Steve King wants to know what "sub groups" contributed as much as Whites have

[GMDino]

(07-21-2016, 06:13 PM)jason Wrote: Yeah. In fact, the Iranian plateau derives its name from the Aryan civilization. Of course Hitler was so enamored by this culture that he grandfathered Persians into his lil master race.

Eh...

Quote:Aryanism is a system of thought born in early-nineteenth-century Europe that divides mankind into different "races." It deems the Aryan race to be "superior," more creative and morally upright than "inferior" races. Those Semites, "Negroes," and others were believed to be characterized by vicious simplicity, cupidity, treacherousness, and an incapacity to grasp metaphysics. It all started soon after Sir William Jones discovered in 1786 that Sanskrit and Persian were related to Latin and Greek, within what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.


The term "Aryan" itself is a neologism coined by a French Orientalist of the era, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron. It is synonymous with "Indo-European," although the latter has a more geographic connotation. In a Zeitgeist where nations and national cultures were given shape, where myths of genealogy were particularly appealing to intellectuals, and where some were grappling with the moral dilemma of colonizing people in far-off lands, Jones's linguistic theory was swiftly manipulated into a racial one -- linguistic similarity was assumed to denote racial kinship.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Aryanism was wrapped into the discourse of science. Racial anthropology came into being as a discipline claiming to classify humans into different racial categories with immutable psychological features by measuring noses, skulls, and ears. As we know all too well, Aryanists, in particular one Adolf Hitler, became increasingly obsessed with racial purity and elevated the opposition between Aryan and Semite to the level of paradigmatic antagonism. This opened the way for the next stage: extermination. Aryanism provided the ideological backbone for Nazi atrocities.

Today, talk of the "Aryan race" in the West is restricted to white supremacist circles in North America and neo-Nazi militants in Europe.
The very concept of "race," although it is still used in political discourses, especially in the United States, is scientifically bankrupt. Leading scientific associations assert that genetic variations between human groups are so gradual that drawing lines is inevitably an arbitrary and subjective exercise. "Indo-European" today refers to languages, not to people, let alone people supposed to assume inherent characteristics. Even its now limited use has been questioned. According to prominent linguists such as Merritt Ruhlen and the late Joseph Greenberg, the theory which holds that Indo-European languages are unrelated to other language groups such as the "Semitic" is overstated, if not outright fictitious.

Despite the rather inglorious legacy of Aryanism, many Iranians still nonchalantly seize every opportunity to emphasize their "Aryanness." But how did Aryanism reach Iran in the first place? Iranian Aryanists would have us believe that we have referred to ourselves as ariya since time immemorial, and that this epithet is a racial one, used to distinguish those who are ariya from those who are not. The claim is fallacious. The term occurs only a handful of times in ancient inscriptions in the Avesta, and on the bas-reliefs of Naqsh-e Rostam and Bisotun. Absolutely no consistent meaning can be derived from these occurrences.

In spite of many attempts to force ariya into Aryanist assumptions, recent scholarship -- in particular the work of Gherardo Gnoli -- has shown that ariya was not quite a racial category. According to Gnoli, in Achaemenid times, ariya was a cultural and religious term to evoke the kings' origin, like a title of particular nobility. In its very restricted, exclusivist nature, that is quite different from a racial category.
Moreover, as already mentioned, the term "Aryan" was coined by Anquetil-Duperron. The neologism is charged with modern and romantic European conceptions of "race" that did not exist in Eastern antiquity. Even more importantly, in the entire corpus of Persian literature, verse and prose, there is no reference to an Aryan race until the twentieth century.

A related myth is the one according to which "Iran" means the "land of Aryans." This myth was propagated by Max Müller, who claimed in 1862 that the term airyanem vaejah found in the Avesta is the ancestor of "Iran" and means the "Aryan expanse." This myth became so widespread that serious scholars propagate it even to this day. Suffice it to look at a dictionary.

By contrast, Gnoli contends that airyanem vaejah is not a historical land, but a legendary, cosmogonic concept in Zoroastrianism. Additionally, the "land of Aryans" would suppose that the inhabitants of the Achaemenid or Sasanian empires were racially conscious in a manner similar to nineteenth-century Europeans. This is of course highly unlikely, particularly given that the Iranian plateau already -- as it has ever since -- featured a complex mix of populations. Out of 30,000 tablets excavated in Persepolis, not one was written in Persian (most are in Elamite, and a few are in Aramean). In fact, the empire was a melting pot. To imagine that its inhabitants believed that a territory must belong to one people is an anachronistic projection of modern ideas onto the distant past. The presence of Arabs on the Iranian plateau and Iranians in the Arabian Peninsula is also attested, but somehow ignored by the prophets of Aryanism.

The now ubiquitous concept of the "Aryan race" first appeared in Iran in the 1890s. Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, one of the ideologues of a particularly bigoted version of Iranian nationalism, was the first to ever refer to it in writing. Interestingly, he spelled it àriyàn (آریان), a transliteration of the French aryen. Later, Sadegh Rezazadeh Shafagh came up with àriyàyi, the term now usually used in Persian. Hasan Priniya dwelt upon Aryans and the "science of race" in the textbooks he wrote for the first cohort of children to be mass schooled by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s.

By that point, the strange idea of Iranian-German racial brotherhood had already appeared in various writings, such as a poem dedicated to "Germania" by Vahid Dastgerdi during World War I. After the Nazis took power, the notion was actively disseminated by the German propaganda machine. The hugely popular journal Nàmeh-ye Iràn Bàstàn, the Persian-language broadcasts of Radio Berlin, the publications and lecture tours of the Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft, and the holdings of the German Scientific Library all promoted the idea of Aryan brotherhood, as Germany sought to convince Iranians to supporting her cause against the "ugly fox" (Great Britain) and "deceitful bear" (the Soviet Union). It all worked very well. Observe how the German football team is even now welcomed in Iran, occasionally with enthusiastic collective Nazi salutes.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/08/post-2.html#ixzz4F5igh9A6