Vkings were like the SS, and Scandinavians should apologize.

[Gollrir]

I'm sorry. Also, I like the ''horned helmet demon with a flail'' in the article. Here we clearly have an expert on the subject.


He's joking right? he has to be joking...

[hellheaven1987]

Japan and Germany apologized for their respective imperial atrocities while many of the instigators were still living, not to mention the millions who were complicit in those systems.

So you mean once the generation who responsible for those crimes die off, those two countries do not need to apologize anymore?

[Earl Dibbles Jr]

Because there clearly isn't any more racists.

There are blacks that are racist towards whites as well, what's your point?

I have to ask, what does that actually mean? Could you give an example?

http://www.nber.org/papers/w6605

"When it is also used in hiring, it yields female and minority employees whose credentials are somewhat weaker, though performance generally is not."

Essentially, we don't care if you worked harder than this black guy, he's getting a job over you cause white guilt and all that.

We're also apologizing for sexism that we didn't participate in these sort of things should be based on your family's income as a child (e.g. if you grew up under the poverty line, you should be part of a system like this) otherwise you're discriminating against underprivileged white men/boys and giving some rich black people an advantage for no reason.

So you mean once the generation who responsible for those crimes die off, those two countries do not need to apologize anymore?

Uhm...yes. The unborn had no say in what atrocities their respective countries committed. For that matter, quite a few people in countries that committed atrocities were opposed to it but they weren't able to do anything due to the tyrannical government.

[Denny Crane!]

So you mean once the generation who responsible for those crimes die off, those two countries do not need to apologize anymore?

That isn't far from the truth. There is utilitarian purpose and that is it.

[Hobbes]

Should the Greeks apologize to the Persians?

No way! Sack of Athens 480BC, NEVER FORGET. Pay war reparations, Iranians!

[Derpy Hooves]

I agree, they should apologize. They caused my great great greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat grandfather suffered so much from the OPPRESSION and the RAPE of the EVIL Vikings! I DEMAND that every single Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, northern French, Finnish, Russian, and every other Viking descendant apologize for the misdeeds of their ancient ancestors.

[hellheaven1987]

So would Angol-Saxon apologize to Romano-Briton for all the harshness they caused 1500 years ago?

Go back to your Denmark and Germany, you Angol-Saxon barbarians!!

[Euphoric]

I just realized... there's a lot of hot Scandinavians at my campus and my ancestors were oppressed by Vikings, maybe we could arrange another way to work things out?

[Simon Cashmere]

History is stained with much bloodshed from all manner of peoples across Europe. To compare the Vikings to the SS however, doesn't withstand scrutiny. The SS really has no real equal in history, and most people do not understand what it was, other than the SS were bad. While superficially acts of violents by 'Vikings' (note that there were many different sorts) can be compared in the abstract to violence perpetrated against civilians, Vikings did not have a very well defined intellectual ideology which underscored their actions. The SS had an incredibly complex belief system rooted in Nazi ideology - including the supremacy of the mythical Aryan race, and that the unter mensche lived or continued living at the whim of the Third Reich - either to serve in slavery or to be killed immediately. Once you dehumanise people, terrible terrible things not only happen to those dehumanised, but are inevitable.

The movie Inglorious Basterds was like all Tarintino movies, very clever - but one thing that it showed, with the two main SS characters in the movie was that they were far from meatheads in jackboots, but very learned. The SS major in the cafe, is reading a book and coolly uncovers the imposters while playing along with them, while the SS Colonel Hans Landa speaks a variety of different languages and is an expert at his intelligence job. What you get from this is, that the SS were the elite and perhaps that makes them even more terrifying, rather than hamfisted oafs, they were polished intellectuals who were at an intellectual level convinced that their way of life, including the execution of the Jewish race, was the correct one.

