![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I <3 Wikipedia
May. 9th, 2009 10:46 pmSeems like every 6 months or so, I get on a different kick... something that interests me that I read up on in my free time, usually on Wikipedia. The past 6 months seem to be dedicated to some combination of history, anthropology, and linguistics.
I checked out a book from the library a while ago called "Paris in 1919" and read different parts of it here and there, picking up a lot of history I didn't know. It was a great place to start, because it was the time when all of the world leaders got together and sat down in Paris (after WWI) and decided where to redraw the lines of various countries, which ethnic groups deserved to get a country to themselves, what sorts of restraints to place on Germany in the unlikely event that they should try to take over the world again (not so great job of that, eh?). And as if that doesn't make it an interesting enough time, it was also just after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and nobody had a clue what was going on there or who was really in charge... at first they were just seen as kind of a group of terrorists who took over, but toward the end they started debating whether to actually invite them to Paris to come to the conference and represent Russia... since they seemed to have demonstrated fairly stable control by then. Eventually, of course, they became known as the USSR. Yugoslavia was created out of a bunch of different slavic peoples from various Baltic countries (those who spoke a "south slav" language), and Zionism which had started as just a pipe dream for radically nationalistic Jews became a serious movement as the UK officially agreed to support the creation of a "nation of Isreal" in Palestine (although not necessarily a state, yet).
After returning that, I checked out one called "FDR" which is about FDR's whole life... unfortunately, that hasn't caught my interest quite as much yet though. Maybe I need to give it a rest and come back to it in a few years. What has seemed to have caught my interest though is lots of other stuff I've been reading on Wikipedia, mostly surrounding Nazis, Jews, race, language, and ancient civilizations. I know that a lot of this stuff (and the stuff I mention above) is probably common knowledge to more history/anthropology type people on my friends list... but I have been fascinated by it for the past month or two, so if anyone has anything interesting to add please do.
The main thing, I guess, that I wanted to try to understand, was where the concept of an "Aryan race" came from and what it meant to the National Socialists. This took me down the rabbit hole to loads of different related topics. The first thing I realized I needed a background understanding of was where different languages come from. I never knew before where the term "antisemitism" came from... I knew that it meant anti-Jewish but that was the extent of my knowledge. Turns out, it makes both more sense and less sense once you start looking at the tree of languages in the world.
One of the most fascinating things for me was looking through the entire Indo-European language tree, and then realizing that Indo-European is but a fraction of the languages spoken in the world (maybe a third? I can't remember), not even as big as Sino-Tibetan, the langauge family Chinese comes from. Nevertheless, looking inside Indo-European really gives you a sense of how connected seemingly totally different groups in the world are in their ancestory. For instance, I have always wondered where on earth the term "Latino" (or "Latin" America in general) came from, if Latin was the language spoken in ancient Rome, or the language that's only still used to name plants or in catholic churches. Well, it turns out that Romance is one of the brances of Indo-European langauges, it's the branch of languages derived from "Vulgar Latin", and includes Italian, French, Spanish, and Portugese. Another branch is "Germanic", the languages that dervied from Proto-Germanic, where German, English, and Dutch came from (although modern english seems to me to borrow just as much from romance languages, but maybe it's my imagination). Anyway, at some point a French scholar came along and made a comment that South and Central America seemed to be more aligned with "Latin Europe" (Europeans who spoke romance languages, namely France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) whereas North America seemed more aligned with Germanic Europe (Germany, Austria, the UK, Scandinavia, etc.). At some point after that, the term "Latin America" stuck and here we are today. Anyway, I never knew that but thought that was really neat.
