Orientation

Purpose of this article

Almost 2 years ago I wrote an article called Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age based on the work of Robert Ellwood (The Politics of Myth). In it Ellwood showed the conservative nature of popular mythologists Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. My purpose was to show how the naïve New Age movement took these mythologists to be liberal in spite of their conservative and even proto-fascist leanings. All three mythologists were writing from the early to the middle part of the 20th century. In this article I want to trace the history of right-wing mythology back 200 years. For this task I will be relying on two great books. One is Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson; the other is Theorizing Myth by Bruce Lincoln.

In search for the Indo-Europeans

Why explore a lost culture with little evidence to go on? From the early 19th  century to the end of World War II historians, linguists, folklorists and archeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture, a people older than the Sumerians. Those scholars who have maintained that this culture existed and have called them “Indo-Europeans;” “Proto-Indo Europeans”, “Aryans” or  “Japhetites”. It was in 1813 that Thomas Young coined the term “Indo-European”.

In Part I of this article I explore those theories that searched for the Indo-Europeans by dissecting language-based on the theories of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. Both these theorists suspected that India was the home of the Indo Europeans. Further on, in the hands of the Grimm Brothers, the search for the Indo-Europeans takes a nationalist turn. Finally, neo-traditional religion supports the vitality of chthonic earth gods. Lastly, I discuss the impact of racial anthropology in which the search for Indo-Europeans is now based on the climate of the area, the skin color and brain size of people in these cultures.

Part II continues this rightward turn in Indo European studies with explicitly fascist direction. Following Arvidsson, I contrast the difference between the “order” theorists and the more “barbarophilism” as they affect the rise of Hitler. India falls out of favor as the home of the Indo-Europeans and is replaced by Germany.

But later, following Bruce Lincoln we find a French fascism smuggled into the work of the great French comparative mythologist, Georges Dumezil. I close with a brief presentation of the fascist work of Roger Pearson in his efforts to carry Indo-European studies right into second half of the 19th century. By way of conclusion, I present comparative mythologist Bruce Lincoln’s ten methodological steps to be sure that the political use of mythology does not interfere with the science of comparative mythology.

Who were the Indo-European scholars and what were their methodological problems?

Interestingly, supporters for the discovery of IE culture were a multidisciplinary lot. They consisted of historians of religions like Mircea Eliade, Jan de Vries, Jacob Grimm, Frederic Max Muller; historians such as Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff; anthropologists such as Claude Levi Strauss and Marshall Sahlins; archeologists like Gordon Childe; sociologists like Georges Dumezil. Others included Franz Bopp, Ernest Renan and Emile Benveniste.

The problem for these scholars was that Indo-Europeans have not left behind any texts and no objects that can definably be tied to them. Given these problems, why did these scholars not give up and turn their attention to other excavations? Why did they persist under these difficult conditions? The answer Stefan Arvidsson gives is that most of these scholars did so for religious and political/ideological reasons.

I The Ideological Origins of the Search for Indo-Europeans 

Anthropology typically examines the similarities and differences between cultures. Yet anthropologists are affected by the political climate of their countries. In European colonial times of the late 18th century, there was little to gain by elites for pursuing the Enlightenment dream of finding a universality of all cultures. Instead, religious and political zealots look for differences to justify the subjugation of these countries. The ancient history of the supposed Indo-Europeans became the proof that one branch of humanity was destined to exploit and rule the others. Mythology became an ideology to justify conquest. As Arvidsson pointed out, romantics like Chateaubriand, and Joseph de Maistre stressed importance of Laws of Manu found in India as a justification for a tripart conservative ideology as we will see later.

Indo-European “Aryan” studies were appropriated at an early stage by racial science. British archeologist Colin Renfrew has concluded from his own research that the research in IE is itself a modern myth. They included those who want to rekindle the old pre-Christian IE or Aryan paganism. Even as late as 1940-44 the most important dividing line among Europe’s inhabitants were between Aryans and Semites. After the fall of Germany in World War II “Aryan” was replaced by “Indo European” because post-war scholarship was dominated by Dumezil who never spoke about “Aryan religion”. Today the term is only used by Neo-Nazis.

Why was it so important for Germany to search for a culture of its origins? Unlike Britain, France or Spain there was no Germany until the end of the 18th century. The usual process of nation-building involved a reference to an ancient geographical homeland as well as an ancient religion. In this climate of imperial ambitions, Germany had neither, so it set out to discover one.

 II Discovery of Sanskrit

Sir William Jones

The Romantic use of language interpreted by various peoples who spoke IE languages made them have an organic unity and had a common fate. They claimed that all people who spoke IE had also inherited a common belief system. IE scholars like Bryant and Jones attempted to find similarities in the myths and god figures and found traces of these beliefs in at least four places: Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns and Norse saga literature. 