To compare the SS to Vikings is pretty silly, given that the Vikings presumably did not have a master race ideology that was comparable to the Third Reich. If anyone is interested in knowing about the SS and the SA a bit or a lot more, happy to talk as long as any is willing to listen, I did German and Russian history at university in my economics degree and Russia and Germany from about 1800 to the present both interest me.

Note also that the SS Major wearing the terrifying black uniform of the Allgemeine SS was a mistake - they were not worn in 1944 in France, it is very much likely he would have been wearing the grey uniform of the SS that looked a lot liked any other Wehrmarcht uniform but with SS collar tabs, and if he was Gestapo, Geheime Statspolizie - he would have been in plain clothes. While the black uniform looks great, there is no way anyone in France would have been wearing it in 1944.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5AERj_7Zs

This is a scene from the German film, 'Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter'. Note the SS officer wearing a shirt that is brown, much like the SA shirts. SS officers did have the power to determine life and death, and the casual way that he takes a life indicates the unter mensche doctrine guiding his thinking. He tells the Wehrmarcht that the girl is not a civilian, but a Jew and so under SS control.

[Geronimo2006]

It's very hard to tell the extent of genocidality on the part of the Vikings. The Pictish population of Orkney may have been exterminated. Hard to tell in England because Danish/Saxon DNA is very similar. I saw a documentary on BBC years ago called "Blood of the Vikings" which mentioned this. In Ireland there were cases of massacres of clergy but eventually they intermarried such as in Dublin, which was ruled by a hybrid Norse-Gael elite, suggesting a degree of assimilation.

[Roma_Victrix]

This just has to be tongue-in-cheek, seriously. How can he, in the same article, mention in detail the St. Brice's Day Massacre of all the Danes living in England under the order of the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred the Unready, and then demand an apology only from modern-day Scandinavians about the sordid Viking raids across the British Isles throughout the centuries?

[Aymer de Valence]

Forget the Vikings, I'm still waiting for an apology from present-day Romans for the misery their ancestors caused in my homeland!

[saxdude]

should Mexico apalogise for the actions of the Aztecs? No, their modern culture is completely divorced from that culture.

That's an dumb analogy for multiple reasons.

I like how the response of most posters is so retardedly over dramatic, all most to the point of actually taking offence to a tounge in cheek article.

It sort of reminds me of how the same posters who would contemplate and argue for the presence of greeks/romans in places like the Americas or China, are the exact same people who and moan over PC correctness on africans in Greece/Rome, based on the exact same evidence (none).

Relax, nobody takes this seriously.

[Dave Strider]

So a bunch of illiterate barbarous sea-nomads who fought for personal gain and the establishment of bloody feudal social darwinism are comparable to the Waffen-SS?

I mean, jesus christ, Vikings are brutal, but everyone was brutal back then. It was the Dark Ages for a reason. To portray the Englishmen of the time as noble and heroic is just as wrong. On the same token, neither the Vikings nor those whom they invaded were, are, or ever will be, on the same level as atrocious, despicable, murderous, and scorn-worthy as Nazis.

This is one of the few times I'll ever actually consider Political Correctness having "gone too far".

There are blacks that are racist towards whites as well, what's your point?

Oh, and this is false. As a white person, I can say that it's not possible to be racist to a white person.

[Aymer de Valence]

As a white person, I can say that it's not possible to be racist to a white person.

Incomprehensibly stupid. How can you say this?

[Col. Tartleton]

I don't want to shock anyone but this is clearly based on a musing by comedian David Mitchell. Or at the very least its a similar point of view. I can't be bothered to find it, but Mitchell was pointing out that the vikings were pretty shockingly horrible people but now have been romanticized and in kind, a few centuries from now the Nazis won't seem so bad because of the space of time and the lack of memories and ability to connect to the victims.

On the topic of Vikingrs and Nordmenn, its important to understand that these are not mutually exclusive or synonymous terms.

