This is something everyone knows. Yet many people, and especially Whites, pretend at least some of the time that they don’t know who’s White, or equivalently, what White means. Worse, some pretend they do know, but that it means nothing or isn’t important to them.
The meaning of White is significant. It has existential, transcendental value for Whites.
Based on the negative, adversarial attitudes towards Whites and Whiteness reviewed in previous podcasts we could say Whites are:
- the people who aren’t supposed to identify as a group, because we’re responsible for oppressing every other group
- the people who aren’t supposed to think about who we are, except to take the blame for everyone else’s problems
- the people who are supposed to open our societies to everyone else, because we don’t want to be stupid/crazy/evil “racists”
Many Whites have internalized this negative view of Whiteness. But this is not satisfying. It’s not positive. It’s not healthy.
So who is White? The short answer is that White means European, people of European heritage. This begs the question: Who is European?
So a better understanding of Whiteness requires a deeper understanding of European history. But as we’ve seen, what is taught in government schools and corporate media is poisonously anti-White. What Whites need is a narrative and explanation which incorporates a racial understanding, recounted from a positive, sympathetic point of view.
I begin an exploration of this longer answer by reading a brief essay by Irmin Vinson, Racial Nationalism and the Aryans. The sub-title is, Who Were the Aryans?
The Aryans were semi-nomadic Nordic Whites, perhaps located originally on the steppes of southern Russia and Central Asia, who spoke the parent language of the various Indo-European languages.
Latin, Greek, Hittite, Sanskrit, French, German, Latvian, English, Spanish, Russian etc. are all Indo-European languages; Indo-European, or more properly Proto-Indo-European (PIE), is the lost ancestral language from which those languages ultimately derive. The “Proto” indicates that the grammar and vocabulary of this long extinct language, probably spoken up until 3000 BC, are a hypothetical reconstruction by modern philologists [philology = the study of literary texts and written records]. Just as Romance languages like Italian and Spanish derive from Latin, so Latin derives from PIE.
Indo-European philology traditionally used “Aryan” both to denote a people, understood racially or ethnically, and the language group itself (“Aryan speech”), irrespective of the race or ethnicity of the people speaking its various branches. In the wake of National Socialist Germany’s defeat, the term fell out of general scholarly use in both senses, and “Indo-European” (IE) became the preferred designation of the language group, “Indo-Europeans” of both the people who occupied the original Aryan homeland and their descendants, who gradually spread out across Europe, much of the Indian sub-continent, and parts of the Near East. Racial nationalists are not, of course, obliged to adopt the timid PC-lexicon of contemporary scholarship, but we should be aware of imprecision of “Aryan” as a racial or ethnic classification.
Arya, meaning “noble,” appears in various Indo-European languages. Its plural form (Aryas=”nobles”) was probably the name the Aryans used to describe themselves prior to their dispersal, and it may survive in Eire (Ireland) and certainly survives in Iran (Airyanam vaejo=”realm of the Aryans”). The discovery of thousands of such cognate words in widely separated languages, along with similar grammatical structures, led philologists to conclude, early in the nineteenth century, that most European languages had evolved from a common proto-language spoken millennia ago by a distinct people who gradually left their original homeland in a series of migrations, carrying their language with them.
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The ancient Iranians didn’t call their country Airyânâm Vaeja, but Airyânâm Khshathra. The name Airyânâm Vaeja occurs in the Avesta and designates the original homeland of the Iranians North of Iran. The meaning of Vaeja is moot but some translate it with “expanse” others with “seed”. Airyânâm Khshathra means “kingdom of the Aryans”, and this is the term the Iranians used for Iran proper. The term became Erân Shahr in Middle Persian, later abbreviated to Erân.
The Irish name Éire is not derived from Arya but from the name of the Gaelic goddess Eriu ( see Wikipedia : Éire).
Of all the Indo-European peoples only the Iranians and Indians called themselves Arya. To use this name for all IE peoples is as incorrect as to call them all “Celts” or “Slavs”.
It is doubtful whether the original Indo-Europeans were all blond and blue-eyed,though some probably were.
The undivided Indo-Europeans are identified with the Kurgan culture in the region North of the Black See.( Kurgan : “burial mound”)
The fact that there is a kinship between Semitic languages and Indo-European and that the oldest testimonies of IE are found in Hittite in Turkey does raise the possibility that the original homeland of the IE peoples was in Turkey. They probably crossed the Caucasus to settle North of the Black See and not via Iran as your map suggests (there are some elements of North Caucasian in IE).
Europeans are not the direct descendants of the invading Indo-Europeans but in various proportions a mixture of Cro-Magnons, Alpines, Mediterraneans and Indo-Europeans. To call Europeans “Aryans” therefore would be a double mistake.
>>It is doubtful whether the original Indo-Europeans were all blond and blue-eyed,though some probably were.<<
Franklin… I would wonder since brown eyed DNA is dominant over blue eyes that the great majority of upper Europeans were indeed blue eyed? And then over the centuries with the minor mixing with brown eyes, we are seeing a lot of Whites now with brown eyes?