[coughs discreetly]
Won’t onebox properly, but jumps to the “Aryanism and racism” bit:
Two excerpts for the TL;DR crowd (although to be fair, if you know this, you have most of what you absolutely need to know):
In the 1850s, the term ‘Aryan’ was adopted as a racial category by the aristocratic French writer Arthur de Gobineau, who, through the later works of his followers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, influenced the Nazi racial ideology. Under Nazi rule (1933–1945), the term officially applied to most inhabitants of Germany excluding Jews, Roma, and Slavs (mostly Slovaks, Czechs, Poles and Russians).
Those classified as ‘non-Aryans,’ especially Jews, were discriminated against before suffering the systematic mass killing known as the Holocaust and the Porajmos.
In India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau’s arguments along another line, and had fostered the idea of a superior “Aryan race” that co-opted the Indian caste system in favor of imperial interests. In its fully developed form, the British-mediated interpretation foresaw a segregation of Aryan and non-Aryan along the lines of caste, with the upper castes being “Aryan” and the lower ones being “non-Aryan”. The European developments not only allowed the British to identify themselves as high-caste, but also allowed the Brahmins to view themselves as on-par with the British. Further, it provoked the reinterpretation of Indian history in racialist and, in opposition, Indian Nationalist terms.
Different day, same old shit.
