Merlin Stone Remembered

by David B. Axelrod

  The creation of “racial theory” as an academic subject appears to have begun with a Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Berlin (the direct predecessor of Hegel)—Johann Gottleib Fichte. It may be significant that in this particular form of second stage cultural racism, along with the then familiar white European assertions that the people of all darker races were supposedly mentally inferior to white Europeans, that there were further assertions that the lighter people of the white race were supposedly mentally superior to the darker people of the white race. According to Fichte, the descendants of the Teutonic/Germanic tribes, i.e, the lightest people of the white race, were supposedly superior to all others peoples on Earth. Fichte asserted that the French, Latin and Jewish “races” were inferior, their generally darker coloring revealing their genetic heritage from the supposedly inferior darker races. Putting forth these ideas in a series of university lectures in 1807 (later published and widely read), Fichte stated that it was only the Germanic people “in whom the seed of human perfection exists.” 9

  Second stage cultural racism, in the guise of “racial theory” remained in the more generalized domain of philosophy for some forty years. But in 1847 a professor of ancient civilizations and philosophy (historical linguistics) at the University of Bonn, Christian Lassen, finally supplied what “racial theorists” had desperately wanted—historical “evidence” of an extremely ancient white civilization to legitimate their claims. It had been somewhat difficult, although apparently not impossible, to assert that the white race was the most mentally advanced form of human, when all available evidence showed that the earliest cultural inventions and developments—from law codes to the invention of the wheel—of the most ancient civilizations had been initiated by the darker peoples of the Near and Middle East. For the “racial theorists” of northern Europe this problem was all the more disturbing alongside the historical records about the Teutonic/Germanic tribes that described them as illiterate primitive people as late as the Roman period. By their own standards of the cultural and technological accomplishments that supposedly reveal basic human intelligence, the northern European “racial theorists” could produce no historical support for their claims. To establish an extreme antiquity, hopefully even a primacy, for white cultural development was a much longed for discovery among the “racial theorists” of the early Nineteenth Century.

  The writings of Professor Christian Lassen provided this “discovery.” Lassen’s work was based upon information that was becoming increasingly available in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Sanskrit writings of the ancient Aryans of India. The information that most pleased the “racial theorists” was that the Sanskrit language of the Aryans was linguistically related to European languages.

  The fact that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language had first been noted by William Jones and Charles Wilkins in late Eighteenth Century England. It was confirmed by the work of Franz Bopp of Bavaria in 1816.10 Publishing his work in four volumes entitled Indische Altertumskunde (Indian Antiquities), Lassen stressed the great antiquity, even the probable primacy, of Aryan culture. According to Lassen, the Aryans were responsible for having initiated and developed many of the earliest cultural and technological accomplishments of humankind. Drawing upon the work of Jones, Wilkins and Bopp, Lassen wrote that the linguistic connections between Aryan Sanskrit and European languages showed that the Aryans were the ancestors of the white race.11 Thus were the assertions of the second stage cultural racism based upon what was believed to be “documented evidence” of the primacy of the white race in cultural and technological development.

  As we mentioned, basing claims of an innate superiority on archaeological and philological evidence of ancient cultures was to lead to further discoveries that completely refuted the “evidence” of white Aryan cultural and technological primacy. The “racial theorists” who used the then available knowledge of the ancient Aryans as proof of the innate superiority of what soon became known as the Teutonic/Germanic/Aryan people would have been deeply shocked, certainly disappointed, had they lived long enough to read the three volumes on the Harappan civilization of India written by archaeologist Jon Marshall and published in 1931.12

  In these volumes, Marshall described the results of his years of excavations of the Harappan civilization of India, excavations that proved that the Aryans had invaded India as aggressive, illiterate nomads at about 1700 B.C. The Aryans had violently conquered the inhabitants of the Harappan civilization during several centuries of attack—eventually appropriating the cultural and technological accomplishments of the Harappans. Marshall’s work was later affirmed by the work of Mortimer Wheeler in 1946–1953.13

  Not only had the Harappans used a written language, wheeled vehicles, metallurgical processes, a brick architecture that included large civic and religious buildings and two and three story private homes, paved streets, and a system of drain sewers that led to inside bathrooms in most homes, but the Harappan civilization had existed for close to a thousand years before the Aryans had even arrived in India. Even more shocking to “racial theorists” would have been Marshall’s and Wheeler’s evidence that the Harappan civilization had been developed by a mixture of Mediterranean and Proto-Australoid peoples who were the ancestors of the dark Dravidian people still present in south India today.

  But Marshall’s discoveries, and the publication of them, were not to be made until some eighty years after northern European ideas about the ancient Aryans were used as a foundation for a form of second stage cultural racism that was propogated by some of the most highly respected professors of Europe.

