The Aryan Ideal: From Ben Franklin to National Socialism
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 7:06 pm
The Aryan Ideal: From Ben Franklin to National Socialism
by Thomas Dalton, Ph.D.
In my recent essay “Blond hair, blue eyes: Some thoughts on the Aryan ideal,” I examined the physiology and history of the classic Nordic features. I argued that these hallmarks of beauty have been acknowledged and respected for millennia and around the world, and thus constitute a kind of universal aesthetic standard or benchmark for humanity. The Nordic/Aryan people furthermore have been proven to have a number of other virtues, including higher intelligence, higher moral and ethical standards, and a greater capacity for building cultures and civilizations.[1] It was not without good reason that Plato called light-skinned people “children of the gods”; it was not without good reason that Pindar called the northerners “a sacred race.”[2] I concluded that the White race was the most beautiful and the most virtuous on Earth, based not on my own biased opinion but on testimony over centuries, scientific research, and on commonly-held views around the world today. Though representing only some 10 percent of humanity, Whites have good reason to be proud. We are exceptional, by most any measure.
Whites used to be proud. They used to speak openly and clearly about their love of their own, about their sense of pride, about their hopes and dreams for a great future for their race. Take, for example, that wise and insightful Founding Father, Ben Franklin. In 1751 he wrote a short essay entitled “Observations concerning the increase of mankind.” In it, he expresses concern about the need to fill up the “empty” lands of the nascent American colony—there being very little talk of independence yet. (This was still five years before the Seven Years’ War, a conflict that set the stage for the later American revolution.) Franklin clearly understood the tradeoffs between native-born North European-American natural increases and the “importation” of foreigners of other ethnicities and races:
The Importation of Foreigners into a Country that has as many Inhabitants as the present Employments and Provisions for Subsistence will bear, will be, in the End, no Increase of People—unless the New Comers have more Industry and Frugality than the Natives [Whites], and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the Country; but they will gradually eat the Natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in Foreigners to fill up any occasional Vacancy in a Country; for such Vacancy will soon be filled by natural Generation. Who can now find the Vacancy made in Sweden, France, or other Warlike Nations, by the Plague of Heroism, 40 years ago; … or in Guinea, by 100 Years Exportation of Slaves, that has blacken’d half [of] America? …
Thus there are suppos’d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho’ ‘tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea,) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more. … This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will, in another Century, be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. …
And since Detachments of English from Britain, sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors [i.e., Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion?
Clearly there was no love lost here for the Germans; the mere fact of their foreign language was enough to hinder true integration. Franklin then closes with these stunning thoughts:
Which leads me to add one Remark, that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny [i.e., light brown or yellowish]; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so [i.e., Native Americans]. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet…why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red [i.e. rosy-cheeked]? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.[3]
A truly remarkable statement by the 45-year-old Franklin, and one we are not likely to see quoted in a textbook of American history. Given the amazing opportunity of a vast, productive, and largely open land, why, asks Franklin, would we import non-Whites? The creators of the American colony were Whites from England, who included a healthy admixture of “Saxons” (including Frisians, Angles, and Jutes) from the very north of mainland Europe—people who shared much genetic heritage with the Nordic Scandinavians. Why dilute the “very small” number of true Whites in the world with yet more dark-skinned races? If only we all were “partial to the complexion of our (native) countrymen”! Here is true pride in oneself and one’s people, something utterly lacking in present-day Whites—thanks in part to relentless bashing by Jews and other PC-liberals. Today, Whites are becoming a minority in their native lands; “I could wish their numbers were increased”—indeed.
Back in Europe, a few brave individuals were proclaiming White virtues, including White/Aryan beauty. As I mentioned in my previous essay, the earliest prominent advocate was probably Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in his 1851 work Parerga and Paralipomena, wrote that “The highest civilization and culture…are found exclusively among the white races… [N]ecessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and perfect all the arts…” This was followed shortly by Arthur de Gobineau’s influential work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1855), which made an explicit and extended case for the superiority of the Germanic/Aryan people.
