Aryan Race Research Articles

Fascismo e classicità: il recupero iconografico delle opere d'arte non romane a fini propagandistici nell'Italia mussoliniana.

The paper demonstrates the importance of the Classical iconography, except the Ancient Roman one, in the Fascist propaganda. It starts considering how the Fascism has also taken inspiration from Ancient Greek artistic examples, often transforming and misinterpreting their original meaning. I especially focus my attention on the famous ancient masterpieces of the Nike of Samotracia, the Doryphoros and the Discobolus, that compared in various propaganda publications. In the second part of the article, I examine how Italian Renaissance's iconographies were recovered in order to sponsorize social policies, concerning family and health, also promoting the superiority of the Aryan race ideology. Finally I dedicate a short paragraph to the XVII century's Classicism and its revival in the Fascist Era, through the rediscovery of Guido Reni's paintings in Fascist propaganda publications.

BRINGING INDOLOGY INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: WHY RICH REWARDS ARE IN STORE FOR MANY FIELDS OF SCIENCE WITH MAJOR IMPLICATIONS REACHING FAR BEYOND INDIAN SHORES

our previous papers, we had dealt with the Aryan problem, the identity of the Harappans, the origin of Brahmi and the Indus script, besides other related topics. We had also observed that the autochthonous Aryan theory and the Vedic Indus theories were untenable, and that the conventional theory that immigrants speaking the PIE, or one of the constituents of the PIE, now to be known as Base Indo-European, migrated to India from Central Asia would still hold good. We had proposed that the Dravidian and the Paramunda Indus theories would be untenable, and that the Harappans were intensely multi-lingual, speaking languages that were remote ancestors of the Prakrits of the Gangetic plains. We had shown how linguistic transformations had taken place: this issue was studied as an interplay between two language groups: an ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit spread in a part of India, died out as a spoken language, and became a liturgical language, and a lingua franca of the elite. The speakers of IE languages then took on the languages of the descendants of the Indus for everyday use due to the transfer of populations to the Ganga-Yamuna doab. Sanskrit then re-influenced the languages of the region, even after it disappeared as a spoken language. We had also discussed the origin of the term ‘Aryan’ which had a cultural connotation in the Rig Veda. We had also proposed that the migrations into India perhaps took place in around 2750 BC, long before the Rig Veda was compiled. In this paper, we discuss the importance of modernizing Indology for various fields of science and the need to replace the now effectively dead Mid-Nineteenth Century school of Indology and Marxist historiography with modern paradigms. We also explain why inaction could be fraught with disastrous consequences. This paper may therefore be construed as a clarion call to scholars from all over the world to take up research on Ancient India, and to raise awareness among scholars of related fields of study. The scientific and the intellectual rewards associated with such an endeavour would be enormous. We also attempt to lay out the contours and identify the key drivers for Twenty-first century Indology.

The Past and Memory in "Archive of Lives": Justyna Łuczaj-Salefs Impressionist Historical Documentary

The documentary film Archiwum istnień tells the story of research by Nazi anthropologists searching among the population of occupied Poland for representatives of the Aryan race. In her film, the director makes use of archival materials from World War Two (above all, photographs, propaganda film chronicles and letters). Not only does Justyna Łuczaj-Salej incorporate the above into the cinematographer’s box of tricks, but most of all, she exploits them counter to their authors’ intentions, thereby initiating a process that de-contextualises and re-contextualises these archives in a deconstruction of the past.

English

The Arab invasion of Sassanid’s territory in 637 A.D. was the cause for many conspicuous changes in the social and political aspects of Persians’ life. One of the most distinct changes was the gradual degeneration of Persians’ assumed cultural and religious legacy that considered Zoroastrianism as the true religion and the Aryan race as a pure and superior one. However, centuries of struggle and skirmishes in part of those interested in the revival of their assumed ancient past did not lead to the restoration of the type of social esteem and stability they favoured for their country. In his modernist novel, The Blind Owl, Sadeq Hedayat sounds like the spokesperson of this faction, voicing their lamentation upon the identity loss and the degeneration of the glorious past they nostalgically advocated and dreamed. Accordingly, building upon Dennis Walder’s theory of Postcolonial Nostalgias, the authors argue that Hedayat’s novella offers a couple of tales as platforms to nostalgically lament the aforementioned undesirable changes that these individuals had to encounter and endure. As such, the first tale presents the bitter reality of a world where nostalgia is prevailing and affecting the invaded nation, while the second tale pictures the degenerated splendour and the tarnished image of the past immediately after the arrival of the invaders. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2001-02