Bruce Lincoln, in his great book Theorizing Myth says Sir William Jones (1746-1794), established himself as one of the world’s foremost linguists with a grasp of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Turkish along with a knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He was a scholar, poet and translator sympathetic to the most liberal causes of his day. By a series of occupational happenstances, this led him to study Sanskrit.

In 1785 he gave a lecture in which he proposed the common origin of the languages (Sanskrit) to which others would later derive and give the name “Aryan”. Jones discovered the similarities between Latin and Greek European languages and the Sanskrit and Persian languages which were termed “linguistic families”. The Bhagavad Gita was translated by Jones along with The Laws of Manu. India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group.

Jones focused on four specific domains of culture a) language and letters b) philosophy and religion c) architecture and sculpture d) science and arts. In his discussion of an evaluation basing his judgments on what he took to be levels of accomplishment, he considered India first among the nations and evaluated it most favorably. He connected the peoples of India and Iran on the basis of their linguistic, religious and artistic similarities.

Romanticism and India

Interest in Sanskrit exploded. Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. He thought it was one of the most important steps in the development of the human race. Raymond Schwab referred to the period around 1800 as an “Oriental Renaissance”. Schlegel’s book in 1808 made the case for India as the Aryan homeland. In the translation of the Laws of Manu, the word “Aryan” means noble. The plot thickens.

For romantics the idealization of India served both as a protest against and an escape from the contemporary world that seemed like a confident march of progress. Threatened by rationalism, mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, anti-aristocratic politics and watered down theology Romantics made India a mystical unity that did away with interdisciplinary European conflicts. While the Enlightenment advocated a contractual right of man, German Romantics argued that human races are an organic part of the natural world with India as its model. Poets such as Shelley, Lord Byron and Schopenhauer attempted to synthesize India with European thinking.

Paris was the Mecca of Orientalism during the 1830s-1840s and it was hoped that studying Sanskrit would liberate scholars from their preoccupation with Greece and Rome. For some time, ancient India became the imagined home of Indo-Europeans. The attractive power of this world grew in 1819 through the writings of Frederic Schlegel, who attempted to build a comparative linguistics (1767-1845) along with von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Like many to come, Herder believed that Asia was the original home of human unity.

The discovery of IE language transformed India, Persia and Central Asia as a kind of European Orient. Thomas Trautmann writes that Jones’ work is nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Interest in India was popularized by the historian of religion, Max Muller. What we are interested in is the relationship of that discovery to political interests of colonial British rule in the late 18th and 19th centuries. 

Language mediates how nature grows in culture

For Romantics, language was the most basic expression of the soul of a people and is the foundation for musical and artistic traditions as well as social laws. The study of the origin of language (philology) was the cornerstone in the 19th century of research in the search for Indo-Europeans. Language became the vehicle through which nature grows through people.

 For Hamann and Herder, the ancient vernacular of languages and literature — poetry and myth – was a prime basis of national identity. Each language embodied the history of the people who spoke it. Each language had a basis in poetry and music far deeper than the degraded prose of modernity. For Herder, the formation of culture consisted of 4 parts:

• A variety of climates — heat and cold have an impact on the disposition of customs and bodies. Climate first produces change at the body’s most superficial level. Over long periods of time the effects penetrate deeper to transform skeletal structure and even the shape of the skull and nose
• The landscape – the features of individuals in a culture are brought into line with the features of the landscape.
• Language impacts thought and social relations.Language impacts thought and social relations.
• The arts through music and dance.

III Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Religion

Comparative religion as rooted in linguistics

As a philologist, Max Muller believed that religion is tightly linked to linguistic groups. Muller thought the only scientific way of classifying religion was by language. He raised the question that if the belief in God arises naturally, why are there such different religious types? In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology.

Primitive religion was monotheist and rooted in sun-worship

Which natural phenomenon had been the most prominent in catalyzing the mythopoetic imagination? Was it thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanos or the sun and dawn? Muller suspected that primitive religion was monothetic and this divine creator had originated from humanity’s encounter with forces of nature. However, it was not the wildest and most unpredictable events but it was the ones which were the most persistent and reliable. He thought the light of the sun fit the bill. Muller hoped to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. He believed that the origin of monotheism was India. In the hopes of finding the monotheistic roots of India, he translated the Rigveda.