Enter Nietzsche
By 1883, Friedrich Nietzsche had published his great work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There he famously introduced the idea of the Übermensch—the overman, the super-man, the being who would succeed today’s human in the course of evolution. “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome” (p. 124).[4] And a few lines later: “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” The precise nature of the Übermensch is never clear, unfortunately, and he is certainly never described as white or Aryan. Nor is he a conqueror; he is, to be sure, “the lightning out of the dark cloud of man” (p. 132), but again, we are unclear of the implications. The overman is associated with “rainbows” and “bridges” (e.g., p. 163), and thus is clearly a transitional figure, a ‘next phase’ in some sense. But he is no world-destroyer, and is nothing to be feared. In fact, he does not yet exist on the planet; he is still coming, still in the future. “Never yet has there been an overman” (p. 205). He is an aspiration, not a reality—certainly no “master race,” certainly no proto-Nazi figurehead.
Nietzsche wrote little more on the Übermensch, and in truth, little at all on race, even the White race. Even Aryans are barely mentioned—though with two notable exceptions. In 1887, he released his book On the Genealogy of Morals, which contains a striking analysis of the origin of contemporary Judeo-Christian morality. Early in the book, Nietzsche makes some preliminary comments on the notions of good and evil as he contrasts the indigenous “pre-Aryan” people of Italy with the “blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race” that arrived from the north.[5] “The Celts,” he adds, “were definitely a blond race.” A few lines later, we find the one and only appearance in Nietzsche of the dreaded word: “who can say whether modern democracy…does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror- and master-race, the Aryan, is not succumbing psychologically, too?” Here, for the only time, we find him explicitly describing the Aryan as the “conquerer- (Eroberer-) and master-race (Herren-rasse).” Clearly, though, he is describing a historical reality; this is no prescription for the present or future. If anything, he is implying that modern democracy has defeated any remnant of the old conquering Aryan.
Nietzsche picks up this same theme a few sections later, where he writes, rather notoriously, of the “blond beast” (blonde Bestie). The phrase occurs three times in section 11: “One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly, in search of spoil and victory” (p. 40). He then speaks of “the raging of the blond Germanic beast” in reference to German aggression over past centuries. Finally, and most ominously: “One may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blond beast at the core of all noble races, and in being on one’s guard against it” (p. 43). It would seem, then, that Nietzsche locates an aggressive core within the historically conquering peoples of the world—which is undoubtedly true, given their various invasions and successes. In a European context, the successful invaders would often have been the Nordic/Aryan blonds from the north, hence the blond beast—the Viking, if you will—at the heart of the traditionally invading peoples.
Is this bad? Is this evil? Hardly. First, it is simply an acknowledgement of historical reality. Second, it suggests that something of the lion-hearted persists in the northern Europeans. If so, what of it? Perhaps we ought to treat them with respect, if true!
The second exception on the topic of Aryans comes in one of Nietzsche’s final works, Twilight of the Idols (1888), where he has some important words to offer on the Aryans of India vis-à-vis the supposed Aryanism of Christianity. In India, the noble Aryans, the upper-caste Brahmins, stood in stark contrast to the lower ranks, especially to the “chandala”—the untouchables. In India, everyone understood the order of rank, and all knew where they stood. Christianity, by contrast, claims to raise up the lowest of the low, the untouchable chandalas, to turn even them into the “beloved of God”—and indeed, the favored of God.
For Nietzsche, this was sheer nonsense. Even more: it was sheer Jewish nonsense. The Jew, Paul, created his universalist church in the manufactured image of a perhaps mythical, and certainly dead, rabbi named Jesus. As a leading chandala, Paul hated the nobles: the Romans, the Aryans. It was Paul’s hatred of Rome that sparked the creation of the Christian religion. As a result, Christianity is the enemy of Aryanism; it is the most anti-noble, “anti-Aryan” religion of all time:
These regulations [of the Hindu Manu] are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial—we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this “humaneness” has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, of privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love. (VII.4, pp. 504–505)
What better cover for this religion of hatred—hatred of the noble, hatred of the Aryans—than to cast it as a “religion of love”? Paul: that master-hater and master-deceiver of all time.[6]
---
Continued
by Thomas Dalton, Ph.D.