Forging Counter-Discourse in Colonial India: Cases of Lower-Caste Elites, Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar

This study attempts to probe the differences in the ideologies of Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar, the two most significant ideologues of lower-caste movement, while reviewing the formation of counter-discourse of lower castes with its interrelation with the mainstream discourse. It suggests us the meaningful clue to understand not only the early context of lower-caste movement but the contradictory factors in its contemporary developments as well.BR The counter-discourse of lower caste has been forged mainly through forming their identity and probing their origin and history. Jotirao Phule, the nineteenth-century Non-Brahman activist and ideologue, argued the ‘original-dwellers’, and thus ‘owners-of-the -land’ identity by reversing Aryan theory widely circulated among the British and the Indian intellectuals. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the twentieth-century late colonial politician and national leader of lower-caste movement, established unique historical identity of Dalits as ‘Buddhists’ and ‘beef-eaters’, which could not be dissolved in the all-inclusive Hindu identity. At the same time, Dalits were set to be an equal entity of independent India by sharing the concept of Aryan and the Indian identity with the mainstream Hindu nationalists.BR Phule-Ambedkar ideology, the pivotal axis of the contemporary lower-caste movement, shares the common aims of annihilation of castes, the oppressive and exploitive social system, and the improvement of status of Avarna and Shudra. The combination of two ideologies has dissimilar and contradictory factors, however. Phule and Ambedkar developed the distinct lower-caste identities from the different points of view on their origin and history. These dissimilarities seem to be resulted from the difference of social context of their periods and the mainstream discourses each period had produced-the Aryan theory to support the colonialism in the late nineteenth century and the Hindu nationalism to advocate the independence of India in the early twentieth century.BR Counter-discourses produced by Phule and Ambedkar articulated the voices of lower-caste groups, therefore functioned as ideologies of the resistance against the mainstream social strata and their discourses which exerted the considerable influence over both the upper-caste intellectuals and the mass. But the contents of counter-discourses were not entirely opposite to those of mainstream discourses, rather somewhat overlapped with them. The lower-caste ideologues produced their counter-discourses in the context of and as a reaction to the contemporary mainstream discourse as we have reviewed the identity formation of lower castes by Phule and Ambedkar.

Science, Politics, and Prejudice: The Dynamics and Significance of British Anthropology’s Failure to Confront Nazi Racial Ideology

For two years in the turbulent mid-1930s, the Royal Anthropological Institute co-convened an expert committee tasked with scientifically evaluating Nazi claims about race. Called the Race and Culture Committee, this body was created at the behest of Charles G. Seligman and given the unofficial objective of producing a strong anti-racist statement attacking the anthropological notion of a pure Aryan race. Scientists and other scholars of Jewish descent were intentionally excluded from the Committee to pre-emptively avert attacks on the report’s validity by anti-Semites. However, such a report was never produced due to the interference of members who were committed to defending Nazi Germany and the country’s racial policies. Using newly uncovered sources, this article argues that the Committee was doomed to failure from the start, and that its demise prevented the collective British anthropological establishment from attacking Nazi views on race with a unified voice before the Second World War despite an emerging consensus that the German government’s pronouncements were scientifically indefensible. More significantly, there is also now evidence that the obstructionist faction within the Committee was taking its ideological direction directly from German scientific practitioners with their own agendas during this period, raising questions about the relationship between science, politics, and interactions between academics and the state. It was only with the later publication of We Europeans that mainstream British scientists would declare their opposition to Nazi racial views, but by then the opportunity to make a more impactful stand had been lost.

