Greg Johnson: The Problem with Aryanism
Aryanism is the view that Indo-European language and culture are normatively white. At its most childish, Aryanism leads to the false inference that Basques, Finns, Hungarians, and Estonians are “not white” because they do not speak Indo-European languages. Equally childish is the inference that non-European Caucasians (Persians, Armenians, Indians) are somehow “us” because they speak Indo-European languages. The reductio ad absurdum of Aryanism is a European who feels more kinship with Persians and Hindus than Hungarians or Finns because of common linguistic roots. Of course, due to colonialism there are also millions of Africans, Amerindians, and Asians who speak Indo-European languages and even carry European genes. Logically, the Aryanist should also prefer these people to Basques or Estonians, but let us hope they shrink back before this absurdity. Europeans can learn a great deal about our own pre-Christian language and culture through the study of Aryan offshoots among non-Europeans. But those who bear these languages and cultures today are still non-Europeans — not “us.”
There is no reason to presume that Indo-European language and culture are normatively European. The Aryans were a branch of the European family that split off from the main stem, evolved a distinct language and culture in isolation for untold millennia, and then migrated back into the European heartland, as well as into the Near, Middle, and Far East.
The Aryans certainly contributed to European civilization but they did not create it. Indeed, when the various waves of Aryans returned to Europe, they were rightly regarded as barbarians. They even regarded themselves as barbarians. Agriculture, ceramics, metal-working, written language, clocks, calendars, astronomy, irrigation, urban life, the wheel, refined arts and crafts, monumental architecture — all of these were pre-Aryan inventions. Europe’s first high civilizations arose around the Mediterranean shore, not in the North. Their creators were subracially Mediterranean, not Nordic. The creators of the high civilizations of Mesopotamia were Caucasian, but they were probably no more European than the current residents of those lands. And when the Aryans diffused themselves throughout Europe and the Orient, they were awestruck by the superior civilizations they found and eagerly to assimilated them, culturally and genetically, until Aryans in the pure form became extinct.
Europeans today, culturally and genetically, are more or less composites of Aryans and pre-Aryans. Thus it is a form of false consciousness — of inauthenticity — to identify ourselves, individually or collectively, with the Aryans, an extinct people who live on only as genetic and cultural ingredients of modern Europeans. The Aryans are part of us, but they are not us. Dreaming that we are Aryans is like a dog dreaming that he is a wolf.