In my recent essay “Blond hair, blue eyes: Some thoughts on the Aryan ideal,” I examined the physiology and history of the classic Nordic features. I argued that these hallmarks of beauty have been acknowledged and respected for millennia and around the world, and thus constitute a kind of universal aesthetic standard or benchmark for humanity. The Nordic/Aryan people furthermore have been proven to have a number of other virtues, including higher intelligence, higher moral and ethical standards, and a greater capacity for building cultures and civilizations.[1] It was not without good reason that Plato called light-skinned people “children of the gods”; it was not without good reason that Pindar called the northerners “a sacred race.”[2] I concluded that the White race was the most beautiful and the most virtuous on Earth, based not on my own biased opinion but on testimony over centuries, scientific research, and on commonly-held views around the world today. Though representing only some 10 percent of humanity, Whites have good reason to be proud. We are exceptional, by most any measure.
Whites used to be proud. They used to speak openly and clearly about their love of their own, about their sense of pride, about their hopes and dreams for a great future for their race. Take, for example, that wise and insightful Founding Father, Ben Franklin. In 1751 he wrote a short essay entitled “Observations concerning the increase of mankind.” In it, he expresses concern about the need to fill up the “empty” lands of the nascent American colony—there being very little talk of independence yet. (This was still five years before the Seven Years’ War, a conflict that set the stage for the later American revolution.) Franklin clearly understood the tradeoffs between native-born North European-American natural increases and the “importation” of foreigners of other ethnicities and races:
The Importation of Foreigners into a Country that has as many Inhabitants as the present Employments and Provisions for Subsistence will bear, will be, in the End, no Increase of People—unless the New Comers have more Industry and Frugality than the Natives [Whites], and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the Country; but they will gradually eat the Natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in Foreigners to fill up any occasional Vacancy in a Country; for such Vacancy will soon be filled by natural Generation. Who can now find the Vacancy made in Sweden, France, or other Warlike Nations, by the Plague of Heroism, 40 years ago; … or in Guinea, by 100 Years Exportation of Slaves, that has blacken’d half [of] America? …
Thus there are suppos’d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho’ ‘tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea,) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more. … This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will, in another Century, be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. …
And since Detachments of English from Britain, sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors [i.e., Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion?
Clearly there was no love lost here for the Germans; the mere fact of their foreign language was enough to hinder true integration. Franklin then closes with these stunning thoughts:
Which leads me to add one Remark, that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny [i.e., light brown or yellowish]; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so [i.e., Native Americans]. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet…why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red [i.e. rosy-cheeked]? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.[3]
A truly remarkable statement by the 45-year-old Franklin, and one we are not likely to see quoted in a textbook of American history. Given the amazing opportunity of a vast, productive, and largely open land, why, asks Franklin, would we import non-Whites? The creators of the American colony were Whites from England, who included a healthy admixture of “Saxons” (including Frisians, Angles, and Jutes) from the very north of mainland Europe—people who shared much genetic heritage with the Nordic Scandinavians. Why dilute the “very small” number of true Whites in the world with yet more dark-skinned races? If only we all were “partial to the complexion of our (native) countrymen”! Here is true pride in oneself and one’s people, something utterly lacking in present-day Whites—thanks in part to relentless bashing by Jews and other PC-liberals. Today, Whites are becoming a minority in their native lands; “I could wish their numbers were increased”—indeed.
Back in Europe, a few brave individuals were proclaiming White virtues, including White/Aryan beauty. As I mentioned in my previous essay, the earliest prominent advocate was probably Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in his 1851 work Parerga and Paralipomena, wrote that “The highest civilization and culture…are found exclusively among the white races… [N]ecessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and perfect all the arts…” This was followed shortly by Arthur de Gobineau’s influential work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1855), which made an explicit and extended case for the superiority of the Germanic/Aryan people.