“SANGUINARY AMUSEMENT”: E. A. FREEMAN, THE COMPARATIVE METHOD AND VICTORIAN THEORIES OF RACE

This article seeks to revise the conventional portrait of the historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92) as an arch-racist and confident proponent of Aryan superiority. Focusing on the relatively obscureComparative Politics(1873), it is argued that, while attitudes towards race were hardening in the later nineteenth century, Freeman combined the insights of the practitioners of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Thomas Arnold to define the Aryan race as a community of culture rather than of blood. Explicitly rejecting biological interpretations of race, Freeman and the practitioners of the Comparative Method used the Aryan concept to denote a community of languages, myths, laws and political institutions and, in recognizing the instability of culture, articulated an account of progress that was cyclical rather than unilinear. It will be demonstrated that Freeman's Aryan universalism issued in anxieties concerning the future stability of the West and a fear that recapitulation might be engendered by contemporary political expansionism and contact with the rival civilization of the despotic East.

'Compass and Chart': Millenarian Textbooks and World History Instruction in Boston, 1821-1923

When America’s first public high school, Boston’s English High School opened in 1821, the curriculum included a class in world history, then called “General History.” Boston’s first world history textbook, Samuel Whelpley’s (1806) Compend of history from earliest times was inspired by a composite ideology that Lawrence Cremin (1980) called “civic piety,” an amalgamation of nationalism, Eurocentrism, republicanism, evangelicism, racism, and Millenarianism. This ideology organized the narrative core of Whelpley’s textbook, which traced the rise of the Protestant Church through time to the United States, where the American nation prepared for the twin Millennia of universal salvation and universal democracy. Subsequent generations of world history textbooks in Boston found new protagonists — first the Aryan race and then “the West” — but they never replaced the twin teleologies of civic piety. A century of curricular reforms to Boston’s world history never challenged the boundaries of this Millenarian narrative structure.

Aryans and the Brahminization of Theory: Identity Politics East and West, Past and Present

In this essay, Figueira discusses how the Aryan past can be studied as a myth, meaning a form of discourse that can be employed in the construction or the deconstruction of society. In particular, this examination focuses on the discourse concerning the Aryan race as a shared myth in nineteenth-century India and in Germany. Myths concerning the Aryans gave historical value to ancient Indian history, contributing to the ideological concerns of India during the colonial and nationalist periods. They also served the political and ideological interests of Europe: The history of India could be appropriated as a means of expressing nineteenth-century European concern with origins. An examination of the Aryan myth thus addresses a fundamental concern of postcolonial criticism, namely that the West needed to constitute the Orient as its Other in order to constitute itself and its own subjective position. Finally, Figueira examines how analogous notions regarding identity resurface in modern critical theories of ideal readers and spokespersonship. A comparative analysis of representations of the Aryan in India and in the West can shed light on how South Asia is constructed today in global academe. The conclusion, therefore, investigates how Indian racial ideology continues to resonate in current-day identity politics. Understanding such an ideology necessitates a comparative literary evaluation, particularly if such an analysis can unmask the repetition of hegemonic race relations in current “liberatory” theories and pedagogies.

