(This takes approximately eight minutes to read.)

The concept for this topic came to me in a dream one morning, and having thought about it, it does seem like a good idea for a thread. I think that the reason that I never made this earlier was that it felt too basic to deserve a discussion, but there’s quite a bit that one can say about it.

The ‘Aryan race’ is universally associated with the Third Reich, but it’s actually a protofascist concept that was fairly popular with White nationalists who lived beyond the German Reich’s borders. ‘Aryan’ is cognate with and lit. means ‘Iranian’, but if you referred to contemporary Iranians or Persians as Aryans, most of them would raise their eyebrows at you. Only in discussions of ancient Asia (incl. its languages) does the term ‘Aryan’ still retain any academic respectability.

The reason that many White nationalists referred to theirselves as ‘Aryans’ is based on misunderstandings derived from early 19th c. linguistics, which was in its infancy at that time. Quoting from Aaron Gillette’s Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, pg. 13:

Friedrich von Schlegel, in 1808, announced that German, Greek, and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. Schlegel concluded that most Europeans and northern Indians must have a common ancestor, which he called the Aryans. Linguistic and historical evidence suggested that the Aryans most likely originated from India or Central Asia, and had migrated as a body to Europe around 1000 B.C.E. These Aryans were thought to embody all the moral and intellectual virtues that had eventually made the Europeans masters of the globe.

Thus began the history of a mythical concept that would cause so much controversy and pathos over the next 150 years. Still, the Aryans remained a great mystery. Were the Aryans one racial group, or simply a linguistic family of varying races? If they were one particular racial group, were they “pure” or “contaminated” by lesser breeds? From precisely where did they originate? What current European people (it being assumed that the Indians were greatly corrupted) had deviated the least from the original Aryan stock? What was the culture of the Aryans, and what of this culture had survived into modern times?

Since all significant contributions to western civilization were supposed by some to have been Aryan creations, the classical Greeks and Romans were included among the Aryan peoples. But many German scholars, such as Theodor Mommsen, believed that the modern Italians were a degenerate Aryan people, who had greatly decayed from the days of the Roman Republic.¹⁵ Indeed, the modern Germans were spiritually closer to the “noble Romans” than were the Italians, Mommsen claimed.¹⁶

Perhaps because German scholars predominated in the study of Aryans, the notion quickly gained ground that those of “Nordic” ancestry were the truest heirs of the Aryan forefathers. Of course, the concept Nordic, when defined as a racial group, was almost as vague as the concept Aryan. It meant different things to different people: Heinrich Himmler believed that the only “true” Aryans were the Germans and the Dutch; Chamberlain included in those possessing the “Teutonic race-soul” the Celts and the Slavs.¹⁷

On what criteria would a people’s Nordic affiliation be judged? Hair and eye color? Cephalic index? History? Archeological evidence? All of the criteria would be employed in the European-wide competition to claim Nordic Aryan ancestry.

The French writer Arthur de Gobineau attempted to solve the riddle of who, precisely, was Aryan. Influenced by his own indirect links to the French aristocracy, Gobineau advanced the claim that the French aristocracy was the only group in France that had preserved the essential elements of Aryan identity.

Italy, Gobineau claimed, had been bastardized since late antiquity by foreign blood. Miscegenation in Italy, he wrote, produced mediocrities, “men with the herd mind,” “nations dulled by a fatal somnolence,” “people like buffaloes chewing the cud in the stagnant wallows of the Pontine marshes.”¹⁸

As we can see, racial philosophists theirselves could not agree on the concept; don’t feel guilty if you do not understand it either.

Despite its cryptic nature, the concept of the ‘Aryan race’ exploded in popularity at the colonial age’s height. For byspel, quoting Winston Churchill in 1902:

I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind, ch. 5:

“G-d ordained the southern white man to teach the lessons of Aryan supremacy,” declared Woodrow Wilson’s friend Thomas Dixon, author of the book and play The Clansman, which became the film Birth of a Nation.

This concept proved useful for justifying the subjugation of others, who neither understood nor enjoyed their disadvantaged status. Never mind how the Fascists theirselves had trouble uncovering findings to support their assumption that the ‘Aryan race’ invented all of the good stuff in the world — what matters is that they had an excuse for their actions; they could overlook all evidence to the contrary. And this was the default excuse for oppressing others: ‘non-Aryans’ were naturally disadvantaged, therefore it was foolish for them to resist something that was supposed to be permanent:

Hitler looked to ‘the American Union which possesses its own [land] base in its own continent’; from this continental land base, he continued, ‘comes the immense inner strength of this state’. As the ‘Aryans’ of the American continent cleared the ‘wild soil’ and made a ‘stand against the natives’, he noted, ‘more and more [White] settlements sprang up in the land’. Germans should look to this historical experience for ‘proof’, since its population of ‘largely Germanic elements mixed little with lower colored peoples’.”¹⁴⁵

Hitler’s understanding of the North American genocide was dependent both on its celebration in popular novels and on the racist theories of the eugenicists. In a speech on May 1, 1939, Hitler declared that the “Anglo-Saxon” was “nothing other than a branch of our German Volk,” and that it was a “tiny Anglo-Saxon tribe [which] set out from Europe, conquered England, and later helped to develop the American continent.”¹⁴⁶

This racist theory had earlier been developed in the United States. The “Aryans” had supposedly come from the Middle East to Germany and from there to England in the form of the Anglo-Saxons. America’s Manifest Destiny was understood by many in the United States as thus being global in scope.