Use and abuse of myth: history of myth

According to Bruce Lincoln, the word “myth” has been used in many ways depending on the historical period. Myth had been used originally in early Greek times to mean a primordial truth or a sacred story. It gradually became discredited with the rise of the Pre-Socrates and dismissed by the Romans as a “fable”. Christianity saw myth as a lie and set them in dualistic opposition to the non-mythic bible. With the rise of science myth was seen as either a sign of ignorance, the result of poetic revelry or a children’s story. Resurrected by the romantics in the 19th century, it became politicized and used to assist in the building of nation-states. In the 20th century it helped to build support for the wave of fascism in the 20th century.

Muller sees myth as degenerative

Muller was a modernist Protestant. He was not a romantic when it came to myths. He found myth irrational and immoral. Muller agreed the IE mythology was a poetic explanation of nature.  But if Vedic India was equal to the West, what kept India economically and politically backward? Unlike Nietzsche and other romantics, Muller saw myth not as a foundation of all religion but as a source of religious degeneration. Like Hamann and Herder, he took poetry to be present from human origins and to reflect an innate religious awareness. Myth was a later development, a disease of language. The Jews, Muslims and Christians as staunch monotheists, were less disposed to the seductions of myth.

Muller and British colonialism

Muller hoped to influence a change in British colonial politics. He wanted to make the British colonists understand that their Indian subjects were Aryan brothers. During a long degeneration, Indian religion withered while Europeans grew and matured into monotheism.  Muller hoped that the people of India would leave behind worship of idols if they received knowledge about the old Aryan Vedic religion.

IV Romantics Champion Myth and Folklore to Build Nationalism

At the end of the 18th century romanticism turned its back on the Enlightenment, especially its more deterministic tendencies. Myth was given a new lease on life. People such as Jones saw myth symbolically as veiled wisdom which simply needed to be first interpreted and then explained. Interest in the vernaculars (local language) displaced the international languages of church and court while myths and, to a lesser extent, folk songs were constitutive as an authentic primordial voice of the volk.

The use of myth at the end of the 18th century was also used by nationalists in their search for a language and set of stories on which the emergence of the nation-state could be founded. In the hands of the Brothers Grimm and others this is exactly what happened. The Grimm’s monumental research shows a Herderian interest in language and myth. They devoted themselves to the first encyclopedic compendium of German myths of 4 volumes. The Grimms argued that it was the conversion to Christianity that shattered the nexus of land-myth and folk. Myth then became entangled with attempts to contrast Aryans and Semites, as we shall see.

Grimm stirs the use of folklore to build nationalism

For the brothers Grimm, prehistory was not a period of dark barbarism but a high cultural golden age. The recovery of ancient texts during the Renaissance included Tacitus’ Germania, first published in 1457.  It dealt with the German sense of honor and integrity, their physical prowess, their courage and sense of  beauty. They were received with enthusiasm by the people of Northern Europe, in part because Tacitus broke the Mediterranean monopoly on antiquity by giving the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Anglo Saxons their first sense of the prestige derived from a deep and noble past.

Grimm (1785 – 1863) gathered folktales from German peasants in order to recreate a strong German culture. He wanted to find rich German stories that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions  He hoped that within the surface of folktales searchers  he could find traces of a German mythopoetic prehistory. Theorists of Northern origins challenged the Bible, for orthodox religion looked to Israel as the cradle of language. Grimm’s work spread and scholars began to record tales and customs of their society. Nationalist motives were always in the search for myths whether they were folktales or rituals.

 V From Modernist to Neo-Traditional Religion: Fall of Nature Mythology of Max Muller

Modernist theories of religion see the modernization process, including science, as part of the evolution of religion. The focus of religious experience is the individual. Modernist theories of religion look for a common core in all religion and its practices involve ethics and prayer. Modernists understand animism and polytheism as late degenerate forms of primitive monotheist tendency. To study non-modern cultures it focuses the language, and it studies myth. Max Muller was a modernist.

Capitalist class rejects modernist religious interpretations

Bruce Lincoln points out that when the bourgeois class at the end of the 19th  century became the ruling class, it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons was that more radical modernists, social democrats, communists, anarchists and union members became interested in these subjects. Events that shook bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism were the real threat of socialism as seen in the Paris Commune. Between 1880-1920, the bourgeois class became a dominating class whose interest in social change decreased, and the relationship between a civilized bourgeoisie and a barbaric working-class now became more important than the relationship between the bourgeois class and a reactionary aristocracy and priesthood which the bourgeoisie had defeated. In reaction, the bourgeois became conservative, nostalgic and nationalistic.  Correspondingly, the image of IE as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neo-traditionalist. But what does neo-traditionalist mean?

What is neo-traditional religion?

