, it made raiding easier. However, it is interesting to note this bit of “xenophobia”: “Written accounts survive from Britain and Ireland condemning or seeking to prevent people from joining the Vikings.” So much for multiculturalism! None of these alliance show the “cultural and ethnic diversity of the Viking age,” which is merely a projection of today’s bs back upon a past age.
The claim is also made that skeletons at sites linked to the Vikings, “points to a mix of Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian peoples without clear ethnic distinctions in rank or gender.” This is supposedly supported by “the latest scientific techniques.” How a genetic analysis of skeletons is supposed to show equalitarianism, feminism, and other Leftist notions, is mystery. That “these markers of identity were more about status and affiliations to long-range trading networks than ethnic symbols,” in nothing short of circular reasoning. As we will see in the discussion below, who knows how these people got in those graves?
Then there is David Perry, in The Washington Post, “White Supremacists Love Vikings. But They’ve Got History All Wrong”:
He makes similar remarks to Downham, seeing the Vikings as not existing in “pure white racial isolation,” as the “whole notion of a pure white medieval Europe …is false.” As Robert Hampton replies: “Perry at least admits the Vikings were predominantly Scandinavian and most of their cross-cultural contact was conquest and colonization. Yet he believes pillaging and enslavement were part of a rich cultural exchange.” One wonders what Kim and Downham would think of this!
It gets even more absurd. Funeral robes containing allegedly Arab inscriptions and Kufic script were discovered in 2017 in some Viking boat graves. This led Left-wing archaeologists to proclaim that Islam influenced Viking culture, if not made it! Now let’s think hard about what other explanations are possible. The Vikings were pirates and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and then burn that, stealing the nails. So why not suppose that some Viking simply stole the robes, by Occam’s razor? In any case, Robert Hampton notes, some scholars hold that the robes contained no Arabic at all, and that Kufic script did not even exist in the Viking period. Other textile experts claim that the robes were simply not Islamic at all. The Islamization of the Vikings is a fantasy to justify contemporary values of multiculturalism and mass migration. If Vikings were Muslims, then how could contemporary Europe reject the mass migration of Muslims? But, if so, what exactly is “racist,” the “original” “Muslims” closing the door on but another group of Johnnie come lately Muslims?
None of this has prevented Juan Cole from writing that some Vikings were Muslims and Thor was brown:
https://www.juancole.com/2017/10/supremacist-vikings-muslim.html
The robes “could just be the result of trade with the Middle East,” so “it can’t be ruled out that there were some converts to Islam.” That does not follow, any more than an African collector of Japanese katana swords, is therefore Japanese. It is not the simplest explanation and applying Occam’s razor again, must be rejected.
Next, Cole then lists all those he hates: “This possibility drove the Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, the Breitbart staff and other losers, bonkers, since Vikings for them are ur-whites.” Not so; Breitbart is Right-wing, but primarily traditional conservative Christian, and is no supporter of the pagan Vikings. We have already mentioned the mixed response of the Nazis to the Vikings. As for the Klan, the KKK has been primarily Christian. Ignoring differences between enemies is a common Leftist strategy.
Cole in his paper says that white supremacy is stupid. Maybe so. He says: “you buy a stupid premise (global heating is not caused by humans e.g.), then all your further statements will be false because they are built on a rotten foundation.” Looked at from the perspective of deductive logic, that is fallacious too, because accepting one false contingent statement does not imply that any other statements in one’s epistemic set are also false.
Cole said that genetic testing of some skeletons in Viking graves showed Iranian origins. So, “Iran may be the origin of a significant number of Vikings.” No empirical evidence; mere multicultural biased speculation again. But now, Cole seems to be logically committed to accepting that there can be a genetic difference between Scandinavian Vikings and the alleged Iranian ones, which does not sit well with the Leftist tribal belief that “race/ethnic differences do not exist.” And who, apart from Cole, says that the skeletons were Vikings anyway, given their “mobility” and passion for trade? After all, we have seen that the other Left critics, discussed above, took a “multicultural’ line that the Vikings engaged in cultural exchange, mainly thief, with other cultures. The skeletons are more likely to have been slaves, and those of rank, dressed up in old abandoned rich guys’ clothes, to confuse later generations of Leftist archaeologists. It is just like if today academics were buried with learned texts, like Aristotle, the texts being protected in the silent gave. Future archaeologists might come to think that these people were wise, when in fact, well, we know what they are.
Cole says that some Vikings may have “mingled with people of color.” That is probably true, given the Viking propensity to pillage and rape. But it does not prove much, since men, especially away from home, will have sex with anything that has a pulse, or had a pulse.
It is Cole’s claims about Norse mythology which are the most absurd.
Cole says that Norse mythology is a version of Indo-European mythology, so Thor, for example has equivalents found in Iran and India, which is true. But, the arrow of causation points the wrong way. In the pre-World War II period, it was widely held that this region was conquered by Euro-white raiders, the Aryans, and surviving elements of their pagan warlord religion is found, in for example, the Rig Veda:
https://www.civilseva.org/2018/02/advent-of-aryans-and-age-of-rig-veda.html
However, given the Great Replacement by the globalists, and White Genocide, anything that could promote some historical pride by Whites must be smashed, so it is obvious that in cases like this the real order of things gets reversed, consciously or unconsciously. Even given this though, common themes do not necessarily imply causation, since Norse mythology and Iranian and Indian myths could have produced this similarity by diffusion of ideas, or simply independently by common experience. A god battling a serpent is not a monopoly idea. In the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myths, snake battles as part of a creation myth occur as well, such as Lira and Kuniya. These are not derived from any other culture, given the Aboriginal’s splendid isolation. Thus, there are not “brown Aryans,” as Cole defines it, but certainly from old school anthropology, there could be brownish Aryans, as the original whites gradually miscegenated with the native populations, leading to the light skinned Indians with Euro-phenotypes seen today. Indian women, almost all with light-skin and light brown eyes, have the record for winning beauty pageants, so time for an eye candy break:
https://herbeauty.co/en/entertainment/indias-8-most-gorgeous-beauty-queens/
It is interesting to note that the newspaper The Hindu ran a story, “How Genetics is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate.”
The idea that Euro-white Aryans conquered India and set up the caste system to prevent miscegenation, makes the Left convulse with anti-racist frenzy. But that was a long time ago. The Aryan hypothesis neatly explains why India switched to Indo-European languages. The Left claim, implausibly, that the switch occurred because of cultural diffusion from European traders, which also has a colonial overtone, for why did they dominate? However, studies of Y-chromosome’s has now shown that there has been an “external infusion of genes into the Indian male linage during the period in question.” As the Aryans were predominantly male, gene flows show up in the male Y-DNA data, and not the mtDNA data, with 17.5 percent of the Indian male linage belonging to haplogroup R1a, which spread from the Pontic-Caspian Steppes, across Europe, Central and South Asia. This is detailed in the paper, M. Silva (et al.), “A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-Biased Dispersals,” BMC Evolutionary Biology (2017):
https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-017-0936-9
the paper states: “Genetic influx from central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome linages … across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago.”
The article in The Hindu quotes one of the authors of the paper as saying that R1a in India was “very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to India.” The evidence now supports the Aryan hypothesis of substantial Bronze Age migrations into India. “One by one, therefore, every single one of the genetic arguments that were earlier put forward to make the case against Bronze Age migrations of Indo-European language speakers have been disproved.”
Series concludes in Part III: Understanding Nordic Origins
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