In one vision, the Anglo-Saxons had come west to the New World, would move west to the Pacific (slaughtering/benefitting anyone in the way) and proceed west through the Pacific and Asia, coming full-circle to the supposed birthplace of the “race” near an area that some in Washington D.C. still obsess over to this day, a nation whose name derives from Aryan: Iran.¹⁴⁷

A believer in this theory, Teddy Roosevelt, played dress-up in Brooks Brothers-designed uniforms not just as politics, but also to model a superior racial specimen eager for war. The same racist theories maintained that the process of warmaking and conquering was necessary for the health of the race. When the Aryans had reached the Pacific, the mission had to continue, not just to fulfill a prophecy or to open markets or to win elections, but so that the race might not degenerate in the dangerous luxury of peace.

General Douglas MacArthur, years later, would attack WWI veterans with chemical weapons in the streets of Washington where they were demanding bonus pay¹⁴⁸, take part (according to the Congressional testimony of Smedley Butler) in planning a coup against Franklin Roosevelt¹⁴⁹, be removed as army chief of staff by President Roosevelt and sent off to the Philippines¹⁵⁰, allow the destruction of U.S. airplanes in the Philippines by the Japanese on the original “Pearl Harbor Day,”¹⁵¹ effectively rule over Japan¹⁵², help provoke and escalate a war in Korea¹⁵³, and get fired by President Truman.

That MacArthur’s father, General Arthur MacArthur, was himself, for a time, the ruler of the Philippines, and explained to a U.S. Senate committee:

“Many thousands of years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary basis of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere. As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific — that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race.”¹⁵⁴

It’s easy to imagine someone referring to this theory as a justification for colonising every spot on Earth: if the Aryans had settled all around the world before being absorbed into other populations, then the Third Reich — or Imperial America — would have been merely taking back what was ancestral land. This made it the perfect racial theory for European colonialism.

Of course, to repeat what I said earlier, the Fascists had no luck getting the findings to support this tosh. Ironically, the evidence for a global Jewish presence is much greater than the hypothesis about a global Aryan one, only in the Axis’s case, that was only another excuse for ‘reconquering’ Earth.

Anyway, oppressors prefer it when they are easily distinguishable from their victims. Both the protofascists and the Fascists believed that the archetypal Aryan had a distinct look. Pg. 14:

The Comte Georges Vacher de Lapouge […] believed [that] “the individual belonging to the Aryan race [… was] tall, with blonde hair, clear eyes, light complexion, and an elongated form of head.”

Although some ‘Aryans’ (e.g. Joseph Goebbels) had raven hair or brown eyes and whatnot due to admixture with other European ‘races’, these distinctions were trivial (unless one wanted to become a Waffen-SS member). On the other hand, the brainlessness in the ‘ideal Aryan’ concept becomes readily apparent when looking at certain Jews who survived the Fascist era, such as Fred Kader and more famously Hessy Levinsons Taft. The reality that not all Jews have ‘Mediterranean’ features was an important reason that the Western Axis introduced the Judenstern.

Added to this, some Europeans saw no contradiction between being ‘Aryan’ and being Jewish. Quoting Alexander Stille in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, pg. 31:

I interviewed an Eastern European Jew who was living in Italy at the time who told me the following story. He wanted to take a vacation on the Adriatic coast, but the racial laws forbade Jews from going to seaside resorts, out of fear that they might communicate with submarines off shore. So this gentleman wrote to the proprietress of a little pensione, saying “You should know that I am Jewish, so let me know if this poses a problem.” The woman wrote back: “It doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Christian, as long as you are a member of the Aryan race.”

No less important: there were European adults in the Fascist era who’d never even heard of the ‘Aryan race’. Gerwin Strobl’s The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, pgs. 3–4:

Klemperer, a Jewish German, who survived because of his marriage to an ‘Aryan’ wife, records a conversation with a friendly stranger in 1943. When he observed that as a ‘non-Aryan’ restrictions were placed on his freedom of action, his interlocutor inquired without a trace of disingenuousness, ‘What is a non-Aryan?’¹

(All emphasis added.)

It’s all too easy to ridicule this racial theory for its incoherence and subjectivity, but it’d be an analytic error to presume that German anticommunists adopted it before rather than after becoming fascists. Utility, rather than logic or evidence, drove the Fascist bourgeoisie to adopt racial theories, hence why it refused to recogise the Roma and Sinti as Aryans despite their being Indo-Europeans par excellence. Compare this with United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, when the SCOTUS decided in 1923 that a man of both Aryan and Caucasian descent was, in fact, neither Aryan nor Caucasian, and therefore ineligible for naturalised citizenship.

While racial theories of inequality may be less fashionable now, the lie that the upper classes deserve their status because of a presumed ‘genetic superiority’ blights us to this day.

Further reading: The Aryan myth: A history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe (mirror)