  The impact that the incorrect evidence about the Aryans had upon “racial theory” was widespread. Count Arthur de Gobineau published the first book of another four-volume treatise in France in 1855, this one boldly entitled Essai sur l’Inegalite des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Basing his theories on the supposed primacy of Aryan cultural development, Gobineau wrote, “History shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the cooperation of this race.” Gobineau also asserted that the lighter people of the Germanic and Celtic groups were the last “pure” remnant of the supposedly culture founding Aryans, i.e., the way all Aryans must have looked before some mixed with other races, extending Fichte’s “seed of human perfection” to all lighter colored people of northern France, northern Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, northern Switzerland, England, Ireland and Scotland.14

  The erroneous evidence of Aryan antiquity in cultural and technological development provided by writers such as Lassen and Gobineau influenced many other European scholars of the Nineteenth Century. Among these was a Professor of History at the University of Berlin between 1874 and 1896. In his extremely well attended lectures, and in his articles in the Preussische Jahrbucher, Dr. Heinrich von Treitschke deeply influenced northern European thought, basing his conclusions of a Teutonic superiority upon the idea that the Aryans had been the original “bearers of culture.”

  Treitschke’s colleague at the University of Berlin, Professor of Economics Eugen Karl Duhring, added “racial theory” to his analysis of economics, asserting that the Oriental or Asiatic nature of Jewish people was morally inferior, thus undermining the European economy.15 One can almost hear the echoes of Vikings, Saxons, and Crusaders, asserting that there is an innate evil or immorality among Asian peoples. It was perhaps not too surprising that some of the later Nazi propaganda used against the Jewish people of Europe stated that their original homeland had been in the heart of central Asia rather than in the actual Semitic homeland of the eastern Mediterranean.

  Claims of a contemporary Teutonic/Aryan superiority wandered even further from factual evidence as “racial theory” was further developed and popularized by an Englishman living in Germany, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.16 In the 1200 pages of his two-volume Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunder
ts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), published in 1897, Chamberlain even challenged the New Testament. Despite the specific Hebrew genealogy listed in The Gospel According to Matthew, Chamberlain declared that the morals of Jesus “proved” that he was not a Semitic Hebrew. What was he then? Judging by his morals, Chamberlain asserted, he must have been an Aryan. Errors exist throughout Chamberlain’s writings. Speaking of the Amorites who produced the Law Code of Hammurabi, well known as a Semitic people, Chamberlain described them as “tall, blond, magnificent Aryans.” Of the Hittites of Anatolia, Chamberlain wrote that they were obviously Semitic, supposedly proved by their long noses. (The Hittites were later shown to be an Aryan group by the work of philologist B. Hrozny in 1915.) Yet despite the many errors and wild speculations in Chamberlain’s books, an English translation of the two volumes was made available in England and the U.S. by 1910, while the original German edition was in its 24th printing in 1938.

  It was not a difficult leap for Adolph Hitler when writing Mein Kampf in 1924 to assert that the Slavic, French, Hungarian and Baltic “races” were inferior to the Germans. Hitler asserted that African people were “half-apes,” insisting that it was “a sin against all reason … a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator” to educate black people.17 But Hitler’s racism was not his own invention or the original product of a warped mind. He leaned heavily upon the “academic” cultural racism that had been accepted by much of northern Europe.

  Thus Hitler could write, “All human culture, all the result of art, science and technology that we see before us today are almost exclusively the product of the Aryan … He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times … If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture and the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as representative of the first group.” 18

  How ironic that such words were being written in 1924, the very year that Marshall began his excavations of the Harappan civilization, the excavations that revealed that the Aryans in India had been illiterate, barbaric nomads who had learned nearly all that they were credited with inventing from the dark Harappans. It is worth noting that in Mein Kampf, while referring to all other peoples as mentally inferior, Hitler singled out the Jewish people as being “in league with the Devil.” Could this sole assertion of first stage cultural racism have been noted and confronted before the horrors of the holocaust had we been more aware of the stages of cultural racism?

  The Aryans

  At this point we must examine the records of the ancient Aryans. Who were these people who were so joyfully adopted by many white Europeans to confirm the assertions of second stage cultural racism? As we shall see, the Aryans did not initiate or found cultural or technological development for humankind, but they may well have been the inventors of the process of racism that has been used repeatedly for over three thousand years.

  We should begin by clarifying that the ancient Aryans were actually specific groups of the second millennium B.C. (2000–1000). Their identifications as Aryans are based primarily upon the evidence of the languages that they used. Aryan languages have been discovered to be the only known languages from ancient periods that are related to the Indo-European languages of today.

  The Indo-European languages are widespread and numerous. Most of them fall into three major categories:

  The first category is composed of the ancient Aryan/Indo-European groups that initially entered recorded history in the second millennium B.C., some invading India, some invading Anatolia (Turkey), some invading Greece, and some invading or migrating into Iran. Their languages are known respectively as Sanskrit, Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Indo-Iranian.

  The second category of Indo-European languages are the Slavic and Baltic (Lettic) languages still used by people who now live primarily in the areas of Russia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

  The third category includes most contemporary western European languages, English, German, Danish, Swedish, Norse, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, and the older languages of Latin and Gaelic. Greek, Persian, Armenian, Hindi, Bengali, Kurdish, Urdu and Romany are also Indo-European languages. Most archaeologists and philologists agree that the earliest Indo-European speaking people were originally a nomadic group whose earliest known homeland was probably on the steppes of southern Russia near the Aral Sea.

