I don’t usually write about un-American sports, but who can resist Norway’s World Cup soccer squad and its iconic team photo? Certainly not me, as an almost 100% descendant of Norwegians. Click to enlarge:
The Norwegian players are evidently proud of their Viking heritage. As are many in my home state, Minnesota, where our NFL team is called, as everyone knows, the Vikings.
Yet there are always killjoys. One of the comments on this tweet is:
You are actually pround of your history of murder, theft, rape of women and enslavement of innocent people ?
Only true scumbags could be proud of that history
*Sigh* Yes, the world was a rougher place a thousand years ago. And the Vikings were, to be fair, among the roughest.
But this is completely uncalled-for:
Erling Haaland and his Norway team-mates have been accused of ‘chauvinism’ and ‘neo-Nazi’ imagery after their World Cup photoshoot.
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Jane Haug Skjoldli, a researcher and Norwegian academic recently argued that the Norway kits for the World Cup could be seen as ‘hyper-masculine and right-wing extremist’, when speaking to Klassekampen.The shirts have rune-like writing on the back and Skjoldli said elements of it are ‘unfortunate and typical of neo-Nazi and fascist symbolic language’.
We certainly can’t have masculinity in an international sports competition! And as for the Nazi thing, please… If the Left insists that everyone must be either a soy boy or a Nazi, most people are going to choose Nazi. But it is really too stupid to be worth talking about.
I would only add this: having grown up in the shadow of World War II, when the Nazis were crushed, defeated, humiliated and exterminated, I never imagined that 81 years after the fact, Nazis would, in the liberal imagination, be so much with us.
