Let’s unravel this racist/property bullshit, starting with the word “Aryan.”
Now associated solely with the white supremacist project (i.e. the Aryan Brotherhood), the Proto-Indo-Iranian word was at its root an ethnic self-designation used by various peoples in Iran and India thousands of years ago, when humanity spread through Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and beyond. Likewise the swastika, now a universal symbol of fascism thanks to Nazi Germany, was similarly stolen from Hinduism.
So why did words and symbols from Asia get hijacked by bunch of Europeans obsessed with being white?
Well, archaeology indisputably places humanity’s origin in Africa, as well as our earliest advanced civilizations outside of Europe, facts that conflicts with the white supremacist delusion of racial superiority. So European racists imagined that these words and symbols were secretly white knowledge, that there was secret migration of Europeans in the historical record that deposited that knowledge in the region then left again.
As the kids say, pure copium.
As contemporary Iranian-German historian David Motadel explains, these German thinkers believed that ‘Aryans’ had moved from Europe to Asia “and founded the ancient civilizations of the East” while “on the Asian fringes they degenerated through mixing with foreign races”. This meant that by the 20th century, “only the ‘Nordic race’, the core race in central and northern Europe, remained purely ‘Aryan’.” (Iranwire)
Under this mass racial delusion, everything is white, even and especially the things that are not. It is a reactionary ideology of lack, its foundation an insistent fear and insecurity at one’s position in the world. This pernicious lie props up the cultural and material plunder that continues to this day.
The fancy word is colonialism. The plain one is theft. You see the theme?
TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part IV: The Lies We Tell Ourselves
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