Neo-traditional ideals of religion want to recreate a vitalized traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to modernization (Muller). Von Schroder, a Baltic German Indologist, wants to renew folk-national, heathen rituals. Scholars like Lang, Von Schroeder, Harrison, Mauss and Eliade think that modernization has been chocked full of what is most vital in religion which was its magical, communitarian and collective rituals. What makes religion vital is what makes religion locally dispersed. Rather than ethics and prayer, what makes religion juicy is its altered states. Animism and polytheism are not only prior to monotheism, but once monotheism comes to power the part of religion that speaks to most people is chocked off. Further, evolutionary anthropologists claimed as Muller’s theories were no more than Christian crypto-apologetics. Frazer’s theories of ancient religion were an attempt to replace Muller’s philological paradigm with an evolutionist and folkloristic theory.

Jane Harrison and the chthonic roots of Olympian Greece religion

Beyond anthropology, the importance of ritual as opposed to myth was embraced by classicists like Jane Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Cornford (1874-1943) and the Cambridge ritualists. Jane Harrison argued chthonic religion had been the true religion of Greece up to the 7th  century BCE. With the Olympians’ victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction and clarity triumph over pulsing life. She held that myth arose as an attempt to explain well-entrenched and no longer understood rites.

 VI Aryan Studies Turn Rightward at the End of the 19th Century

Aryan liberal romanticism, which began with Jones, had weakened substantially by 1870. Yet the search for the Aryans grew, with input from Michelet, Fichte, Lasson and Hubert on the left and Renan, Schlegel and Wagner on the right.

Right-wing transitions to Aryanism

On the right, Renan idealized the polytheism of the IE. He constructed a long-lived opposition between IE and Semitic people. He connected the Biblical Shem’s line with monotheistic intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals along with lack of feeling for art and nature. For conservatives, the Jews promoted modernism. From 1870 on IE became connected with anti-Semitism.

Schlegel questions whether the French Revolution really was, along with its cosmopolitan and humanistic optimism, about progress. Becoming a Catholic, he came to embrace a nationalistic, reactionary and pessimistic world view.  In circles close to Schlegel people began for the first time to value the Middle Agesmore highly.

Wagner

Wagner greatly admired Grimm for all his work on folktales. He sought to connect the Volk through art rather than scholarship. According to Wagner, a total work of art would integrate music, poetry, dance, theatrical spectacle, the plastic arts and architecture. This integration of all the arts would undermine the shallowness of modernism, and rejuvenate an appreciation of folk, where the arts and rituals were once one.

Wagner worked on his materials over the next thirty years into the four dramas of The Ring Circle. This was intended as a ritual celebration, not a theatrical performance. He claimed that both the science and art of today are specialization of activities that were once unified. He believed this appreciation of the beauty of nature could arise only out of polytheism. That Wagner traced the origins of the German Volk to India shows that he understood them as part of the Aryan Diaspora.

The place and misplace of Nietzsche in Aryan politics

For Nietzsche, myth was a necessary foundation for all religion. In his earlier writings on myth, he took Wagner’s theories as his point of departure, especially in his book Birth of Tragedy. But in his later life Nietzsche disliked the vulgar antisemitism and German nationalism of Wagner. Nietzsche threw in the towel with Wagner after The Ring premiere at Bayreuth. Nevertheless Nietzsche’s training was in classical philology and he was well-versed with research in Indo-European linguistics and myth and undertook his own studies. He was not dependent on Wagner for this.

Nietzsche has been mistakenly categorized as antisemitic, especially in liberal and socialist circles. But as Walter Kaufman pointed out many years ago in his great biography of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s work was taken over by his sister who had fascist connections so that his work was pulverized to make it fit with Nazi ideology.

Bruce Lincoln gives us at least four reasons why Nietzsche was not antisemitic or a proponent of fascism:

• Nietzsche’s “blond beast” is not a special race but a category that encompasses multiple races, including Greeks and Japanese. However, he gave them further consideration. His detailed discussion was all devoted to the Greeks and the Germans.
• Soon after Nietzsche wrote Genealogy of Morals he came upon the Laws of Manu, an ancient Indian text on the ethics, law and social structure of India. Nietzsche admired the original religion and culture in India. While all the world’s people originated in India, he thought those of the West-Egyptians and Europeans came from the higher castes and it was for them that was reserved the title “Indo-Europeans”. While Nietzsche showed racial bias it was towards Europeans and Egyptians, not Germans.
• Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ancient and modern Germans. Ancient Germans (based on the work of Tacitus) had freedom and energy, but modern Germans did not, having become ever less Aryan and ever less barbaric. Therefore, Nietzsche saw nothing in the Germans of his time that was noteworthy.
• The Nazis were antisemitic – Nietzsche was anti-Christian. His early antipathy toward the Jews and Judaism was gradually attenuated and balanced by a growing, occasionally grudging, respect. Instead he become mercilessly more critical of Christianity. Everything wrong in Judaism was amplified and exacerbated in Christianity. The criticism he had of the Jews was that they were the first weak Christians, not that they had any of the other characteristics that fascists attributed to them. His most acidic systematic criticisms, his theory of resentment was leveled at Christianity not Judaism. Christianity is treated as the extreme form of all that is sickeningly present in Judaism.

