Hitler’s worldview included copious referencing of Nordic creation mythologies (thus his love of Wagner!), and as a consequence of this there developed strong pro-Nazi movements leading up to, through, and most disturbingly, after WWII in all the Nordic/Scandic countries (Scandinavian countries as a group are all the Nordic countries, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, plus Finland). Iceland was no exception to these Nazi sympathies — documented by black-and-white images of uniformed goose-stepping rubes on parade in downtown Reykjavík before the 1940 British occupation, and the refusal of Icelandic authorities to allow African-American soldiers into the country during the later US occupation. These warped sympathies have persisted right up to the present time: a fact that was brought to my attention by a sequence of articles published in Iceland’s main national newspaper, Morgunbladið, back in the early 1990’s when I had recently immigrated to Reykjavík to take up residence with my future ex-wife, an Icelandic psychologist who I had met in Germany a few years previous. The current events in Norway bring all this back to mind, again…
My partner and I wrote the following letter to the editors of “Foreign Living,” an English-language weekly aimed at the immigrant population of Iceland. It gives some hint as to the content of the handful of ten-column two-page diatribes that were published as editorial content in the main (and decidedly right-wing!) national newspaper in Iceland, Morgunbladið. They included direct quotes from Mein Kampf among rants saying that all cross-cultural marriages in the country should be immediately annulled and that all foreigners should be deported. [This paper is currently under the editorship of the former Prime Profiteer Minister of Iceland, Davið Oddsson, the very same man that was running the Central Bank when the s**t hit the proverbial fan and the nepotistic card house that he constructed while PM — selling all the national banks to his cronies at a handsome return — ultimately imploded in September 2008. None of these inept and uneducated gamblers have yet been brought to justice, and Davið was forced to resign from the Central Bank although he took no responsibility for anything that happened under his watch! The myth of the Nordic countries consistently being ranked by the UN as the least corrupt in the world took a direct and completely justified hit, but that is another story detailed here (see the archive between 2008-10).] There are many things in Scandic society which do not surface on the outside.
There are plenty of good reasons for the appearance of a mass-mailed newspaper around that same time, 1992, that was sent to every Icelandic household from an ultra-right-wing organization in Georgia (US) filled with histories of the Aryan Race, ad nauseum. Presumably this was also sent to households across the Scandic world, and who knows how many were actually kept as a treasured source of important information about the state of world and the ultimate superiority of the Aryans.
Having spent years moving across the Scandic terrain, I must also point out that the twisted wrecks of humanity that cling to these distorted fantasies do not represent a majority of people in these countries. On the contrary, they are a minority among societies that are progressive, relatively open, and who enjoy a pluralistic way of life that only recently ascended from peasant farming and fishing under some sort of displaced monarchical exploitation to social democratic hyperwired-info-society. The minority is not insignificant, though, and between neo-nationalistic impulses and general racism, it forms a palpable under-current that can be experienced directly or indirectly by the observant outsider, depending on the color of their skin, not the content of their character. (And a further note, this whole incident should simply remind people that human nature is only conditionally confined by the strictures of relative social value-systems: there is no social system where that base nature cannot suddenly or slowly arise from the cover of rectitude and manifest itself. No social system is immune from this play of dynamic instability between control versus not-control: the comfort of the known versus the fear of the unknown, self-righteousness versus humility.)
Dear Editors;
We hope that you will not consider the following letter as too controversial to print in your next issue. We also regret that our first contribution to your magazine has to be on such despicable topic, but we felt that it was necessary to bring the following to the attention of your readers, as it is an issue that bears directly on many of them.
Our primary motivation in writing this letter is in response to an article in the July 29, 1992, Morgunbladið, page 30, entitled “White Mans Holocaust” written by one Magnús Þorsteinsson from Grimsnes. While we are not so naive to assume that racism in some form does not exist here in Iceland, given the relative isolation and cultural homogeneity, we were sickened by the ideas put forth by this man. Media access should be given to all legitimate social and political issues — but not to racist incitement in the form of lies and myths published in the most widely-read newspaper in Iceland. As partners in a “mixed-race” marriage, we both felt personally attacked and defiled. The following letter tries to address a few of the absurd points made in the article, and we would urge anyone interested to review the original article in Icelandic to more clearly understand our points and our feeling of outrage. (Another article, also by M. Þorsteinsson, entitled “The Protection of the Aryan Race” was published in Morgunbladið on September 3, 1991, page 43).
