Aryanism

thumb|[[Arno Breker's 1939 neoclassical sculpture Die Partei (The Party), which flanked one of the entrances to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The sculpture emphasizes what the Nazi Party considered to be desirable Nordic Aryan characteristics, the Nordic race subtype was believed by the Nazis to be the purest of the Aryan race.]]

Aryanism is an ideology of racial supremacy which views the supposed Aryan race as a distinct and superior racial group which is entitled to rule the rest of humanity. Initially promoted by racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Aryanism reached its peak of influence in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s and 40s, the regime applied the ideology with full force, sparking World War II with the 1939 invasion of Poland in pursuit of Lebensraum, or living space, for the Aryan people. The racial policies which were implemented by the Nazis during the 1930s came to a head during their conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union, culminating in the industrial mass murder of six million Jews and eleven million other victims in what is now known as the Holocaust.

Background

By the late 19th century, a number of later writers, such as the French anthropologist 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 "brachycephalic" (short-headed) peoples. Similar theories were promoted by Nordicists like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Nazism and Aryanism

thumb|[[Adolf Hitler]]

The ideology of Nazism was based upon the conception of the ancient Aryan race being a superior race, holding the highest position in the racial hierarchy and that the Nordic-type Germanic peoples were the most racially pure existing peoples of Aryan stock. The Nazi conception of the Aryan race arose from earlier proponents of a supremacist conception of the race as described by racial theorist figures such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther identified the European race as having five subtype races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic. Günther applied a Nordicist conception that Nordics were the highest in the racial hierarchy amongst these five European subtype races. 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. 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.

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 Rasse), more commonly known as the Armenoid race, and said that such origins rendered Jews fundamentally different from and incompatible with Germans and most Europeans. This association of Jews with the Armenoid type had been utilized by Zionist Jews who claimed that Jews were a group within that type. 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. 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 Günther ascribed as being used by Jewish racial theorist Samuel Weissenberg to describe contemporary Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. Because of this, the Nazis declared Slavs to be Untermenschen (subhumans). Exceptions were made for a small percentage of Slavs who were seen by the Nazis to be descended from German settlers and therefore fit to be Germanised to be considered part of the Aryan folk or nation. Hitler described Slavs as a mass of born slaves who feel the need of a master. Hitler declared that the Geneva Conventions were not applicable to Slavs because they were subhumans, and German soldiers were thus permitted to ignore the Geneva Conventions in World War II with regard to Slavs. Hitler called Slavs a rabbit family meaning they were intrinsically idle and disorganized. Nazi 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. The Nazi 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. Nazi 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 descendants of the Germanic Goths. However the Nazi regime continued to classify Croats as a subhuman in spite of the alliance. Nazi 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. 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 Nazis. However, Achim Gerke revised Gorter's draft of the Civil Service Law classifying Aryans as people tribally related to German blood.

thumb|A Nazi German [[Propaganda_in_Nazi_Germany#Posters|propaganda poster lambasting the Catholic Church for its relatively anti-racist, philosemitic rhetoric|268x268px]]

The question of whether Italians were Aryan enough was questioned by the Nazi racial theorists. Hitler viewed northern Italians as strongly Aryan, but not southern Italians. The Nazis 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. The definition of Aryan remained in constant flux to such an extent that the Nazis questioned whether European ethnic groups such as Finns or Hungarians were to be classified as Aryans. 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. 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.

Italian fascism and Aryanism

thumb|[[Benito Mussolini]]

In a 1921 speech in Bologna, Mussolini stated that fascism was "born out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race". In this speech Mussolini was referring to Italians as being the Mediterranean branch of the Aryan race, Aryan in the meaning of people of an Indo-European language and culture. Italian fascism emphasized that race was bound by spiritual and cultural foundations, and identified a racial hierarchy based on spiritual and cultural factors.

Italian fascism strongly rejected the common Nordicist conception of the Aryan race that idealized pure Aryans as having certain physical traits that were defined as Nordic such as blond hair and blue eyes. The antipathy by Mussolini and other Italian Fascists to Nordicism was over the existence of what they viewed as the Mediterranean inferiority complex that they claimed had been instilled into Mediterraneans by the propagation of such theories by German and Anglo-Saxon Nordicists who viewed Mediterranean peoples as racially degenerate and thus in their view inferior. Anthropologist Carleton S. Coon in his work The Races of Europe (1939) subscribed to depigmentation theory that claimed that the Nordic race's light-coloured skin was the result of depigmentation from their ancestors of the Mediterranean race.

In the early 1930s, with the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany and with dictator Adolf Hitler's emphasis on a Nordicist conception of the Aryan race, strong tensions arose between the Fascists and the Nazis over racial issues. In 1934, in the aftermath of Austrian Nazis killing Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, an ally of Italy, Mussolini became enraged and responded by angrily denouncing Nazism. Mussolini rebuked Nazism's Nordicism, claiming that the Nazis' emphasizing of a common Nordic Germanic race was absurd, saying, "A Germanic race does not exist. We repeat. Does not exist. Scientists say so. Hitler says so." The fact that Germans were not purely Nordic was indeed acknowledged by prominent Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) (Racial Science of the German People), where Günther recognized Germans as being composed of five Aryan subtype races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic while asserting that the Nordics were the highest in a racial hierarchy of the five subtypes. Cogni was a Nordicist but did not equate Nordic identity with Germanic identity as was commonly done by German Nordicists. Cogni had travelled to Germany where he had become impressed by Nazi racial theory and sought to create his own version of racial theory. On 11 September 1936, Cogni sent Mussolini a copy of his newly published book Il Razzismo (1936). The Nordicist racial theorist Guido Landra took a major role in the early work of La Difesa, and published the Manifesto of Racial Scientists in the magazine in 1938. The Manifesto received substantial criticism, including its assertion of Italians being a pure race, as it was viewed as absurd. Many of the writers took up the traditional Nordicist claim that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was due to the arrival of Semitic immigrants. By 1939, the Mediterraneanists' advocacy of a nativist racial theory that rejected ascribing the achievements of the Italian people to Nordic peoples. Rellini claimed that Mediterranean and Nordic peoples arrived later and peacefully intermixed in small numbers with the indigenous Italian population. However these efforts were challenged by Mussolini's endorsement of Nordicist figures with the appointment of staunch spiritual Nordicist Alberto Luchini as head of Italy's Racial Office in May 1941, as well as with Mussolini becoming interested in Julius Evola's spiritual Nordicism in late 1941.

According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, many neo-Nazis want to establish an autocratic state modeled after Nazi 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" 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.

See also

• Ahnenpass
• Aryan Games
• Aryan paragraph
• Aryanization
• Esotericism in Germany and Austria
• Invented tradition
• Ariosophy
• British Israelism
• Christian Identity
• French Israelism
• Honorary Aryan
• Root race
• White supremacy
• Wotansvolk
• The Creativity Movement

References

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Glinka, Lukasz Andrzej. Aryan Unconscious: Archetype of Discrimination, History & Politics. Great Abington, UK: Cambridge International Science Publishing. 2014
• 2nd edition: Motilal Banarsidass 2025
• Arvidsson, Stefan. ”Aryan: conceptual history”, Wenda Trevathan (ed.), The International encyclopedia of biological anthropology. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2018.
• Poliakov, Leon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe New York: Barnes & Noble Books. 1996
• Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (1903) The Arctic Home in the Vedas