Aryan  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 17:05, 2 March 2009

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Refugees from Nazism, Holocaust

1. In theosophy, Germanic mysticism and Nazism: A member of an (alleged) master race comprised of non-Jewish Caucasians, especially those of Nordic or Germanic descent.
   • 1925–26, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translation from German to English by James Murphy, 1939

     This short sketch of the changes that take place among those races that are only the depositories of a culture also furnishes a picture of the development and the activity and the disappearance of those who are the true founders of culture on this earth, namely the Aryans themselves.

2. in neo-Nazi or white supremacist ideology: A person of Caucasian ethnicity; a white non-Jew.

Usage notes

• In popular conception, the Aryan racial type is marked by having blond hair and blue eyes. These are not criteria of any of the technical racial definitions.
• Using the technical meanings of the term ‘Aryan’ (Indo-Iranian, Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European, or a subdivision of the Caucasian race) could be misleading and dangerous, as the Nazi and neo-Nazi ideological usages, with their connotations, are the only widely understood meanings of the term in modern English.
• Neo-Nazi users generally do not intend the term to be pejorative, however, it can be taken as such outside of the neo-Nazi community, because of the term’s heavy use by and association with the Nazis; the implication is that non-Aryans are inferior. The word is highly-charged, because this thinking is widely considered to have lead to the Holocaust.
• Due to the fact that the racial senses of the term are, outside of academic contexts and historical or ethnographic discussions, used primarily by racists of Caucasian ethnicity, the term is sometimes used by non-Nazi speakers as a euphemism for ‘White racist’ (see the talk page for an example scenario).
• Today, the term ‘Aryan’ is used primarily by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or in discussing the ideology and racial theories of Nazism, a mid-twentieth-century racist political movement that considered Aryans (in the first sense) to be the master race, neo-Nazism, and other white supremacist movements and organizations. The term is therefore strongly associated with such ideologies, to the point that it is sometimes euphemistically used to refer to or describe them. Because of this, and because the term carries a strong emotional charge, the technical senses are perhaps best avoided outside of academic contexts where they are certain to be understood, and the racial senses connected with Nazism are perhaps best avoided altogether.