Preservation of cultural and national identity are probably the most difficult issues to be resolved in the Modern World. Unfortunately it seems that the typical solution to ethnic conflict does not involve coexistence. Rather, it seems much easier for people to justify all levels of psychological and physical violence in the fertile ground of nationalism and institutionalized racism. We all can see the obvious and bloody results of nationalism in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet states. Almost as destructive and equally disgusting is the continued rise of passive or active racism in much of the Western World. For the an example of the extreme results of racism, look at Los Angeles and Soweto.
While the advance of international media technology and tremendous increases in world population make the defense of cultural integrity a complicated problem, certainly it is possible to protect ones own heritage without destroying someone elses. The only positive solution is a continuance of genuine dialogue between peoples; and we must look to our human obligations to fellow passengers on this earth.
How is it possible to both love the land of ones birth and hate another human being for speaking another language or having a different color of skin or eyes? How is it possible to say that eye-color is a function of intellect and culture? We thought that ideas like this have been completely discredited especially to be published in the media.
M. Þorsteinsson claim that earlier (Imperial) cultures met their destruction through the pollution of their founders blood is worse than absurd. To claim that there ever was a Roman or Greek of pure blood is to ignore the constant ‘racial’ mixing of conqueror and conquered. What about the moral bankruptcy of sustained exploitation of the secondary citizens by the ‘Master Race’ of all empires? We suggest that M. Þorsteinsson look carefully at Tacitus (Annals of Imperial Rome) for examples of the internal imperial corruption and at the historical position of Iceland at the hands of the Danish Crown for examples of Nordic/Aryan scruples. (Absolute power corrupts absolutely!) The material supremacy of the First World, or, as M. Þorsteinsson has it, the Nordic World, has within it absolutely no grounds for moral supremacy — on the contrary, the consumerist mentality that threatens the remains of Iceland’s and many other country’s heritage is a moral vacuum. The idea that the Nordic/Aryan ethnic heritage has some inborn superiority is worse than absurd, it is simply not true — every indigenous culture has its own intrinsic value and worth.
Oppression of one group by another can only be for economic profit. It is a myth that colonialism has been abolished. Economic domination is the fuel that runs dictatorships around the world for the sole benefit of the consumerist and energy-intensive Western World. Where does the material wealth of the Western World come from anyway? It comes directly from the natural resources that are controlled by the multinationals in so-called ‘Third World’ regions. M. Þorsteinsson suggests that rain forests are being destroyed by inept Third World countries, we wonder if he has any teak or mahogany around his Nordic house.
To say that the cultures of North Europe, North America, New Zealand and Australia, with their enormous material wealth, “high-culture”, “humanity”, and “equal-rights”, are examples of the superiority of the Nordic race is to miss some of the most profound and disturbing lessons that history can teach. Or perhaps the points are to be ignored and forever to be repeated — the countless displacements from war and other acts of “economic necessity” or “national security” that, among thousands of other catastrophes, caused the genocide of millions of Native Americans (some of the same race that drove Leif Ericsson from the shores of Vinland), caused Norwegians to move to Iceland to escape the oppression of the Norwegian Crown, and caused the steppe tribes to move to Finland in escape of the Mongols.
This society does not need bigots or racists like M. Þorsteinsson; nor does it need a newspaper like Morgunbladið to propagate such ideas under the guise of free expression. The world has always been, since the Tower of Babel was thrown down (if you subscribe to a Judeo-Christian version of history), a swirl of intersecting groups of people, some who have the destiny to love another without regard to differing genetic stocks. We happen to be one such couple, and although we both have blue eyes, we are proud of our capacity to overlook that fact. We think it is far more important to share our differences and sustain dialogue than to blame others for our own shortcomings.
signed,
Magnea Björg Jónsdóttir, Dipl. Psychologist,
and John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, Professor at MHÍ
Reykjavík, 2.8.1992