  It was upon the extremely tenuous argument of a specific connection between the Aryans who had used Indo-European Sanskrit, and the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century people who used Indo-European Germanic languages, that “racial theorists” declared that the lightest skinned, lightest haired, lightest eyed members of the Teutonic/German peoples were the most direct descendants of ancient Aryan peoples. This claim of a direct Aryan ancestry for the lightest people of the white race may or may not be true. But even allowing, for the sake of discussion, that any specific group of people today are the last “pure” remnant of the ancient Aryans, what is this Aryan heritage?

  One group of Aryans is known to have entered the area of Iran (hence the name Iran, from Aryan) before the second millennium B.C. They do not appear to have developed any major cultures there for several thousand years. This was despite the fact that the nearby cultures of the Sumerians in southern Iraq, the Semitic Akkadians in central Iraq, the Elamites in southwestern Iran, and the Harappans in India, had been using written language and building highly developed civilizations from about 3000 B.C. The archaeological evidence of Iran suggests that the Aryan migration or invasion into the area may even have brought earlier Neolithic developments there to somewhat of a dead end, e.g., Jarmo, Susa, Sialk, and Tepe Hissar.19 As we shall explain more fully, the earliest evidence of Iranian/Aryan literacy dates to about the Seventh Century B.C.

  A second group of Aryans are known to have invaded Anatolia (Turkey) at about 1800–1500 B.C. Anatolia had experienced gradual Neolithic cultural and technological development by non-Aryan groups from about 5000 B.C., e.g., Hacilar and Catal Huyuk. According to the archaeological evidence and written records of about 1400 B.C. the Aryans had arrived in Anatolia as aggressive, illiterate nomads, killing and terrorizing as they moved southward. After a period of several centuries they eventually subjugated the people of the earlier culture of Hatti in central Anatolia. After this conquest the Aryans adopted the cuneiform writing of the Semitic Akkadians to their south. It was from these cuneiform tablets written by the Aryans in Anatolia, who referred to themselves as the “Rulers of the Land of Hatti,” that archaeologists dubbed the Aryans of Anatolia as Hittites. Their records reveal that once the Aryans had conquered the people of Hatti, the Aryans assumed the roles of aristocracy and ruling class, enslaving many of the indigenous inhabitants who were of Mediterranean origin.

  Were the Hittite Aryans a superior people? If the violent conquest of citizens of developed urban and agricultural communities by invading nomads using horses for speed and power and javelins for murder and terror is indicative of a superior people then the Hittite Aryans were superior. It is true that once they had conquered the indigenous Hattians, the Aryans ruled for several centuries, but such a people can hardly be described as the founders or inventors of culture, or as the essence of innate morality.20

  The most substantial body of evidence of the early Aryans comes from India, the group of Aryans that became the subject of Lassen’s study and, in turn, so deeply affected the development of “racial theory.” In India, both archaeological and written evidence confirm the invasion and conquest of the ancient Harappan civilization by the nomadic Aryans. Although Harappan writing has been discovered it has not yet been deciphered, thus the oldest available written records of ancient India are the Aryan writings that date from about 1200 B.C. onward. These were written in a script believed to have been adopted from Mesopotamia. From archaeological excavations, and from the written records of the
Aryans, we know that the Aryan invasion of India occurred in much the same gradual pattern as the Aryan invasion of Anatolia, and at approximately the same period. Since the Aryan/Indo-European entries into Greece are also dated to about this same time, it is clear that the Aryans had broken up into several groups at about this time or slightly earlier.

  One extremely interesting aspect of the Aryan records from India is the description of a sacred Aryan ritual known as the Asvamedha. This ritual consisted of a specially consecrated horse being allowed to roam free for one year, followed by a band of Aryan warriors on horseback. As the horse wandered onto the territories of other peoples the ritual required that the band of Aryan warriors insist upon a payment of tribute from the inhabitants of the territory. If tribute was refused, the Aryans then broke into open warfare. If the Aryans achieved a martial victory the territory was then claimed as an addition to Aryan lands. (If the horse and warriors were still alive at the end of the year, the warriors brought the horse back to their tribal chieftain who then sacrificed it in ritual ceremony.) 21 Perhaps related to this custom, the Aryans gradually swept through the entire Harappan culture that had been built along some 950 miles of the banks of the Indus River. The archeological evidence suggests that the killing and looting of both urban and agricultural communities continued for several centuries.

  It is interesting to note that the Aryans, even in the much later period when they had adopted writing, described any rebellious inhabitants as rakshas, demons who drank blood and killed infants, or yaksas who were said to eat children, or vetalas—vampires. Later Aryan legends tell of a “Demon King” named Ravana who was associated with the large island of Ceylon that lies just off the southernmost tip of India. Although the “Demon King” is portrayed as a mythical figure in Aryan legend, his connection with the southern area of India that experienced the least Aryan intrusion is interesting, especially as the later Dravidian writer Kamban portrayed Ravana as a somewhat heroic figure defending his people.22