Call it their "inner Viking" coming out.

In response to a creepy request from communist Chinese minders to remove Falun Gong and other politically embarrassing books from a village public library while the Chinese ski team trains there, a humble Norwegian librarian bit back and told the Chicoms to stick it.

According to the Times of London (subscription only):

Freedom of speech enjoyed by Norwegians meant that the demand was "completely out of the question", [library manager] Ms [Anne] Marken said. "We cannot remove the contents of the library because of such requests."

Here's the Times' backdrop:

More than 40 Chinese cross-country skiers, accompanied by 15 coaches and managers, are in the Norwegian town of Meraker to train for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics as part of a collaborative training programme. Members of the delegation requested that the local library remove several books, including one about Falun Gong, which has been outlawed as a cult in China since 1999. The episode is the latest example of Beijing's efforts to export its censorship laws overseas.

According to Norway Today, Anne Marken, the library manager, told a local newspaper that she had turned down the request. She said: "They have said that if any of the Chinese skiers are caught with these books, they are afraid that they would risk being sent to labour camp or prison in China."

This was exactly the right response to the outrageous Chicom demand, attempting to turn Norway into as benighted and information-deprived a place as Red China itself.

The arrogance of the Chicoms was rather amazing.  How would they react if American officials asked them to pull Mao's little red book off their store shelves, or maybe dog off their restaurant menus?  Tourists don't get to set the terms of a visit.  Either you visit and take it in as it is or you don't visit.

But the Chinese are something pretty different.  As David Goldman notes, there are no "backsies" with the Chicoms.  They don't interact with others; they just bully.  There is no give and take with them; they just absorb.  The more they interact with the West, the less they want to learn new things and embrace new ideas.  Their game instead is to export their censorship abroad as much as they seek to intensify it at home.  And they are so fanatical about it that they are willing to go small.

We all know they've co-opted Yahoo! and Google to keep information from the Chinese public.  We all know about their Orwellian social credit system, which watches citizens' every electronic move and dishes consequences to those who do not conform.  We all know how they have a cow every time the dissident Dalai Lama visits a Western leader.

We also know how they've co-opted Hollywood, a recent case being their insistence on removing a Taiwan patch from a pilot character's jacket in a remake of Top Gun.  We know how they censored the entire U.S. basketball operation based on a pro–Hong Kong tweet of a Houston team manager — with some of their local pawns coming out and defending them based on all the money they expect to make.  The Times notes that they censored European soccer games from airing in China too, based on one player speaking out about China's horrific enslavement or "re-education" of the country's Uighurs.

But now they're going really, really small here, attempting to micromanage a Norwegian library's contents, assuming that the Norwegians will be pushovers to accommodate them, and then a precedent will be set.

And as if training athletes focused on a big match are big frequenters of book libraries.  Or that one book, readable by one person at one time (unlike the internet, which can be read by millions), might just make some kind of difference.  They think so, and it's too big a risk.

Because for them, hell-bent these days on restoring their totalitarian glory, just exposure to the ideas is dangerous. 

Notice also how the Chicoms also attempted to manipulate the Norwegians' feelings, by telling them that any athlete caught reading such books would be a sure thing for the laogai if he dares go back to China.  They saw how a crowd of Swedes on a jetliner protested the deportation of an Afghan thug to his homeland, so Norwegians would probably react the same sappy way.  They were right, though, that such a person probably would be headed for the camps.  Left unspoken though was that for the reader, that's an invitation to flee, and probably what the Chicoms really had in mind.  Training in Norway, after all, costs money, and Chicoms are probably a little nervous about their athletes' desire for spiritual nourishment outside the Communist Party and want to protect their "investment."

In any case, the Norwegians, at least in that back boonie ski resort, were having none of it. Free speech is the Norwegian way and at least in the outskirts, Norwegians still believe it. One can only hope it was a good bucket of ice water onto the Chicoms to hear 'no' for this, because the next librarian to be intimidated now has courage from it to tell the Chicoms to go to hell, too.

Messing with Vikings is always a bad idea. Somewhere, out on a remote ski resort in the world's far north, the Viking spirit lives.