The Core of Western 'Civilization' is Reflected in its Adoration of Vikings
Joe Rogan admires the "giant marauders" who "couldn't wait to jump off that boat and start hacking people to bits" due to their "superior Viking DNA."
The popularity of a film romanticizing the brutality of Viking raiders lays bare an uncomfortable truth – the myth of Western civilization. Amid the choreographed scenes of pillaging and blood lust, a deeper revelation unfolds: The West's professed march towards enlightenment and progress is an illusion, one that obfuscates its primitive roots and the tenacious grip of its pagan past.
The admiration showered upon these Nordic marauders is not an anomaly but a window into the core of Western culture. It signals the resurgent and deeprooted interest in hyper-masculine white males partaking in primal acts of violence.
As commentator Joe Rogan remarks with thinly veiled (Hitlerian) lust, these were "giant marauders" who "couldn't wait to jump off that boat and start hacking people to bits" due to their “superior Viking DNA."
Indeed, beneath the veneer of Judeo-Christian values and secular ideals lies an atavistic longing, a dark undercurrent that has never been tamed. The bearded warriors hacking and raping through defenseless villagers speak to an ancient part of the European psyche that still craves subjugation, exploitation, abuse and conquest, no matter how many centuries of reason have supposedly transpired.
We need only look at the wars of occupation, slavery, torture camps, and industrial killing campaigns waged by Western nations to see these impulses made manifest. From the destruction of Iraq, the scorched earth tactics in Vietnam, the mass sexual abuse of children in the colonies and religious institutions, to the currently ongoing genocide in Palestine, the line of savagery traces back, unbroken, to the days of Viking longboats and pillaged coastlines. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights withers before the reality of shock and awe bombardments, drone assassinations, and overthrown governments for mineral wealth.
The veneration of these bygone barbarians exposes the fraudulence of Western pretensions. If these berserkers of the ancient North are indeed glorified, what does it say about the ‘civilizing power’ of Westernized Christianity and the so-called Enlightenment? The iconic horned helmets serve as a mockery of the notion of moral evolution, suggesting a contradiction in how Westerners, who assert their cultural lineage from Greece and Rome—civilizations that themselves inherited most from Arab and Persian cultures—often indulge in behaviors that their supposed ancestors would have condemned.
This paradox resolves when we accept that Western civilization is not a civilization at all, but merely new packaging for the same pathological underpinnings. The epidemics of misogyny, unrestrained materialism, grotesque social stratification, and sublimated violence betray a culture never weaned from its primitive tribalism.
So as moviegoers thrill at the theatrical butchery committed by these icons of Aryan hyper-masculinity, they are merely returning to form. The West's storied plunder surrounds us – hollowed communities, ravaged ecosystems, subjugated peoples, and the wreckage of nations. While it drapes itself in the vestments of enlightened secular ideals, underneath beats the primordial heart of pillagers slipping the gore bath, mad with blood lust.