Aryanism

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Aryanism is the name given to a historical racial theory and political movement that advocated for the existence of an Aryan race. In its most extreme form, it viewed this race as a distinct and superior racial group entitled to maintain a racial hierarchy. Initially promoted by 19th-century racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the ideology of Aryanism reached its peak of influence in National Socialist Germany. From 1933 to 1945, the National Socialist regime applied the ideology in pursuit of Lebensraum, or living space, for the Germanic peoples.

With the Third Reich being a defeated power during World War II, combined with the legacy of the Holocaust, the ideology of Aryanism, as well as the heavily disputed existence of an "Aryan race" itself, has strongly fallen out of favor. Nevertheless, it still continues to be practiced amongst some white nationalist and white separatist movements.

Background

By the late 19th century, a number of later writers, such as the French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge in his book L'Aryen, argued that this superior branch could be identified biologically by using the cephalic index (a measure of head shape) and other indicators. He argued that the long-headed "dolichocephalic-blond" Europeans, characteristically found in Northern Europe, were natural leaders, destined to rule over more "brachiocephalic" (short headed) peoples. Similar theories were promoted by Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

National Socialist Aryanism

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Further information: Nazism and race

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. The ideology of German National Socialism was based upon the conception of the ancient Aryan race being a master race and that the Germanic peoples were the most racially pure existing peoples of Aryan stock.[1] The National Socialism conception of the Aryan race arose from earlier proponents of a "Master Race" conception as described by racial theorist figures such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[2]

National Socialist racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther identified the European race as having five subtype races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic.[3] Günther applied a Nordicist conception that Nordics were the highest in the racial hierarchy amongst these five European subtype races.[3] In his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) ("Racial Science of the German People"), Günther recognized Germans as being composed of all five European subtypes, but emphasized the strong Nordic heritage amongst Germans.[4] Günther believed Slavic people to be of "Eastern race", one that was separate from Germans and Nordics, and warned about mixing "German blood" with Slavic one.[5] He defined each racial subtype according to general physical appearance and their psychological qualities including their "racial soul" - referring to their emotional traits and religious beliefs, and provided detailed information on their hair, eye, and skin colours, facial structure.[4] He provided photographs of Germans identified as Nordic in places like Bedan, Stuttgart, Salzburg, and Schwaben; and provided photographs of Germans he identified as Alpine and Mediterranean types, especially in Vorarlberg, Bavaria, and the Black Forest region of Baden.[4] German Führer Adolf Hitler read Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes that influenced his racial policy, and with NSDAP backing, Günther attained a position in the anthropology department at the University of Jena in 1932 where Hitler attended Günther's inaugural lecture.[6]

Adolf Hitler.

Günther distinguished Aryans from Jews, and identified Jews as descending from non-European races, particularly from what he classified as the Near Asian race (Vorderasiatische) more commonly known as the Armenoid race, and said that such origins rendered Jews fundamentally different from and incompatible with Germans and most Europeans.[7] This association of Jews with the Armenoid type had been utilized by Zionist Jews who claimed that Jews were a group within that type.[8] He claimed that the Near Eastern race descended from the Caucasus in the fifth and fourth millennia BC, and that it had expanded into Asia Minor and Mesopotamia and eventually to the west coast of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.[7] Aside from ascribing Armenians and Jews as having Near Eastern characteristics, he ascribed them to several other contemporary peoples, including: Greeks, Turks, Syrians, and Iranians.[9] In his work Racial Characteristics of the Jewish People, he defined the racial soul of the Near Eastern race as emphasizing a "commercial spirit" (Handelgeist), and described them as "artful traders" - a term that Gunther ascribed as being used by Jewish racial theorist Samuel Weissenberg to describe contemporary Armenians, Greeks, and Jews.[7] Günther added to that description of the Near Eastern type as being composed primarily of commercially spirited and artful traders, by claiming that the type held strong psychological manipulation skills that aided them in trade.[7] He claimed that the Near Eastern race had been "bred not so much for the conquest and exploitation of nature as it was for the conquest and exploitation of people".[7]