VII) Racial Anthropology

As we’ve seen, the first Indo-European studies were grounded in linguistic observations. Max Muller equated linguistic affinity with ethnic affinity as opposed to physical appearance. In retrospect, he rightfully saw language, religion and nationality as independent of blood, skull or hair color. Jones also did not think skin color was important. However, both scholars’ contention was increasingly isolated and drowned out. The issue was how to measure being Indo-European.  Did one belong with those who spoke related languages and are considered to have a similar culture, or with those who looked similar?

During the 19th century racial anthropologists began to discuss IE, threatening the proprietorship of linguists. Instead of the study of religion, language and folklore to find the origins of Indo-Europeans, the new school focused on differences between people in material and physical characteristics and their geographical location. Racial anthropologists argued that people’s physical appearance could directly explain their degree of civilization. They debated which race was the original one and whether other races were the result of evolution or degeneration. They thought pure races were more fit than mixed ones. Racial anthropology became a study of signs where the internal moral and cultural states could be interpreted from external physical signs.

Climate, skin color and physique

According to Tacitus, the German climate is harsh and damper in the North and West, windier in the South and East. The cold and damp character of the Northern environment impressed itself on the bodies of those who live there. Bruce Lincoln says the whiteness of the cold must have scorched the Indo-Europeans and produced their red color. From mid-19th century, the empirical methods of racial anthropologists were improved to measurement of skin color and the size of skulls and noses. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) argued that Aryans could be identified by their long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. In his more extreme moments, Carus associated blond hair with the color of the sun and blue eyes with that of the sky, which identified Aryans as day people in contrast to the darker, lesser races.

The changing meaning of “barbarians”

Bourgeois humanists before 1870 looked down on barbarians for having had destroyed classical Rome. But as romanticism gained hold of bourgeois ideology, barbarian invasions were seen in a more positive light. As European romantics grew more cynical of the benefits of civilization and they studied the decline of other world civilizations and tumultuous migrations, the violence of the barbarians seemed to be necessary steps in a process of revitalization. Over a period of time from 1870, the barbarian origin of Europe changed from having been a source of guilt and shame to being something honorable.

The right turn against India

A racial anthropology of India begins in 1840s. It was discovered that not all Indian languages were Sanskrit.  South Indians had Dravidian language roots. From this, John Stevenson developed the racial theory of Indian civilization. According to him Indian races were divided into Aryans and Dravidians. It was thought the caste society was developed as a protective mechanism against racial mixing. In other words, violence was justified as a means of maintaining racial purity. This theoretical framework served to legitimatize British colonialization. The relations of the British as a new invader into India was  only the latest version of a hierarchical order that had existed thousands of years before. These vital colonizers had no use for romanticizing India.

Arthur de Gobineau and Germany as the proposed new home of Indo-Europeans

Scholars like Gobineau, Chamberlain and Paul Broca described Indo-Europeans as blond, blue-eyed and tall with straight noses, a straight profile and long narrow skulls. In their hands, Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke IE languages but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteristics.

According to Gobineau, what happened in India was that white Aryans became brown and their culture and religion had degenerated into Hinduism. This racist historiography was also backed up by philological interpretations of India’s oldest source, the text the Rigveda as an interpretation of the description of the Aryan Dravidian conflict. Gobineau’s moral of history claimed that when whites racially mix their superior civilization degenerates Indo-Europeans were  looking  less and less like Indians and Iranians and more and more like Germans. Led by Renan, the culture that was Indo-European was no longer to be discovered in West Asia but ultimately in Germany. Wagner was friends with Gobineau and tried to make de Gobineau’s theories less pessimistic and more antisemitic. Wagner’s son-in-law was Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927) whose book in 1899 was the foundation text for the development of Nazi ideology.

Please see my table which compares the framework for the changing meaning of Indo-Europeans.