Recorded Message for Spring Mobilization [New York, 1967

June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (summer 2012): 80–2 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 RECORDED MESSAGE FOR SPRING MOBILIZATION [NEW YORK, 1967] Bertrand Russell Stefan Andersson, in his review in this issue of Erik Eriksson’s book on Vietnam, cites the message that Bertrand Russell reportedly tape-recorded for the largest antiVietnam War demonstration in the United States. It took place in New York City, 15 April 1967. Russell’s tape was to have been played at the demonstration, but it was rain-shortened and the tape wasn’t presented. The whereabouts of the tape, if it is extant , are unknown. The message is of special interest for its several explicit and oblique references to the upcoming sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal. It was not known at the time where and when they would take place, but later in April, France having failed Russell, Sweden stood Wrm in its tradition of free speech, assembly and press. The message was Wrst published in the tenth number of the New Yorkz brpf’s Foundation Bulletin (B&R C67.08). It was reprinted in Volume 2 of Bertrand Russell’s America, without the nine sentences from “We will demonstrate this” to “who insist that we identify Johnson and his policy with you the American people.” The present text is printed from the typescript, dated 7 April 1967, in the Bertrand Russell Archives (220.148669) and was compared with that in thez Foundation Bulletin. The typescript’s type is of baggage-stamp size. In extreme old age Russell commonly made his tapes from type of this size. There is no manuscript with it. Corrections are in another hand. Indeed, some of the phrasing is uncharacteristic of Russell’s prose, but his tape-recording the message must be regarded as conferring his approvalz—zjust like his extant tape-recording of “Appeal to the American Conscience” the previous year. (K.B.) I t is clear t0 all who have the will to see that the United States Government is committing genocide in Vietnam. The Secretary 0f Defence informed the Senate that approximately 4,000,000 pounds of bombs fall daily on Vietnam. The tonnage exceeds all the bombing in the PaciWc theatre during the entirety of World War Two. It exceeds the bombing in Western Europe during the same period. June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd Recorded Message for Spring Mobilization 81 1 [The word “confused” was deleted here and no replacement verb inserted on the typescript. The version in the Foundation Bulletin has, as would be expected from the next sentence but one, the word “identiWed”. (Ed.)] This concentration of explosives is taking place in a relatively tiny areaz—zin a country the size of New York and Pennsylvania. The Washington Post of March 17 reported that in the month previous, the United States Air Force dropped 68,000 tons thus raising the daily total of bombardment to four and a half million pounds daily. This is four times the Korean total. Four and a half million pounds daily of bombardment in a small peasant country is terror bombing aimed at the population. Reports from North Vietnam brought by our investigators make clear that roads, bridges and railways are rarely hit. Villages, towns, hospitals, schools, churches, pagodas, tuberculosis sanatoria and leprosariaz—zthese are destroyed andz especially targeted. Fragmentation bombs, steel pellet bombs, napalm, white phosphorous and magnesium bombs are used to terrorize and massacre the peasants of North Vietnam. That is their sole purpose. For any person capable of human impulse, for any man with a shred of intellectual probity, for any with the faintest murmur of moral feelingz—zthis supreme atrocity is hateful. The cynical men who discourse in the newspapers about the extent of civilian damage as opposed to military targets are men who lack honour. They compare with Germans who argued as to the extent to which Jews polluted the Aryan race when these Germans discussed the Gas Chambers. What is our proper response...

The death marches: the final phase of Nazi genocide

From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with merciless brutality by their SS guards, by army and police units, and often by gangs of civilians as they passed through German and Austrian towns and villages. Even in the bloody annals of the Nazi regime, this final death blow was unique in character and scope. In this first comprehensive attempt to answer the questions raised by this final murderous rampage, the author draws on the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Hunting through archives throughout the world, Daniel Blatman sets out to explain - to the extent that is possible - the effort invested by mankind's most lethal regime in liquidating the remnants of the enemies of the Aryan race before it abandoned the stage of history. What were the characteristics of this last Nazi genocide? How was it linked to the earlier stages, the slaughter of millions in concentration camps? How did the prevailing chaos help to create the conditions that made the final murderous rampage possible? In its exploration of a topic nearly neglected in the current history of the Shoah, this book offers unusual insight into the workings, and the unraveling, of the Nazi regime. It combines micro-historical accounts of representative massacres with an overall analysis of the collapse of the Third Reich, helping us to understand a seemingly inexplicable chapter in history.

Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the “Aryan” Discourse in Iran

The claim to belong to the “Aryan race,” believed to be rooted in the ancient self-designation ariya, is a fundamental pillar of the Iranian nationalist discourse. This paper aims to show that in fact it is a twentieth-century import from Europe, where after being instrumentalized for colonial endeavors and Nazi atrocities, it has become almost completely discredited. Yet Iranians continue to nonchalantly refer to themselves as Aryans and the myth of the “land of Aryans” persists, even in academic circles. It will be argued that the reason for this resilience is the specific role Aryanism plays in Iranian identity politics, and the strategies designed to manage the trauma of the encounter with Europe.

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman, Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of t...