Hitler's conception of the Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race") explicitly excluded the vast majority of Slavs, regarding the Slavs as having dangerous Jewish and Asiatic influences.[10][11] Because of this, the National Socialists declared Slavs to be Untermenschen (subhumans).[10][12] Exceptions were made for a small percentage of Slavs who were seen by the National Socialists to be descended from German settlers and therefore fit to be Germanised to be considered part of the Aryan master race.[13] Hitler described Slavs as "a mass of born slaves who feel the need of a master".[14] Hitler declared that because Slavs were subhumans that the Geneva Conventions were not applicable to them, and German soldiers in World War II were thus permitted to ignore the Geneva Conventions in regards to Slavs.[15] Hitler called Slavs "a rabbit family" meaning they were intrinsically idle and disorganized.[16] National Socialist Germany's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had media speak of Slavs as primitive animals who were from the Siberian tundra who were like a "dark wave of filth".[17][18] The National Socialist notion of Slavs being inferior non-Aryans was part of the agenda for creating Lebensraum ("living space") for Germans and other Germanic people in eastern Europe that was initiated during World War II under Generalplan Ost: millions of Germans and other Germanic settlers would be moved into conquered territories of Eastern Europe, while the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed, or enslaved.[19] National Socialist Germany's ally, the Independent State of Croatia, rejected the common conception that Croats were primarily a Slavic people and claimed that Croats were primarily the descendents of the Germanic Goths.[20] However the National Socialist regime continued to classify Croats as a"subhuman" in spite of the alliance.[21] National Socialist Germany's policy changed towards Slavs in response to military manpower shortages, in which it accepted Slavs to serve in its armed forces within occupied territories, in spite of them being considered subhuman, as a pragmatic means to resolve such manpower shortages.[21]

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in 1933 they passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service law which required all civil servants to provide proof of their Aryan ancestry and defined "non-Aryan" as a person with one Jewish grandparent.[22] In 1933, the German Interior Ministry official Albert Gorter drafted an official definition of the "Aryan race" for the new law which included all non-Jewish Europeans, this definition was unacceptable by the National Socialists.[23] However, Achim Gerke revised Gorter's draft of the Civil Service Law classyfing Aryans as people "tribally" related to "German blood"[23]The Nuremberg race laws of 1935 classified as "racially acceptable" people with "German or related blood".[23][24]

Hitler often doubted whether Czechs were Aryan or not, he said in his table talk "It is enough for a Czech to grow a moustache for anyone to see, from the way the thing droops, that his origin is Mongoloian."[25] The question of whether Italians were Aryan enough was questioned by the NSDAP racial theorists. Hitler viewed northern Italians as strongly Aryan, but not southern Italians. The National Socialists viewed the downfall of the Roman Empire as being the result of the pollution of blood from racial intermixing, claiming that Italians were a hybrid of races, including black African races. Hitler even mentioned his view of the presence of Negroid blood in the Mediterranean peoples during his first meeting with Mussolini in 1934.[26] The definition of "Aryan" remained in constant flux to such an extent that the National Socialists questioned whether European ethnic groups such as Finns or Hungarians were to be classified as "Aryans".[23] Hungarians were classified as "tribally alien" but not necessarily "blood alien", in 1934 the NSDAP published a pamphlet which declared Magyars (which it did not define) as Aryans.[22] The following year, an article published by the National Socialists admitted that there were disputes over the racial status of Hungarians.[22] As late as 1943, there were disputes over whether Hungarians were to be classified as Aryan.[27] In 1942, Hitler declared that the Finns were "racially related Germanic neighboring peoples", although there is no evidence to suggest that this was based on anything racial.[22]

The idea of the Northern origins of the Aryans was particularly influential in Germany. It was widely believed that the "Vedic Aryans" were ethnically identical to the Goths, Vandals and other ancient Germanic peoples of the Völkerwanderung. This idea was often intertwined with antisemitic ideas. The distinctions between the "Aryan" and "Semitic" peoples were based on the aforementioned linguistic and ethnic history. A complete, highly speculative theory of Aryan and anti-Semitic history can be found in Alfred Rosenberg's major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg's account of ancient history, melded with his racial speculations, proved to be very effective in spreading racialism among German intellectuals in the early twentieth century, especially after the First World War.

Semitic peoples came to be seen as a foreign presence within Aryan societies, and the Semitic peoples were often pointed to as the cause of conversion and destruction of social order and values leading to culture and civilization's downfall by proto-National Socialist theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

These and other ideas evolved into the National Socialist use of the term "Aryan race" to refer to what they saw as being a master race, which was narrowly defined by the National Socialists as being identical with the Nordic race, followed by other sub-races of the Aryan race and excluding Slavs as non-Aryan. They worked to maintain the purity of this race through eugenics programs (including anti-miscegenation legislation, compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalized mentally ill as part of a euthanasia program).

Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer of the SS), the person ordered by Adolf Hitler to implement the Final Solution, or the Holocaust,[28] told his personal masseur Felix Kersten that he always carried with him a copy of the ancient Aryan scripture, the Bhagavad Gita because it relieved him of guilt about what he was doing – he felt that like the warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions.[29]

Post-World War II Aryanism

Since the military defeat of National Socialist Germany by the Allies in 1945, some post-World War II adherents of National Socialism and/or similar ideologies have developed a more inclusive definition of the term "Aryan", claiming that the peoples of Western Europe are the closest descendants of the ancient Aryans, with Nordic and Germanic peoples being the most "racially pure."

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1953-2012), a British historian and professor of Western esotericism at the University of Exeter, asserted that many neo-Nazis want to establish an autocratic state, modeled after National Socialist Germany, to be called the Western Imperium. It is believed that this proposed state would be able to attain world domination by combining the nuclear arsenals of the four major Aryan world powers, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia under a single military command.

This proposed state would be led by a Führer-like figure called the Vindex, and would include all areas inhabited by the Aryan race, as conceived by Neo-Nazis. Only those of the Aryan race would be full citizens of the state. The "Western Imperium" or "Fourth Reich" would embark on a vigorous and dynamic program of space exploration, followed by the creation by genetic engineering of a super race called Homo Galactica. The concept of the "Western Imperium" as outlined in the previous three sentences is based on the original concept of the Imperium as outlined in the 1947 book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics by Francis Parker Yockey as further updated, extended and refined in the early 1990s in pamphlets published by David Myatt, a British neo-Nazi who later became an Islamic terrorist before rejecting his extremist past.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Longerich 2010, p. 30.
  2. ↑ Yenne 2010, pp. 21–22.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bruce David Baum. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York, New York, USA; London, England, UK: New York University Press, 2006. P. 156.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Anne Maxwell. Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940. Eastbourne, England: UK; Portland, Oregon, USA: SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS, 2008, 2010. P. 150.
  5. ↑ Racisms Made in Germany, Wulf D. Hund 2011 page 19
  6. ↑ John Cornwell. Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact. Penguin, Sep 28, 2004. [1], p. 68
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Alan E Steinweis. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Harvard University Press, 2008. P. 28.
  8. ↑ Mitchell B. Hart. Jews & Race: Writings on Identity & Difference, 1880–1940. Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. P. 247.
  9. ↑ Alan E Steinweis. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Harvard University Press, 2008. P. 29.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Longerich 2010, p. 241.
  11. ↑ André Mineau. Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity. Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 34-36.
  12. ↑ Steve Thorne. The Language of War. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2006. P. 38.
  13. ↑ Wendy Lower. Nazi Empire-building And The Holocaust In Ukraine. The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. P. 27.
  14. ↑ Marvin Perry. Western Civilization: A Brief History. Cengage Learning, 2012. P. 468.
  15. ↑ Anne Nelson. Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler. Random House Digital, Inc., 2009. P. 212.
  16. ↑ David Downing. Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty Two Days That Decided World War II. P. 48.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ David Downing. Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty Two Days That Decided World War II. Read How You Want, 2010 P. 48.
  19. ↑ Joseph W. Bendersky. A concise history of Nazi Germany, Plymouth, England, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2007. p. 161-2.
  20. ↑ Rich, Norman (1974). Hitler's War Aims: the Establishment of the New Order, p. 276-7. W. W. Norton & Company Inc., New York.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Norman Davies. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. Pan Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 167, 209.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 22.3 Ehrenreich, The Nazi ancestral proof, p.10
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 23.3 Eric Ehrenreich. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington, Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press, pp.9-10
  24. ↑ Ehrenreich, The Nazi ancestral proof, p.70
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Ehrenreich, The Nazi ancestral proof, p.11
  28. ↑ Himmler noted on 26 July 1942 in response to Rosenberg’s attempt to influence Jewish policy that "The occupied territories will be Jew-free. The Fuhrer has laid the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders." Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War New York:2008 Penguin Page 271; Himmler had begun the initial pre-Wansee Conference implementation of the final solution by July and August of 1941. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War New York:2008 Penguin Page 240.
  29. ↑ Padfield, Peter Himmler New York: Henry Holt, 1990. p. 402.
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