Changing Meaning of Indo-European –19th-20th Centuries

Second-Half of 19th century	Time period	Early 20th century
Rising bourgeoisie	Situation of the bourgeoisie	Declining Attempted imperialism
Liberal values and humanistic ideals of science	Political views	Neo-traditionalist ideas
No Anti-Semitic and sometimes anti-Christian but not connected to a racial ideology	Is there a racial ideology?	Yes. Connected to racial ideology John Stephenson on racial anthropology in India: Aryans vs Dravidians
Muller, Jones	Theoreticians	Renan, Stephenson (India)
They were heroic, idealistic free thinking and rational humanists who fought against despotic power and antiquated customs	The stories told of Indo-Europeans	Stories of how Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered dark primitive original population (Stephenson)
Civilized India, Iran	Where Indo-Europeans came from	Barbarian Germanic, Nordic
Comparative linguistics	What was used to measure differences?	Physical criteria – long, narrow skull, blond hair blue eyes Gobineau
Extraordinary language and culture	Why were Indo-Europeans successful?	(Violence) No racial mixing (Gobineau)
Fought against backward superstition	What did the Indo-Europeans do?	They were a regeneration and revitalizing growth movement
Originally monotheists Animism and polytheism is degenerate	Religious origin	Originally animists and polytheists Monotheists degenerative
Shameful for barbarians having destroyed ancient Rome	Attitude towards the barbarians	Necessary for clearing out the rot of modern life
Humble monotheists		Proud pagans who don’t bend their knees

The post Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Guest Post by Moon of Alabama

Stephen Byren writes, correctly, that the purpose of the Russian offensive towards Kharkiv is to disintegrate the Ukrainian army:

To my mind, Russia’s objective is to force Ukraine’s army to chase after invading Russian units. The idea is to cause heavy casualties on the Ukrainian side and, if all goes according to plan, either to split Ukraine’s army into two, or disintegrate it altogether.In such a manner the idea is not just to take territory but to destroy Ukraine’s ability to resist. There are many indicators that Russia is having success in the ongoing operation.

General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, (which includes foreign fighters and Nazis units,) agrees to that. He paints an bleak picture (archived):

Like most Ukrainian officials and military experts, General Budanov said he believes the Russian attacks in the northeast are intended to stretch Ukraine’s already thin reserves of soldiers and divert them from fighting elsewhere.That is exactly what is happening now, he acknowledged. He said the Ukrainian army was trying to redirect troops from other front line areas to shore up its defenses in the northeast, but that it had been difficult to find the personnel.

“All of our forces are either here or in Chasiv Yar,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian stronghold about 120 miles farther south that Russian troops have assaulted in recent weeks. “I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”

The Ukrainian military has pulled out parts of various brigades that are engaged in the east and is moving them north towards the Kharkiv region. This will be a hodgepodge of partly filled battalions without a unified command and with nothing left to stuff any holes elsewhere.

Budanov correctly fears that Russian can and will repeat this game in other places:

General Budanov said he expected the attacks in the Kharkiv region to last another three or four days, after which Russian forces are expected to make a hard push in the direction of Sumy, a city about 90 miles to the northwest of Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials have previously said that Russia had massed troops across the border from Sumy.Pavlo Velycho, a Ukrainian officer operating near the Russian border in the Sumy region, said that Russian shelling of the outskirts of Sumy had recently increased.

The Russian forces can easily progress because the money allocated for fortifications in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions was paid to fictitious companies without any trenches ever being build (machine translation):

Multi-million contracts for the construction of fortifications, for which they spent a total of 7 billion hryvnias there, were transferred by the Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars.
…
It so happened that the department of the Kharkiv OVA for defense purchases chose newly registered no-name firms and FOPs. Moreover, the owners of these firms do not resemble successful businessmen and businesswomen-they have dozens of court cases, from whiskey theft to domestic violence against their husband and mother, some of them are deprived of parental rights and have had enforcement proceedings for loans in banks.Another interesting detail-it seems that these beneficiaries do not even know that they are millionaires. After all, they continue to work in shifts” in the fields ” and factories.

The U.S. obviously fears that the Ukrainian army will not be able to hold its lines. Today Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived on an unannounced visit in Kiev to shore up moral, or probably to arrange for a change in Ukraine’s leadership:

Blinken, who arrived in Kyiv by train early on Tuesday morning, hopes to “send a strong signal of reassurance to the Ukrainians who are obviously in a very difficult moment,” said a U.S. official who briefed reporters traveling with Blinken on condition of anonymity.”The Secretary’s mission here is really to talk about how our supplemental assistance is going to be executed in a fashion to help shore up their defenses (and) enable them to increasingly take back the initiative on the battlefield,” the official said.
…
Blinken will reassure Ukrainian officials including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of enduring U.S. support and deliver a speech focused on Ukraine’s future, the official said.

Blinken and Biden need the Ukrainian army to hold until the November election is over. It is unlikely that they can achieve that aim. Some pause on the battlefield would now be convenient but that requires to get rid of Zelenski.

