Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

It is deeply disturbing that GB "News" presenter Mark Steyn claims "Aryans" built "western civilisation" in his podcast. This thread explains why normal, decent people no longer use the term, not least because of its connotations with white supremacism & the #Holocaust.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1611715247290867715

While it is a term originally used as an ethnocultural self-designation by Indo-Iranians in ancient times, the atrocities committed in the name of Aryanist supremacist ideologies means academics & other normal decent people avoid the term 'Aryan' like the plague.

The theory of an “Aryan race” appeared in the mid-19th century & remained prevalent until the mid-20th century, when for reasons obvious to any decent person, the term fell out of favour, & is generally used exclusively by the far-right & neo-Nazis.

britannica.com/topic/Aryan

According to the hypothesis, probably light-skinned Aryans were the group who invaded and conquered ancient India from the north and whose literature, religion, and modes of social organization subsequently shaped the course of Indian culture, eventually superseded by Hinduism.

During the 19th century, through the works of Friedrich Schlegel, Christian Lassen, Adolphe Pictet, & Max Müller, the terms Aryans, Arier, and Aryens came to be adopted by a number of Western scholars as a synonym of '(Proto-)Indo-Europeans'.

Many believed Aryan was the original self-designation used by ancient speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, based on erroneous assumptions that Sanskrit was the oldest Indo-European language, & the linguistically untenable position that Ériu (Ireland) was related to Arya.

Since the late 20th century, scholars generally reject both the Aryan invasion hypothesis & use of the term Aryan as a racial designation, suggesting that the linguistic root of Sanskrit 'arya' (“noble” or “distinguished”), was actually a social rather than an ethnic epithet.

Rather, the term 'Aryan' is used strictly in a linguistic sense, in recognition of the influence that the language of the ancient northern migrants had on the development of the Indo-European languages of South Asia.

In the 19th century “Aryan” was used as a synonym for “Indo-European” and also, more restrictively, to refer to the Indo-Iranian languages. It is now used in linguistics only in the sense of the term Indo-Aryan languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family.

In Europe the notion of white racial superiority emerged in the 1850s, propagated most assiduously by the comte de Gobineau & later by his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who first used the term “Aryan” to mean the “white race.”

Racially-oriented interpretations of Aryas as "fair-skinned foreign invaders" led to the term Aryan in the West becoming a racial category connected to the supremacist ideology of Aryanism: Aryans as the "superior race" responsible for most achievements of ancient civilizations.

In 1888 Max Müller, who had himself inaugurated the racial interpretations of the Rigveda, denounced talk of an "Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes & hair" as a nonsense comparable to a linguist speaking of "a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar".

But an increasing number of Western writers, especially anthropologists and non-specialists influenced by Darwinist theories, came to see the Aryans as a "physical-genetic species" contrasting with the other human races - rather than as an ethnolinguistic category.

In the late-19th/early-20th centuries, a fusion of Aryanism with Nordicism, promoted by writers such as Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, Paul Broca, & Hans Günther, led to the portrayal of Proto-Indo-Europeans as blond & tall, with blue eyes and dolichocephalic skulls.

Modern scholars reject those views and remind that the idea of a Vedic opposition between ārya and dāsa underlying a racial division remains problematic, since "most of the [Vedic] passages may not refer to dark or light skinned people, but dark and light worlds".

Arthur de Gobineau, the author of the influential Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), viewed the white or Aryan race as the only civilized one, & conceived cultural decline & miscegenation as intimately intertwined.

According to de Gobineau, northern Europeans had migrated across the world & founded the major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with indigenous populations described as racially inferior, leading to the decay of the ancient Aryan civilizations.

In 1878, German American anthropologist Theodor Poesche published a survey of historical references attempting to demonstrate that the Aryans were light-skinned blue-eyed blonds.

The use of Arier to mean 'non-Jewish' seems to have first occurred in 1887.

In 1887, a Viennese physical-fitness society decided to allow as members only "Germans of Aryan descent".

Stefan Arvidsson identified The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) by Houston Chamberlain, as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts"

bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?IS…

British-German writer Houston Chamberlain theorized an existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan race & a destructive Jewish-Semitic race.

Another key turning point in the history of the ideology of a superior white 'Aryan' race came with the publication of the best-seller The Passing of the Great Race, published by American writer Madison Grant in 1916.

