Reminds me of the time somebody in r/nursing asked if they would run into any problems having tattoos. Most places don't care too much these days and especially since they wanted to work psych which is pretty in-demand but I commented that if they're gang related or look similar to gang related symbols there could be trouble because there's a lot of crossover between the psych and corrections patient populations.
They told me "oh they're just some norse runes." Bruh. I thought you were gonna tell me it was a butterfly on your wrist or something you gotta be kidding me. They stopped responding before telling me which runes specifically but if an internet stranger clocked them from a few message board responses maybe they rethought some things.
Ok, legit though, a friend of mine started going bald in his mid 20’s. Tried growing his hair out but was eventually convinced that shaving his head was a better look.
Then he started to really get into Melodic & Power Metal and similar sounding music.
Then Amon Amarth. Which lead him to Norse mythology. So he gets a Mjolnir necklace. And he likes leather jackets.
Perfectly innocent!
And he visits some friends in Germany. Coincidentally there is an anti-nazi protest going on. This huge German dude takes one look at the pasty-white, skinhead, Norse symbol, leather jacket friend of mine and gets RIGHT UP I HIS FACE. Very intent on kicking his ass until the people he is visiting defuse the situation.
Nazis have borrowed Norse symbology since like the beginning of Nazis. Their most recognizable symbol is also borrowed from other cultures.
Unlike the swastika, Norse symbols aren't so strongly associated with Nazis that they're now completely unacceptable, so some Nazis use them as a way to broadcast their interests while keeping some plausibly deniable "I just think they're neat" shit.
Don't forget they also called themselves Aryan despite the Aryans being from central/south Asia. They're generally considered to be Indo-Iranian based on where they ended up and where they started. But it flows off the tongue better to put the former first.
The Nazis were super into Norse runes. Hitler legitimately thought that they held magical powers.
I'd say I'm surprised you didn't know that, but honestly, I'm not because there's a lot of those kinds of things that they don't mention when teaching about WW2. Plenty of skinhead dog whistles that I didn't learn about until later on.
I just want to put this out here because it happened to me. I've had a deep interest in Norse mythology since I was a child and have several tattoos featuring runes and Norse mythological imagery. I knew that Othala was a common white supremacist symbol as well as things like the sonnerad, triskele, and valknut so I avoided them.
However, my most visible piece is a raven skull with 3 runes running down the middle. 2 of them are apparently associated with Nazi shit. Thankfully they're obscure enough that normal people don't assume I'm a white supremacist, but it's dog-whistley enough that I've had Nazis assume I was also a Nazi and try to strike up conversations with me.
For anyone considering getting runes, be very careful with which ones you select and how you present them. Here's a decent list of Norse symbols that have been associated with white supremacist movements
It's also why they think that everything is a bad code that they can descramble. They have these super obvious codes to signal to others and assume every other group has a code that's just as poorly disguised. That's how we ended up with shit like Pizzagate. If you order certain pizzas that unlocks the secret basement with the kids! It's also why a lot of them think there's a super secret cabal running everything.
Never got around to it, but I wanted to do a statistical search of Reddit usernames that pop up in subreddits with two or more numbers at the end. You'll of course have lots of people with '86 or '92 because they had their birth year at the end of their username. I'm betting '88 sticks out on the bar chart. Not everyone with an '88 at the end will be a nazi, but a disproportionate number with '88 would be a hint towards what kind of people the subreddit is attracting.
you also would have to normalise over all the usernames of the platform. as a number repeating itself, i would assume that it generally attracts more attention. source: i compete in team sports. after the birthyears repeating numbers are the ones most often chosen for jersey numbers.
There's even some arguments that we should go back to them. Runes are the original English alphabet, and spelling would be more natural with them. But ripping them away from the nazis would be hard.
There might be an argument for adding back in thorn and such but the funny thing about the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic rune system is that it was copied and altered from Etruscan/North Italian sources in the first place!