It's awfully difficult to summarize the impacts, good and ill of an entire civilization's interactions with neighboring peoples over the course of at least four centuries. However most information on the topic of the Dark Age Norse (and Low Germans) is extremely simplified, brief, and biased. Either we are told that the Norse were misrepresented by history or the Vikings were the absolute worst of the barbarians. A lot of things changed in those four hundred years, its almost as bad as trying to summarize the last four centuries of French history in a similar manner. It's as though Richelieu, Bonaparte, and de Gaulle were all contemporaries. France killed a hell of a lot of people in four hundred years, sometimes for very bad reasons. The modern citizens don't really need to apologize for being citizens. Not a lot of choice in our citizenship come to think of it.

The difficulty in discerning who was a Viking raider and who was a Nordmann colonist is fairly difficult to discern. Most people in the Roman Empire were peaceful slaves or farmers. Most people in the Norse Dark Age were peaceful slaves or farmers. Most people in the British Empire were peaceful slaves or farmers. But that doesn't mean the Roman Legions did not savagely massacre men, women, and children and exterminate entire centers of culture and civilization. It does not mean the Viking hordes did not disembowel pacifistic monks, rape and kidnap farmers daughters, or dismember heads of state. It doesn't mean that Pirates of the Caribbean wouldn't drive a cutlass into your belly and shove your still living body overboard for the sharks. The fact the Romans made some efficient organizational improvements for the survivors doesn't exactly wash the blood off their hands but I guess its something for apologists to latch on to. However with the Vikings in Britain there were no improvements. Their civilization had essentially already come to Britain with the Anglo Saxons and had largely been improved on more in Britain than it had in Scandinavia. The PotC had no real impact on history, but they had intense swagger and in an age where swagger is fashionable they make good anti-heroes.

Anyhow if this was remotely serious we'd be better off looking at more recent Scandinavian atrocities than the Vikings. While Scandinavia has been fairly quiet and well mannered in our lifetimes it wasn't for the vast majority of the time between the Vikings and now. Singling out the Vikings is silly. I think someone had better apologize for the Northern Crusades and the Northern Wars. I don't need to name any names but...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

*cough* Sweden *cough*

Oh, and this is false. As a white person, I can say that it's not possible to be racist to a white person.

That's the stupidest thing I've read in a while. Anyone can treat anyone like because of their heritage. A racist can even be intolerant of people of the same heritage as said racist.

[hellheaven1987]

Nazi is already viewed not so bad in East Asia nowadays, perhaps has to do with the heavy Fascism elements in East Asian culture.

[Col. Tartleton]

Nazi is already viewed not so bad in East Asia nowadays, perhaps has to do with the heavy Fascism elements in East Asian culture.

I'm not too worried about it. At this point I think the sane portions of the west have forgiven Germany to the point that Germany during WW2 and Nazi Germany are practically different things. I'd like more acceptance of WW2 having happened from Japan, but I can't make them. If the Orientals want to wear Hugo Boss, fine. They're nice clothes after all. The context and the mindset of the person are what matter.

Lawful Neutral Germany gets to wear the Eisernes Kreuz.

Lawful Evil Germany gets the Hakenkreuz.

Maybe that's how it should be. In a game where the Nazis are non playable targets I want them in arm bands. If they're playable I want them to be "good" Wehrmacht. Call me part of the problem.

Which of course is why Company of Heroes 2 is so repugnant. They let the Germans be Lawful Neutral but make the Soviets Chaotic Evil. They're the good guys in the game but they're committing war crimes against their own side for no reason at all. Completely ed.

[trance]

The blood eagle is pseudo historical, and there's minimal support for using it as an argument that "vikings were oh so horrible". Naturally, vikings were traders, colonialists and warriors, and there was no doubt a lot of killing. Saying they were worse than those they fought against is a pretty ridiculous notion though.

[Col. Tartleton]

I think its fair to say the actual Vikings were worse than the Anglo Saxon civilians they were killing but if we put Anglo Saxon Thegns attacks against Norse civilians during the reconquest of the Danelaw that would also be appalling.