Also, on the Belgian tip – the mention of Vlaams Blok reminded me. Herge, the artist who created Tintin, worked during the German Occupation for a publication controlled by the Nazis. He was investigated after the war, and it sullied his reputation for years. The poor Belgians – on top of everything else, of the three most famous Belgians of the XXth Century (Tintin, Hercule Poirot and Jacques Brel) two were fictional and all three were widely assumed to be French.

Then I think of the McCarthy years and Americans’ willingness to rat their neighbors out as pinkos and commies, and they weren’t even under the guns of occupiers. They didn’t have a tyrant to collaborate with so they invented one.

The Finns gave us Bonk!

In my college days, I knew a lass who was Finnish/Ukrainian from New Jersey.
Some of the sensible ones knew that staying on the Least Coast was better than migrating to the Great Cold North, of “Americas’ Heartland”.

Mike Royko once devoted a column to determining how to insult a Norwegian-American, and came up with the phrase, “Herring choker.”

I just read in the LA Times that Finland has 85 music schools in the whole country.

Seriously. And who wasn’t lynching negroes back during Jim Crow? Amirite? Amirite?

My Norwegian in-laws say that they are sooo grateful for your leniency. I think they’re being sarcastic, but since none of you Scandinavians ever changes expression, who can be sure? (/snark)

The nice part of that deal (for us, that is) is that, while mocking the Norwegians as our kindhearted, but rather dimwitted cousins from Hicksville, we still get to claim any and all Norwegians of distinction as, well, kinda Danish.

Disse folk har sproget blandet;-
de er herrer nu i landet.-
Men i tiden længst forgangen
råded der orangutangen.
Han var skogens mand og herre,
frit han turde slå og snærre.
Som naturens hånd ham skabte,
så han gren og så han gabte.
Uforment han turde skrige;
han var hersker i sit rige.-
Ak, men så kom fremmedåget,
og forplumred urskogs-sproget.
Firehundreårig natten
ruged over abekatten;

The Swedish penchant for ¨ just proves what we’ve been suspecting all along, that Swedes are really some sort of knock-off Germans. That might explain why both countries have been kicking our asses for the last five centuries.

Ow! :(

Who’s to tell what kind of kink Grants Wood?

My Norwegian in-laws say that they are sooo grateful for your leniency. I think they’re being sarcastic, but since none of you Scandinavians ever changes expression, who can be sure? (/snark)

And as for you poor unfortunate souls from Scandinavia, well – I suppose you’ll just have to take one for the team. I’m sure you could spend all day mocking English, the most absurd tongue man has ever contrived to speak (except Latin, obviously.)

I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘aryan supermen’.

I run a pretty brisk and deeply unfair trade in mock-German; seeing all this Scandinavinese makes me want to expand. I think I’ve been giving the Danes, Swedes, and especially those motherfuckers in Norway too much slack for far too long.

And incidentally:

I’m always fascinated at the number of highly educated people on this board.

Not I. I just pay attention; I’m a third-year undergrad senior (and in political science, for that matter – history is really not my field, I just happen to like it and plumb it a lot for stuff to work with). I think this is pretty much living proof that any old idiot can come up with the stuff I belt out if they have an obscene enough personality and enough spare time.

you’re more than welcome to pity us for our current government
We’re talking the same one that responded to the controversy fermented by the Mohammed cartoons – whose original publishers were basically hatchet-men for it – was to scream and cry about Islamofascism suppressing their freedom of speech when foreign diplomats begged them to stanch the increasingly violent protest with an official apology? Because yeah, ow.

Never understood why the Finns, after emigrating all the way across the Atlantic in leaky iron barges, would settle in the Upper Midwest … I guess coming from a country filled with mosquito/gnat infested swamps in the summer and in the winter, ice-spicule-filled winds made them believe in Loviatar, goddess of pain & cold — they felt at home in places like the Upper Peninsula.

Damn crazy Yoopers; anyone living in a place where you can get somewhere near 40 feet of snow in a season, and where you have to have tunnels connecting the house to the barn … man, you have to have a masochistic streak.

Big tall slow-smiling Finnish girls, on the other hand…

Vadå umlaut… vi är väl inga tyskar för fan!

It’s not umlaut when it’s a separate letter (the dots on the letter don’t go on and off in the same word unlike German).