U.S. media are emphasizing the $60 billion package passed by Congress for Ukraine. They neglect to explain that only $14.5 billion of that is actually going to Ukraine, half of it to keep the state solvent and the other half in form of weapons Ukraine might buy once they are build. The other money is designated to refill the U.S. military stockpile.

The real military help for Ukraine during the next months, in form of artillery and anti-air ammunition, will be minuscule.

There is nothing in there that can defend against the FAB glide bombs the Russian military is using in ever growing numbers to break up Ukrainian positions. The last three days have each seen Ukrainian losses at about 1,500 per day – double the usual count – with most of them occurring on the eastern front, not in the Kharkiv direction.

Currently the replacement rate through Ukrainian mobilization is said to be only 25% of the losses that are actually occurring.

Everyone knows that the war is coming to an end. That there will be a victor, Russia, and a lot of looser. The U.S. as well as the EU are now trying to find a face saving way to acknowledge that without admitting it.

The easiest way will be to blame Ukraine, and especially its President Zelenski, for having not listened to western advice during some of the hotter phases of the war (Bakhmut etc). “We gave them a chance and they blew it,” will soon become the major tenor of official statements.

But in reality there never was a chance for Ukraine to defeat or even to weaken Russia. All numbers, capacities and people, pointed against that. Despite that fact it was pushed to its death by western delusion.

One hopes that its people, and others, will have learned from it.

Once they can turn the blue into red, all will be well. Understanding this graphic is so easy, a caveman could understand it. But not a liberal Biden voter or paid off politician. Whatever you do, follow the wisdom of Scott Adams:

“White people should get the hell away from black people.”

Via Western Rifle Shooters

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source:  blacklistednews Published: May 14, 2024 SOURCE: 2ND SMARTEST GUY IN THE WORLD The fast approaching Presidential election will be far more difficult to steal this time around, and thus will require ever more drastic measures to subvert the will of the voters. The 4th Branch of the United States Government, which happens to be the
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It was predictable [SEE HERE] and it happened exactly as predicted. BlackRock investment firm writes the regulatory and economic policy for Joe Biden’s administration. That’s the quid-pro-quo that maintains the Biden political financial operation. All of DC know it. No one does not know. The one’s who claim they do not know about it are […]

The post Joe Biden Announces Tariffs on Non-Existent Products from Non-Existent Origination Country – Here’s Why appeared first on The Last Refuge.

The special counsel's office 'twisted' information to falsely imply that former IRS agents Shapley and Ziegler were under investigation.

'In America, the Constitution gives the power to make laws to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable commissioners.'

Biden’s DOJ charged dozens of pro-life Americans but has repeatedly failed to bring the hammer down on pro-abortion lawbreakers.

Last Thursday, Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) teamed up with fellow Republican Senators Kevin Cramer (ND) and Marco Rubio (FL) to unveil the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) Act aimed at giving pregnant women a federally-backed “clearinghouse” of resources — called Pregnancy.gov — for “expecting and postpartum moms, as well as those with young children,” and create grants for caregiving organizations helping women enter the world of parenting.

Along with expanding child support to include a woman’s pregnancy, a press release from the senators said the MOMS Act would “provide critical support to women during typically challenging phases of motherhood – prenatal, postpartum, and early childhood development – and bolster access to resources and assistance to help mothers and their children thrive.”

Not surprisingly, the far-left, abortion-loving liberal media have decided to be as focused on defeating this pro-life bill with misinformation as they were about pushing women to murder their unborn children.

In story after story, the liberal media have claimed the bill would create a database of women currently pregnant for the federal government – in some liberal dystopia/twisted fantasy – to surveil women to prevent abortions. The problem? It’s all voluntary and shy from divulging one’s location.

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The Guardian went full send with a headline beyond parody: “Katie Britt proposes federal database to collect data on pregnant people; Republican US senator from Alabama best known for delivering widely ridiculed State of the Union speech in March”.

Writer Léonie Chao-Fong doubled down with a disregard for biology, claiming without evidence the bill “create[s] a federal database to collect data on pregnant people” by having them “enter their personal data and contact information.”

Chao-Fong also whined: “[t]he bill specifically forbids any entity that ‘performs, induces, refers for, or counsels in favor of abortions’ from being listed in the database, which would in effect eliminate swaths of OB-GYN services and sexual health clinics across the country.”

Yes, Léonie, the point is to give women facing sudden pregnancies options beyond abortion.

NBCNews.com and longtime Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen piled on in a story whining about the bill giving federal funds to pro-life pregnancy crisis centers and pedaled the lie about HHS becoming a surveillance agency

The tools at HuffPost did the same in a piece with the headline “Critics Rip Sen. Katie Britt For Celebrating Moms With ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Like Proposal” and hilariously then referred to women as “pregnant people”.

