Stop Giving Up Symbols

Norway is having a moral panic over the use of runes by their Olympic team.
There is little evidence that the rune originally had any symbolic significance beyond its sound value, but the letter shares the name of a Norse deity popularly understood as the god of war, Tyr. Nowadays, most runologists consider it a letter no more mysterious than the letter T.

Even so, the presence of the Tyr rune on the team’s sweater design was enough to raise alarms. Norway’s security police have warned of the rise of a small but politically extreme and potentially violent group called the Nordic Resistance Movement, which uses the Tyr rune in its branding.
The last thing anyone should want to do is to give up a powerful symbol to a hate group. Declaring an ambiguous symbol to be 'a symbol of hate' surrenders it to the worst sorts of people. No one should go along with this foolishness.

4 comments:

raven said...

My wife is fond of saying, whenever some irreducibly stupid obsession with minutia crops up, "these people don't have enough to do".

Now there is a solution- consider the old saying about getting rid of a headache- just hit your knee with a ballpeen hammer and the headache will be completely forgotten? Same things apply to feelings- have your country overrun by war and famine, and all those worrisome race and gender problems will just melt away. Ever notice it is always the academics that seem to be obsessed with this stuff? The people pushing shovels and welding bridges and pulling nets don't give a damn about it.

Eric Blair said...

Yeah, just saw a fellow who teaches historical European martial arts drop the "European" from his book title because 'fascists' and white supremacists have 'infiltrated' the HEMA scene.

Just giving up. Sad.

raven said...

What does that say about his fighting ability? It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, etc.

douglas said...

"Attacking Vikings" they call themselves? And immediately surrender a piece of their history?

Not worthy.