Eur Aryan Roots

In Nazi Germany between the years 1940 and 1944, proof of your Aryan or Semitic roots meant the difference between life and death. How this inhuman and intrinsically absurd theory of racial superiority originated and how it took hold of the German imagination makes for a fascinating, scholarly study. Tracing the origins of the Aryan Myth in the West, the author shows how in the heyday of nationalism, most European people developed legends glorifying their high born ancestry. He shows how these legends developed into pseudoscientific theories, which treated Europeans as the norm and other peoples as inferior--until in 19th-century Germany they culminated in the concept of a superior Germanic "race" in contrast to the inferior Jewish "race." This cultural study sheds horrifying new light on the philosophy that "justified" the mass extermination of millions of "subhumans" during World War II.--From publisher description.

This general Aryan superiority is indicative of a highly active and capable intellect, even though no one mind exercised a controlling influence. The general mentality of the race, the gross sum of Aryan thought and judgment, must have guided the course of Aryan evolution and kept our forefathers from those side-pits of stagnation into which all their competitors fell. During its primitive era the Aryan race moved steadily forward unto a well-devised system of organization which formed the basis of the great development of modern times.-from "The Age of Philosophy"What began in the late 19th century as a startlingly inept work of wishful thinking, outrageous conjecture, and bald racism masquerading as scholarship transformed itself, in the late 20th century, into a foundational work of neo-Nazi philosophy. Positing an heretofore-and subsequently-entirely unknown culture of Indo-Europeans as the standard bearers of all human progress and initiative, this 1888 work strings together a portrait of the "Aryan race" from carefully chosen scraps of religious, political, and social systems from across the Old World into a house of historical cards.Useless as a guide to human cultural origins, The Aryan Race is nevertheless essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the modern subculture of white supremacists, and how they come by their extreme doctrines.CHARLES MORRIS (1833-1922) also wrote A Manual of Classical Literature, Aryan Sun-Myths: The Origin of Religion, Heroes of Discovery in America, and The San Francisco Calamity.