Yahoo! News promptly cross-posted this under the same headline.

Salon and Raw Story weren’t going to be left out either. Cue the laugh tracks for the latter’s headline: “Katie Britt shredded for ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-type proposal to ‘register’ pregnant women”.

At Salon, they melted down at women even being told groups that support women and babies exit: “The bill also outlines the creation of a database of ‘pregnancy support centers,’ or crisis centers, which critics say provide women with misleading information in an effort to keep them from having abortions.”

Someone call GLAAD on HuffPost, NBC, Raw Story, and the like for using the term “pregnant women!”

Now, for the facts. Here was a piece from the (now digital-only) Alabama newspaper conglomerate AL.com:

Britt spokesman Sean Ross said users are not required to register or log in to the site to search for resources. The website will not ask for the user’s pregnancy status or for personally identifiable information.

“These social media posts are intentionally, flagrantly false,” Ross said.

Website users could voluntarily enter their contact information if they wanted personal follow up from a staff member at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Those services would also be available to friends and family members who are not pregnant if an individual was worried about sharing her information with the website. The website would invite users to take an assessment and provide consent to be contacted.

The website would not require people to take the assessment to receive more information about local resources, Ross said.

“Through the website, anyone can view the relevant resources in a given locale without disclosing any personally identifiable information to the government,” Ross said.

The headline, however, only met Britt halfway with a scoffing headline: “Claims that bill would create registry of pregnant women ‘flagrantly false,’ says staff for Alabama Sen. Katie Britt.”

LifeNews Note: Curtis Houck writes for Newsbusters, where this column originally appeared.

The post Pro-Life Senator Launches New Bill to Help Pregnant Women in Need appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The West has long been obsessed with China. In the 19th century, the Middle Kingdom was dominated and debauched by Western trading companies, backed by Western militaries, pushing drugs into China. Remember the Opium Wars? Those uppity Chinese had the effrontery to destroy the British India Company’s opium and try to eradicate addiction. That was China’s century of humiliation.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. China has roared past the collective West in so many metrics. The global industrial base has shifted to Asia. Deadly fentanyl coming into the United States used to flow from China, but now they make the stuff in Mexico and ship it north.

For years, the Chinese economy has been significantly larger than that of the US in the benchmark that counts: purchasing power parity. That is the “measure of the price of specific goods… to compare the absolute purchasing power of the countries’ currencies.”

Conventional wisdom is that as China rises, the US fades. On the surface, that seems to be the case: the US wallows in debt and endless wars while China makes friends through the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS and other mechanisms.

But not so fast. Remember that old saw, “demography is destiny”? The future belongs to those who show up, and by every projection, there will be a lot fewer Chinese around in the coming decades.

China falling?

America’s pre-eminent imperial mouthpiece, Foreign Affairs, just posted Nicholas Eberstadt’s thought-provoking “East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse: And How It Will Reshape World Politics”. Has Mr Eberstadt derailed the mythos of long-term Asian dominance?

As of 2023, Japan[’s]… childbearing levels are over 40 percent below the replacement rate. China’s childbearing levels are almost 50 percent below the replacement rate; if that trend continues, each rising Chinese generation will be barely half as large as the one before it. Much the same is true for Taiwan.

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South Korea’s 2023 birth level was an amazing 65 percent below the replacement rate — the lowest ever for a national population in peacetime. If it does not change, in two generations South Korea will have just 12 women of childbearing age for every 100 in the country today.

East Asia… is set to shrink by two percent between 2020 and 2035. Between 2035 and 2050, it will contract by another six percent — and thereafter by another seven percent for each successive decade (if current trends hold).

If projections hold, China’s working-age population will be more than 20 percent smaller in 2050 than in 2020. Japan’s and Taiwan’s will be about 30 percent smaller, and South Korea will be over 35 percent smaller.

Grim. The Asians know it. Eberstadt says that East Asia “is set on a course of decline that extends as far as the demographer’s eye can see.” Sadly, he is correct.

The Wisconsin professor

Though his field is obstetrics and gynecology, one of the most astute sinologists around is University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Yi Fuxian. Prof. Yi is as pro-Chinese as they come, but not a fan of China’s government. His book Big Country with an Empty Nest warns about China’s impending demographic implosion.

LifeNews Note: Louis T. March has a background in government, business, and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author, and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. This column originally appeared at MercatorNet.

The post China’s Massive Underpopulation Crisis: China’s Birth Rates are 50% Below Replacement Rate appeared first on LifeNews.com.