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors: Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors:Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness Lowry Martin Since Justin O'Brien's 1949 article "Albertine the Ambiguous," which examined the importance of sexuality in Proust's corpus, most scholarly investigation has discussed male homosexuality in À la recherche du temps perdu.1 Proust's more robust development of Charlus and other male homosexual characters stands in contrast to the seemingly superfluous references to undeveloped lesbian characters, some of whom are either invisible or anonymous (e.g., Léa, the famous actress who is never seen or Bloch's sister and Mlle Vinteuil's lover who are never named). For many years, critics and contemporaries of Proust, such as André Gide or Jean Cocteau, claimed that these female characters, originally debuting in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, were merely men in textual drag.2 In light of this "transposition" theory, it is understandable that for many years critics had largely passed over the racial and political nuances that filigree Proust's lesbian imaginings, and in particular, the way he imagined his character, Albertine.3 Her sexual ambiguity preoccupies Marcel, the narrator, as it fuels his imagination. The specter of lesbianism is woven throughout his work, and Proust's semiotics of this sexual other merits closer attention. My proposed reading of Albertine illustrates that representations of same-sex desire among women were more than literary afterthoughts. To the contrary, a careful reading of his treatment of Albertine and the Bloch cousins allows for a more nuanced and complicated understanding not only of Albertine but also of the rhetoric of Gomorrha (lesbianism) within Proust's imaginary. While Charlus serves as a Rosetta stone to unlocking and understanding the sign system of French underground gay culture, the portrayal of Albertine is also infused with an array [End Page 97] of contemporary discourses that highlight the political tensions and social anxieties of the period. This article focuses primarily on Proust's language of the nation and the other—national or ethnic stereotypes of the German, Austrian and Jew—which underscores the importance of contemporary cultural debates in the theorization of same-sex attraction between women. While Proust's reliance on cultural stereotypes may not have been a conscious political statement, they do illustrate just how deeply ingrained they were in the cultural thought of the period. Proust's various depictions of lesbianism echo and incorporate racial discourses of his time and reflect some of the political and social tensions of the French Third Republic. The fact that Proust's lesbians are descendants of the "race maudite" proves important to this kind of analysis.4 Like their male counterparts, these women are the strangers at the gate—women who, in a broader cultural context, can easily be represented as threatening the security of the nation. Through a juxtaposition of excerpts from Proust's work with materials from pivotal cultural moments of the fin-de-siècle, such as the Dreyfus Affair, I underscore how medical and political currents influenced Proust's conceptions of lesbianism and were anfractuous means of referencing contemporary social concerns. Before turning to the texts, a discussion of some of the formative ideological currents of the French Third Republic will anchor my readings. I. The Enemy Within: Creating the Threat of the Racial Other Issues of race and ethnicity inspired and structured the organization of many of the bourgeois political, legal, and medical discourses from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.5 The legacy of French theorists such as Buffon, Cuvier, and Gobineau continued to shape French ideologies of cultural and racial superiority for decades. Bertillon's anthropometrics and Gobineau and Laponge's exaltation of the Aryan races were the cornerstones of racial claims of French supremacy. The same rhetoric provided the ideological underpinnings of France's colonial intentions. The impulse to order and to "normalize" the nation stemmed from representations of cultural dissonance that contravened accepted ideas of racial purity and sexual virtue—infrangible elements of the Third Republic's [End Page 98] ideological bedrock. The interchange between sexuality and French ideas regarding the health of the State is clearer when one considers the longstanding debates regarding the falling birthrates in France...

