Revisiting the Aryan racial superiority cult

Towards the end of the 19th century, a belief in the innate superiority of the Nordic, or “Aryan”, races — specifically of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon variety, but by implication including others — started to become fashionable. This way of thinking would reach its gruesome culmination in the catastrophe of Nazism, with its cult of übermensch Aryanism inspiring the dispossession, subjugation and sometimes even outright extermination of other races deemed “inferior”.

Initially, theories of Nordic-Teutonic racial superiority were by no means confined an exclusively German phenomenon, but were very much in vogue in Anglophone circles as well. Houston Stewart Chamberlain did much to popularise the idea and give it a veneer of intellectual credibility.

Such ideas also made their way to the United States, at the time still largely dominated by the Anglo-Saxon sector of a population whose make-up was in any case far less ethnically diverse as it is today. Ku Klux Klan ideologue Hiram Wesley Evans thus could refer to “the so-called Nordic race which, for all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilisation”. Such ideas were by no means confined to the fringes. President Warren Harding’s campaign manager Will Hays, for example, had no qualms about describing his lineage as “the finest pioneer blood, Anglo-Saxon, German, Scotch-Irish and Dutch” (the Celtic Scotch-Irish being regarded as equivalent to the Nordic races for this purpose). To state the obvious, it is all a very far removed from the Obama era.

That such theories were fashionable during this particular period is understandable since the late 19th to early 20th centuries were certainly a time of pronounced Anglo-Saxon and Germanic ascendancy. Britain’s empire covered a quarter of the globe, her navy famously dominated the seas and her economic hegemony dated back at least a century to the Industrial Revolution. Germany, after centuries of fragmentation, was now a dynamic united entity, economically and militarily dominant on the European continent and arguably at the height of her intellectual and cultural influence. Across the Atlantic, the United States was flexing its muscles with increasing confidence in its nascent sense of Manifest Destiny.

By contrast, the non-Nordic civilisations were pretty much in the doldrums. India and its immediate neighbours were British colonies, while China was sunk in a humiliating torpor that saw its sovereignty being continually violated with impunity by the European powers (and by Japan, too, as it happens, prefiguring the impressive modern-day emergence of the Far Eastern countries as major world players). The Islamic world, once so dominant, was lagging hopelessly behind its Euro-Christian rivals. Some two-thirds of Muslim countries were European colonies while the remainder mainly falling within the decayed and fast collapsing Ottoman Empire. Spain had ceased to be a world power at least two centuries before, Italy had only just emerged from centuries of colonisation by the Hapsburgs, Russia was in crisis and even France, humiliatingly thrashed in the Franco-Prussian War, was playing second fiddle to its powerful German neighbour.

Beliefs in an innate “Nordic” superiority were thus understandable in the context of the times, yet quite apart from the moral issues such racist theories raised, how correct was that assumption in the light of world history? A broad overview of the waxing and waning of major world civilisations over the past five millennia of recorded history will have revealed even then that the prevailing Nordic hegemony — military, economic, cultural and technological — was actually quite a recent phenomenon and far from typical of what had gone before.

The cradle of civilisation was not northern Europe, but the Middle East. It was in Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — that the first great human strides in such areas of literature, philosophy, architecture, law and science began dramatically manifesting. Thereafter major civilisations, lasting for many centuries, emerged throughout the region, such as in Egypt, Assyria, Persia and — again in Iraq — Babylon. The Jewish civilisation, based in ancient Israel but nurtured in other Middle Eastern countries as well, would eventually give rise to two of the greatest religious movements the world would ever know, Christianity and Islam. Meanwhile further east, India and China were establishing their own vastly impressive civilisations.

Europe too eventually began to come into the picture, but when it did it was not through its “Nordic” races, then frankly mired in primitive barbarity, but through its “deep south” Greek peoples. The myriad achievements of the Grecian civilisation established some 2 500 years ago continue to reverberate to this day. After Greece’s decline, it was the Romans’ turn — another southern European power. Likewise, their accomplishments have been the building blocks of those societies that succeeded them.

Far from participating in this dramatically rich period of advancement and human creativity, the Germanic peoples eventually were instrumental in destroying them, plunging Europe into an extended “Dark Ages”. The so-called Renaissance that was seen as Europe’s revival was, to a large extent, an Italian phenomenon. Meanwhile, during the Dark and Middle Ages, Islam burst onto the scene, creating a vast empire that for centuries was well in advance of the Christian world in terms of scholarship, governance and economic management.

It took Spain — another southern European country — until the end of the 15th century to finally rid itself of Islamic occupation. Thereafter, it was Spain that was the dominant European power for an extended period, during which time it established an overseas Empire in the Americas to rival in size every empire that had gone before. Little Portugal also participated in that venture. Spain’s eclipse in the 17th century was followed by a period of French dominance, something that was as much cultural as it was military. This lasted until at least the mid-1850s.

Only in the 17th century, in fact, does one see the emergence of north European people’s as major players on the world stage. The Dutch succeeded in throwing off the Spanish yoke, established a sizable overseas empire and enjoyed an impressive period of economic and cultural influence. England emerged much the stronger after its civil war and proceeded to lay the foundations of its subsequent meteoric rise. Even Sweden enjoyed a status as a great power for a time. Germany remained fragmented, but its Prussian component was becoming a force to be reckoned with. While the Netherlands and Sweden gradually declined as great powers, the British and Germans continued to rise (significantly, the final decisive defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 was accomplished almost entirely by British and German troops).

I realise I’ve been simplifying wildly, yet in broad terms the core of what I am saying seems to be correct: The Anglo-Saxon and Germanic period of influence was not indicative, as its proponents asserted, of an historic superiority but was in reality a relatively late phenomenon that had been preceded by millennia of supposedly backward non-Aryan races dominating the world stage. What is more, the resurgence
of the southern and eastern Asian countries — India, China, Thailand, Japan, the Koreas and Taiwan — suggests that the era of north European dominance is already coming to an end. It’s all a turning wheel, in other words. Maybe one of these centuries, it might even be sub-Saharan Africa’s turn, if the Botswana rather than Zimbabwe road is followed.

One last word: Many might be offended by all this talk of major world civilisations and the comparisons made with what are by implication inferior societies. My intention rather has been to use the criteria of what constitutes a significant civilisation against those who once argued on behalf of an intrinsic north European superiority.

There is a telling vignette I would like to share, because it made a lasting impression on me when I first encountered it. Essentially, it is about an early encounter between British crewmen and the Aborigine inhabitants of the East Coast of Australia some years prior to the British take-over. As recorded by the crewman concerned, a group of Aborigines were met on the shore of Botany Bay and offered the usual tools and trinkets used to win over the “barbarians” — beads, nails, copper wire and the like. However, instead of capering and clamouring for more like the eager “primitives” they were supposed to be, the Aborigines merely glanced briefly at the items, then threw them aside. “All they wanted us to do, it seemed, was go away” the writer commented.

I don’t remember exactly who was concerned and when this took place, but it is a highly revealing little vignette. The Aborigines might have been essentially a Stone Age people, but they were quite happy to remain that way. Certainly, they felt no sense of cultural inferiority at the time vis-à-vis the newcomers to their ancestral land, even if they were unable to resist its rapacious advance.