The problem with the recently pulled SAS advert was ... that there were too many problems with it.
It pretended to challenge some myths, but did so by buttressing others (like the 'democracy' of classical Greece, which was only economically viable thanks to slave labour).
It implied that a nation can claim something as truly 'its' only if it wasn't a development of something else from elsewhere (as if baseball couldn't be 'truly American' if it developed from English rounders).
It implied that something can't originate in more than one place independently (there is no evidence that vertical European windmills developed from horizontal Iranian ones).
But the main problem was that it didn't really say "for many things we think of as Scandinavian we are, partially at least, indebted to other nations". It said "some nations are inventive, but all we can do is steal ideas and then pretend they were ours".
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