New Essays on Russell

September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd Reviews 81 1 The Wrst one was Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language (Westport, ct: Praeger, 2002). Reviewed by David Blitz in this journal, 23 (2003): 176–82. 2 The essay Wrst appeared in Russell 25 (2005): 107–39. NEW ESSAYS ON RUSSELL Stefan Andersson stefankarlandersson@live.com Alan Schwerin (under the auspices of the Bertrand Russell Society), ed. Russell Revisited: Critical ReXections on the Thought of Bertrand Russell. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Pp. ix, 158. isbn 978-1-84718-494-8. This is Alan Schwerin’s second edited collection of essays on Bertrand Russell .1 As in the Wrst, he has provided us with an indexed smorgasbord of nine essays on a variety of subjects, but this time he has been less ambitious by not adding an introduction himself and engaging some less meritorious authors. On the other hand, the subjects chosen by the amateurs (in the sense of lover, admirer, and devotee) Russell scholars are refreshingly original, interesting and executed with a simplicity and clarity that I Wnd lacking in some of the essays of the bona Wde professors and graduate students of philosophy. The Wrst essay, “Bertrand Russell and Eugenics”,2 is by Stephen Heathorn. He has published a book and over twenty peer-reviewed articles. He is also responsible for co-editing three volumes of Russell’s Collected Papers. In other words, he is a well-qualiWed researcher, and I can understand that the editor has September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 82 Reviews chosen to put his essay Wrst, since it’s the best, all things considered. Heathorn starts his interesting, well-researched and well-documented essay with a short introduction to how the connotations of the term “eugenics” have developed from the time when Francis Galton coined it in 1883 to the present time, when most people tend to associate it with the Nazis’ attempts to purify the Aryan race by killing, imprisoning or, in the best case, just sterilizing people who were deemed unWt to reproduce. But before Hitler entered the international scene in the 1930s, there was a period when “the ideas behind eugenics were both scientiWcally respectable and acceptedby intellectuals from across the entire political spectrum” (p. 1). Bertrand Russell was one of them, and this essay is an account of his public engagement with eugenics from the 1890s through to the post-World War ii years. The main thesis is that his “belief in the potential of eugenics for bettering society was increasingly outweighed, over time, by his fear of the uses to which eugenics would be put” (p. 2). As Heathorn later shows, Russell didn’t have much to say about the topic publicly after the mid-1930s, which doesn’t mean that he had stopped thinking about it. This is evident, for example, from his private correspondence with the biologist Julian Huxley in the 1960s. Russell Wrst came to eugenics by reading Francis Galton in the 1890s. His interest was motivated by both general intellectual curiosity and personal concerns . In 1894 he married Alys Pearsall Smith, something that his grandmother was dead against. When she couldn’t stop her grandson from marrying the older Quaker woman (she was his senior by Wve years), she insisted that they should not try to have any children on the grounds that there was a prevalence of mental illness among both families’ ancestorsz—zan argument that the young aristocrat could not dismiss. Although preoccupied with mathematics and political theory, he kept up to date with developments in genetic research from the late 1890s. There was an obvious connection between his interest in politics and eugenics. Many Edwardians feared the negative consequences of the so-called “diTerential birth rate”, i.e. that the poor sections of the population reproduced much faster than the wealthy. That, in the long run, could have disastrous eTects on the stability and progress of society. It seemed to be the case...

Nazi Race Theory and Belief in an “Aryan Race”: A Profound Failure of Interdisciplinary Communication

In the popular and scientific imagination, Nazi science, in particular theories of race, loom large as a point of reference for discussion of moral issues within science. This paper argues that popular and academic discussion of Nazi race theory has been in general highly misleading, and vitiated by a failure to differentiate between: (1) popular, propagandistic and aesthetic stereotypes of race; (2) racial policies; (3) academic race theory as expounded within scholarly publications in the Third Reich. Since these have not been clearly distinguished, discussion of the relationships between them has of necessity been confused. The case of the “Aryan race” is clear evidence of this confusion, since academic race theorists consistently rejected the notion as unscientific, as did policy makers after 1935. This widespread preconception that Nazism promoted the idea of an Aryan race is based on the popular use of the “Arisch” in the public culture of Nazi Germany. Textbooks on race published in Nazi Germany however routinely rejected the use of “Aryan” as a racial term, pointing out that it derived from the discipline of linguistics. There has been an almost complete lack of communication between scientists, historians and linguists over these key questions, and this has produced a profoundly entrenched set of misunderstandings over such as issues as the relationship between Darwinism and Nazism, ideas about racial purity, hybridity, racial determinism and the ideological contribution of linguistics to Nazism. These misunderstandings echo through wider debates about the politics of science, to the detriment of public debate about the nature of human identity and human diversity.

