There is more going on here than anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs and even more than “the enemy of my enemy”. It fits their warped racist mythos about “Aryans”. You can see then when this odious shitbag reminds Iran that he “respect[s] your nation and its history” Hitler declared Iran to be an “Aryan state” and in 1935 the Shah changed Persia’s name to Iran, allegedly at the suggestion of the German ambassador.
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I was waiting for this. As I understand it, the term Aryan was coined to refer to the incredible cultural and scientific achievements of Persian peoples that, somehow modern Germans were descended from(!?!).
If the western world understood even half of what the people of this region accomplished while they were still eating grubs maybe we’d be seeing a totally different modern history of the Middle East.
Oh, wait they’re brown. Never going to happen.
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Well, yes and no. Brown or white, depending on the U.S. context, whether we’re talking de jure or de facto, and more.
To date, studies of American whiteness have centered on European or Anglo contexts and diasporas and consistently tell a unidirectional story of how groups become white. Thus, sociologists and historians have shown, for example, how the Irish were paid in “wages of whiteness,” how Italians were made “white on arrival,” and how “Jews became white folks.” Barring a few exceptions, there has been little orientation toward examining two areas: whiteness and its related logics of exclusion for non-Western groups, and how whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked, or mismatched in the law and on the ground. . . .
The interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes, and particularly the points of friction at which they meet, tell us not only about Iranian Americans but more generally about how white racism continually reorganizes itself to exclude those whom the legal category “white” nominally includes.
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“Indo-Iranian” apparently, well before the Persians. Basically the block of people who spread Indo-European languages to the area of Eurasia that encompasses modern Iran through India. And originating right around Kazakhstan. The term “Aryan” was an autonym used by pre-Persian Iranians, and certain early cultures in and around India, eventually becoming the label for Northern India and Northern Indian peoples in the earliest Indian writings.
The term Aryan has been used in History and Archaeology to refer to early Indo-Eurpean cultures in India/Pakistan and points north, and later Northern Indian cultures and languages distinguishing them from the Dravidian languages and cultures of Southern India. The terms there being drawn from labels applied in Vedic texts. And we sort of turned it into this racist, only sorta accurate time line of light skinned Aryan Indians invading and displacing, subjugating and civilizing dark skinned Dravidians. So super fun.
The Nazi and white supremacist adoption come sort of out of that. But more out of Madam Blavatsky, probably the most influential occultist in history. Much of her writing was built around the idea of “root races”. It’s sort of a mystical glossing of the multi-regional theory of human origins. Where by different populations of humans evolved separately, in different areas of the world. Whiiiich is basically inextricable from scientific racialism. In Blavatsky’s telling there had been multiple “races of men” since the origin of time, many of them magical or supernatural. Including the Atlantians and the Hyperboreans. Most of which are extinct or have transcended or something.
But she labeled Humanity the “Aryan” root race, and got into a bunch of nasty shit about which peoples had degenerated by breeding with non-human root races, or drifting spiritually. Or were worse for being more distantly descended from the original pure Aryans.
And you can see where this is going. German Theosophists and Anti-Semites decided it was Germans who were closest to “pure” and it became central to the Nazi ideology.
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Of course he is upset. Persians are caucasians. What Nazi wants to see us running around killing WHITE people?
I was reading about how Mussolini had to negotiate with Hitler over a period of time about whether or not Italians could be “white.” Eventually, Hitler allowed for northern Italians to be white, but not southern Italians. It sounded like they wasted tons of time on these completely insane esoteric pseudo-sciencey woo based arguments (I bet that woman you were talking about was at least distantly involved in that circle)… you’d think at some point Mussolini would have realized begging Hitler to be “white” was a pretty “cuck” (sorry, couldn’t resist) situation to be in but clearly none of these people were playing with a full deck.
If you are bored and like dorky RPGs Chapo has a hilarious episode where they play Call of Cthulhu and make fun of “pizza gate”, phrenology, hp lovecraft, and WASP racism against Italians. It’s so great.
Actually a lot of good links in this thread… I am getting more and more interested in history these days
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She was dead about 40 years by the time of Hitler. But she founded the Theosophist movement, and German Theosophists were instrumental in the formulation of early Nazi ideas about race. And the Thule Society, the occult ethno-nationalist group that sponsored and lead to the Nazi party was a direct descendant.
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I assume the quotes are to indicate that they aren’t really liberals and progressives, and are actually ashamed conservatives.
All the progressives I have seen are angry about it and are talking about sabotage and draft dodging, even outside my usual radical left circles.
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My bad I somehow missed the giant embedded inline snippet from Wikipedia. For some reason my phones browser keeps jumping up and down really weirdly in terms of scrollable content position when I scroll to read your comment so it is and was hard to read it. Very strange
And the Fox-Right’s White Nationalist Poster Boy, Tucker Carlson, feels the same.
The article reads rather condescending, but if there are people gushing over Richard Spencer being anti-(external)-war, without examining his motives, then they’ll need a reality adjustment over Tucker Carlson.
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