Enter Nietzsche
By 1883, Friedrich Nietzsche had published his great work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There he famously introduced the idea of the Übermensch—the overman, the super-man, the being who would succeed today’s human in the course of evolution. “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome” (p. 124).[4] And a few lines later: “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” The precise nature of the Übermensch is never clear, unfortunately, and he is certainly never described as white or Aryan. Nor is he a conqueror; he is, to be sure, “the lightning out of the dark cloud of man” (p. 132), but again, we are unclear of the implications. The overman is associated with “rainbows” and “bridges” (e.g., p. 163), and thus is clearly a transitional figure, a ‘next phase’ in some sense. But he is no world-destroyer, and is nothing to be feared. In fact, he does not yet exist on the planet; he is still coming, still in the future. “Never yet has there been an overman” (p. 205). He is an aspiration, not a reality—certainly no “master race,” certainly no proto-Nazi figurehead.
Nietzsche wrote little more on the Übermensch, and in truth, little at all on race, even the White race. Even Aryans are barely mentioned—though with two notable exceptions. In 1887, he released his book On the Genealogy of Morals, which contains a striking analysis of the origin of contemporary Judeo-Christian morality. Early in the book, Nietzsche makes some preliminary comments on the notions of good and evil as he contrasts the indigenous “pre-Aryan” people of Italy with the “blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race” that arrived from the north.[5] “The Celts,” he adds, “were definitely a blond race.” A few lines later, we find the one and only appearance in Nietzsche of the dreaded word: “who can say whether modern democracy…does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror- and master-race, the Aryan, is not succumbing psychologically, too?” Here, for the only time, we find him explicitly describing the Aryan as the “conquerer- (Eroberer-) and master-race (Herren-rasse).” Clearly, though, he is describing a historical reality; this is no prescription for the present or future. If anything, he is implying that modern democracy has defeated any remnant of the old conquering Aryan.
Nietzsche picks up this same theme a few sections later, where he writes, rather notoriously, of the “blond beast” (blonde Bestie). The phrase occurs three times in section 11: “One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly, in search of spoil and victory” (p. 40). He then speaks of “the raging of the blond Germanic beast” in reference to German aggression over past centuries. Finally, and most ominously: “One may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blond beast at the core of all noble races, and in being on one’s guard against it” (p. 43). It would seem, then, that Nietzsche locates an aggressive core within the historically conquering peoples of the world—which is undoubtedly true, given their various invasions and successes. In a European context, the successful invaders would often have been the Nordic/Aryan blonds from the north, hence the blond beast—the Viking, if you will—at the heart of the traditionally invading peoples.
Is this bad? Is this evil? Hardly. First, it is simply an acknowledgement of historical reality. Second, it suggests that something of the lion-hearted persists in the northern Europeans. If so, what of it? Perhaps we ought to treat them with respect, if true!
The second exception on the topic of Aryans comes in one of Nietzsche’s final works, Twilight of the Idols (1888), where he has some important words to offer on the Aryans of India vis-à-vis the supposed Aryanism of Christianity. In India, the noble Aryans, the upper-caste Brahmins, stood in stark contrast to the lower ranks, especially to the “chandala”—the untouchables. In India, everyone understood the order of rank, and all knew where they stood. Christianity, by contrast, claims to raise up the lowest of the low, the untouchable chandalas, to turn even them into the “beloved of God”—and indeed, the favored of God.
For Nietzsche, this was sheer nonsense. Even more: it was sheer Jewish nonsense. The Jew, Paul, created his universalist church in the manufactured image of a perhaps mythical, and certainly dead, rabbi named Jesus. As a leading chandala, Paul hated the nobles: the Romans, the Aryans. It was Paul’s hatred of Rome that sparked the creation of the Christian religion. As a result, Christianity is the enemy of Aryanism; it is the most anti-noble, “anti-Aryan” religion of all time:
These regulations [of the Hindu Manu] are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial—we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this “humaneness” has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, of privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love. (VII.4, pp. 504–505)
What better cover for this religion of hatred—hatred of the noble, hatred of the Aryans—than to cast it as a “religion of love”? Paul: that master-hater and master-deceiver of all time.[6]
---
Continued