The Many Metaphors of War: A Critique of Rank's Essay

Otto Rank's analysis of literature shows how some people have compared the conquest of a city to the rape of a virgin. But what does this prove? The fact that Rank's essay was written in 1914, when he was still deep into Freudian orthodoxy, suggests he saw these metaphors as an indication that aggression is somehow related to the repression in advanced civili zations of libidinal instincts. Freud, in his later Civilization and its Discontents, made that argument explicit, suggesting that aggressive impulses mount as people are restricted from following the pleasure principle. Rather than acting to meet their sexual needs as they arise, their actions are highly circumscribed by the cultures in which they live. Blocked from expressing their basic instincts, there is a buildup in forces behind these drives, a dynamism that provides for explosive buildups within the human beings so circumscribed (Freud, 1939). If we look at the historical data, however, we find a variety of images and metaphors for war, whether it be conquest or defense. In Hitler's Mein Kampf, the explicit motivation for initiating war was based on the rights of the superior and idealistic Aryan race to rule over others. As the superior father figure, the Fuhrer would lead the German people in the accomplishment of their mission. As the strongest one in their midst, he deserved their sole support. The adversary was the Jew?the viper who steals from the people, seeks to maintain the purity of his own bloodstream while poisoning that of theirs. Not only that, beastly impulses are attributed to the dark and swarthy Jew:

The Struggle for Danish Youth: Fascism, Sport, Democracy

This article demonstrates the potential fascination of Nazi ideology outside Germany's borders in a country declared by the Nazis to be a friendly and racially pure zone and with the celebration of the athletic body as the common denominator. The article also shows that the use of sexuality as a political weapon is not a new phenomenon invented by modern American politics. The great paradox of the life of the internationally renowned Danish gymnastics innovator Niels Bukh is that he created a liberating male gymnastics but tried to use it for totalitarian purposes. Nazism's enormous gravitational pull stemmed from an extremely competent aestheticization of politics. Without a realization of the power that a cult exerts, it is impossible to understand, let alone resist, the appeal of Nazism to the human subconscious. Bukh was a master at playing on exactly these emotional strings. And this was why the Nazi authorities were so pleased with Bukh that they invited him to present displays in the Third Reich, rushed off to Bukh's little cult refuge in the North and introduced his gymnastics into German sports education. For the Nazis, Bukh's gymnasts were the incarnation of a perfection of the Aryan race.

E. A. Freeman (1823-1892), a Neglected Commentator on Byzantium and Modern Greece

<p>E. A. Freeman, principally known as an historian of medieval Europe, is a neglected pioneer of Byzantine history. He was among the leading British commentators on the "Eastern Question". His friendship with George Finlay, reflected in letters preserved at the British School at Athens, informed his analysis of Greece and South-East Europe. He travelled and lectured widely throughout his life, publishing prolifically and repetitiously. However, he never published an overview of Greek history, leaving unfinished manuscripts. His writings demonstrate his commitment to "universal history" and to contemporary racial theories. He considered the Greeks to be a superseded strain of the Aryan race, whose potency had been bequeathed to the Teutons, and more particularly to the English.</p>

R. Breitman, B. M. Stewart, and S. Hochberg, eds. Advocate for the Damned: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935

On the afternoon of April 8, 1933, in a private audience with Adolf Hitler, James G. McDonald raised Nazi Germany's treatment of the “Jewish question.” Chairman of the Foreign Policy Association, McDonald had long maintained contact with some men in Hitler's inner circle, who knew of his expressed sympathy for Germany during World War I. Immediately, so reads the brief entry in McDonald's diary, the chancellor of the Third Reich replied that “Germany is not fighting merely the battle of Germany. It is fighting the battle of the world, etc.” [sic]. Returning to the United States, McDonald provided additional information to Jewish leaders regarding that interview, especially Hitler's observation, “I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.” McDonald entertained few illusions thereafter. The first consequence of a possible Franco-Polish occupation of Germany, he opined to some acquaintances, would be “a wholesale slaughter” of German Jews. Once passed over for the U.S. ambassadorship to Berlin that June, McDonald felt freer to express his views of the Nazi regime. As reported in the next month by the New York Times, he emphasized in a Chautauqua lecture series that Hitler, a man of “terrific power and tremendous faith in himself,” had centralized and unified Germany more completely than ever before in that country's history. A Middle Western American of Scotch and German ancestry who had been brought up in a Catholic home, McDonald felt compelled to remind his listeners that the “Jewish problem” was “a Christian problem” because “the Christians are the persecutors, and they are violating every principle of Christianity.” Further, he cautioned, in light of the Nazis’ unquestioning belief in the myth of the supremacy of the Aryan race, “no Jew can feel sure of police protection on streets, justice in courts, or of his place in the state of schools.”