The ninth century chronicles of England constantly refer to the war between the ‘Christians’ and the ‘heathen’, that is, the war between the English and the Vikings. Once the English had themselves been heathen and a bit like the Vikings. However, they had settled 300-400 years before the Viking raids, founding homes and farmsteads (‘hams’ and ‘tons’) and had begun to live as Christians. The Vikings raided (killed, raped, enslaved, looted and pillaged) and traded (exploited and made huge profits). True, many of them then settled like the English, but their spirit lived on and infected other races.
Their spirit lived on in the last Viking invasion – that of the Normans, who were also Vikings. By the eleventh century, having learned French, these barbarian Vikings had become the shock-troops of the new imperial papist ideology in Rome, massacring in southern Italy, England and then much further afield as far as Jerusalem in so-called ‘crusades’. Then their spirit spread to others, especially in northern France between the Loire and the Rhine, and gradually horse-mounted banditry and castle-built exploitation (called ‘feudalism’) became the norm for the whole European upper-class.
Thus, this was the spirit of the Teutonic Knights attacking 13th century Russia, of Spanish conquistadors in 16th century Latin America, of British and French slave-traders, ‘merchants’ and pirates in the 18th century Caribbean and India, of European cowboys in 19th century North America and the spirit of all Westerners and their converts who have looted and pillaged Asia, Oceania and Africa. At one time people spoke of Westernization, in the 1960s Americanization, today it is globalization. It is all the same. It means infecting the world with the Viking spirit of piratry and pillage.
Today the Viking spirit is not conducted by Viking longships, medieval knights, Spanish galleons, British ‘privateers’ (State-sponsored pirates) or Gatling gun-armed troops massacring Africans armed with spears. It is conducted by Western politicians in cartels, ‘businessmen’, international bankers and Stock Exchange or corporate ‘raiders’. They are raiding, asset-stripping, the rest of the world to feed their incredible capitalist-consumerist machine, making all into drugged, enslaved and enzombied consumerists with their Black Friday Alexa apps, ordering them to buy. They are today’s Viking victims.
‘. . . never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples who desecrated the sanctuaries of God, and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God’. (Alcuin, Letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria.)