Grant warns of a dangers of miscegenation - the sexual relationships or reproduction between people of different ethnic groups, especially when one of them is white, commonly referred to back then as "a mixing of bloodlines" with the immigrant "inferior races". i

According to Grant, these immigrant "inferior races" included speakers of Indo-European languages (Slavs, Italians, & Yiddish-speaking Jews), allegedly faced by the "racially superior" Germanic Aryans (Americans of English, German, & Scandinavian descent).

Guido von List & Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels founded an ideological system combining Völkisch nationalism with esoterism, theosophy, occult freemasonry, & pagan German religion to create a myth of Aryan superiority & a secret order working to restore the lost, racially pure society.

Prophesying a coming era of German (Aryan) world rule, they argued a conspiracy against Germans (instigated by non-Aryans, Jews, or the early Church) had "sought to ruin this ideal Germanic world by emancipating the non-German inferiors in the name of a spurious egalitarianism".

Through the works of Houston Chamberlain, Gobineau's ideas influenced the Nazi racial ideology, which saw the "Aryan race" as innately superior to other putative racial groups.

press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…

The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg argued for a new "religion of the blood" based on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its "noble" character against racial & cultural degeneration.

Rosenberg believed the Nordic race to be descended from Proto-Aryans, a hypothetical prehistoric people who dwelt on the North German Plain and who had ultimately originated from the lost continent of Atlantis.

Under Rosenberg, the theories of Arthur de Gobineau, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and those of Hitler, all culminated in Nazi Germany's race policies and the "Aryanization" decrees of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s.

In its "appalling medical model", the annihilation of the "racially inferior" Untermenschen was sanctified as the excision of a diseased organ in an otherwise healthy body, which led to the #Holocaust.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1489919200839839751?s=20&t=q-d4bp9_YZkcJrc_C6EC1g

According to Nazi racial theorists, the term "Aryans" (Arier) described the Germanic peoples, & they considered the purest Aryans to be those that belonged to a "Nordic race" physical ideal, which they referred to as the "master race".

Although the physical ideal of Nazi racial theorists was typically the tall, blond haired, & light-eyed (usually blue) Nordic individual, such theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair & eye colour existed within the racial categories they recognised.

Adolf Hitler & many Nazi officials had dark hair but were still considered members of the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine, as the determination of an individual's racial type depended on many characteristics in an individual rather than on just one defining feature.

In September 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws. All Aryan Reich citizens were required to prove their Aryan ancestry; one way was to obtain an Ahnenpass ("ancestor pass") by providing proof through baptismal certificates that all four grandparents were of Aryan descent.

In December 1935, the Nazis founded Lebensborn ("Fount of Life") to counteract the falling Aryan birth rates in Germany, & to promote Nazi eugenics, & 1933-39 was characterized by concerns about birth rates & #abortions.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1540471809010810880?s=20&t=q-d4bp9_YZkcJrc_C6EC1g

At the top of the thread I neglected to mention that in addition to GB "News" presenter Mark Steyn explicitly referring to "Aryans", he also refers explicitly to the slowing of the birth rate of "Aryans", which he claims has been accelerated by Covid vaccines.

Before ending this thread, readers should know that in India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau's arguments along another line, & had fostered the idea of a superior "Aryan race" that co-opted the Indian caste system in favor of imperial interests.

In its fully developed form, the British-mediated interpretation foresaw a segregation of Aryan & non-Aryan along the lines of caste, with the upper castes being "Aryan" & the lower ones being "non-Aryan".

The European developments not only allowed the British to identify themselves as high-caste, but also allowed the Brahmins to view themselves as on-par with the British. It provoked the reinterpretation of Indian history in racialist &, in opposition, Indian Nationalist terms.

For obvious reasons, the term 'Aryan' is rarely used by anyone outside of those subscribing to far-right neofascist ideology. In the late 20th & early 21st centuries, many white supremacist groups still used the word Aryan in their name as an identifier of their racist ideology.

Those groups include the Aryan Circle (a large group with roots in the Texas prison system), the Aryan Nations (a Christian Identity-based hate group), and the Aryan Brotherhood (a group originating in San Quentin prison).

Modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan movements in Russia claim a direct linkage between themselves as Slavs and the ancient 'Aryans', and in some Indian nationalist circles, the term 'Aryan' can also be used in reference to an alleged Aryan 'race'.

The contemporary association of 'Aryan' with racism, crime, hate crimes, & Nazism has given the word a powerful new negative sense, which is why responsible, decent citizens avoid the term & any other allusions to one of the worst chapter in human history.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1599375641798881280?s=20&t=XYzSmok3yaDtQIGLPZbTEw