Continuing in my search to figure out where the Nazi ideas about race came from, here is a map of where different language groups are spoken today:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families
Notice that there is a pink region stretching from Iran, through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India where "Indo-Iranian" languages are spoken. This is one branch of Indo-European. There are about 10 branches, one of them being Romance which I already mentioned, another being Helenistic (Greek), another being Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc.)... curiously, Albania and Armenia each get their own branch of Indo-European to themselves... must have been isolated for a long time! The Indo-Iranian branch can be broken into Indo-Aryan and Iranian. The Iranian branch is where Persian came from, and the Indo-Aryan branch is where Sanskrit came from. I think originally "Aryan" referred to all Indo-Iranian languages, because there's a self-identifying word in Sanskrit *and* a self-identifying word in Persian (or some predecessor to it? I forget) that sounds like "Aryan". Indeed, the modern name for Persia is "Iran" which is derived from the word "Aryan". But the real mind-boggling thing is... if Aryan refers to people who settled Iran and northern India (and in between) a long time ago... what does it have to do with Nazis? Well, apparently, it was one mistake after another, and I still don't fully understand the progression. But basically, there were a lot of sketchy European race theorists who built off of each other, with progressively more racist theories, and eventually the Nazis just took what were the popular racist theories of the time and used it for propaganda. But the first mistake was deciding that all Indo-European people must have originally called themselves "Aryans", so the name came to mean all Indo-European people. But then, there was this whole Nordic/Teutonic movement where various Germanic European scholars started suggesting that the original Aryans were from Scandinavia, settled Germany and Austria first, and then went down into Persia and India... but after settling India they began to mix with the non Indo-Europeans from southern India and become impure... supposedly the remnant of the original pure "Aryan race" was still in the Germanic regions. It's amazing how far down these weird wrong hypotheses they went... one assumption building off of another. But one interesting side effect of the Nazi fascination with "Aryans" and it's original association with northern India... is that they chose as their symbol an ancient Hindu symbol, the Swastika. Not only that, but there was a big Vedic mysticism subculture within the Nazis (like Alfred Rosenberg)... another thing I find bizarre and amazing. Apparently, Hitler himself was not much of a fan of eastern religion, and for the most part he advocated a version of Christianity the Nazi's called "positive Christianity" which recast Christ as a powerful figure (rather than a humble figure) who transcended the meek "slave morality" of the Jews. Although he seemed perfectly tolerant towards any religions (as long as they weren't Semetic) and cared more about politics and race than about spirituality. Speaking of the word "Semetic"...
Stepping back from the entire Indo-European language tree, another category on par with Indo-European is Afro-Asiatic (yellow region on the map above)... languages originating in northern africa and the middle east. The largest branch of this is the "Semetic" languages, notably Arabic and Hebrew. I always found it strange how members of the KKK and neo-Nazis could hate not only black people but Jews who seemed to me to be totally different ethnic groups... but I guess at least there is some loose connection if they both had ancestors who spoke Afro-Asiatic languges. Another interesting tie is the Rastafarians, who apparently believe that the Isrealites were dark skinned and originally from Ethiopia... they still speak of "Zion" but to them it does not mean Jerusalem. Of course, everyone, including Indo-European, is from Africa at some point, as far as I understand it. But for some reason, the Nazis made this huge distinction between speakers of Indo-European languages and speakers of Semetic languages. Ironically, some neo-Nazis today have openly requested an alliance with Al-Qaeda to help fight Isreal... if only they read their own propaganda, you would think they would realize that Arabs are just as "Semetic" as the Jews =) At any rate, my guess is that all of the posturing and bullshit about language and ancestors was just an elaborate excuse the Nazis used to dehumanize a particular subgroup of the population in Germany at the time. It made the whole thing seem more legitimate to them, but really it was the same type of good-old-fashioned "hate anyone in your neighborhood who looks or acts differently from you" that goes on when just about any different ethnic groups try to live with each other for a long time... they just took it a few steps further.
Now one thing I have still not succeeded in understanding, despite reading several Wikipedia pages on it, is how the hell white Europeans and North Americans ended up being called "Caucasians". Apparently, it has something to do with the Caucasus region where the Caucus mountains lie (parts of Russia, Gerogia, Azerbaijan, Turkey), but what I don't understand is that none of the people who lived there seem to have anything to do with the people who today are called Caucasian (presumably me, or at least that's what I usually check on the box)... for example, on this map, it lists "Caucasian people" and "Indo European people" separately, and the only Indo Europeans listed are Armenian, Greek, Iranian, and Slavic. But the Caucasians listed (which presumably were not even Indo European at all, so would have been the types that Nazis wanted to throw into the ovens?) are Georgians and various ethnic groups I've never heard of. So what gives? Anyone know the story of how "Caucasian" came to mean what it does on an affirmative action questionaire today?
I checked out a book from the library a while ago called "Paris in 1919" and read different parts of it here and there, picking up a lot of history I didn't know. It was a great place to start, because it was the time when all of the world leaders got together and sat down in Paris (after WWI) and decided where to redraw the lines of various countries, which ethnic groups deserved to get a country to themselves, what sorts of restraints to place on Germany in the unlikely event that they should try to take over the world again (not so great job of that, eh?). And as if that doesn't make it an interesting enough time, it was also just after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and nobody had a clue what was going on there or who was really in charge... at first they were just seen as kind of a group of terrorists who took over, but toward the end they started debating whether to actually invite them to Paris to come to the conference and represent Russia... since they seemed to have demonstrated fairly stable control by then. Eventually, of course, they became known as the USSR. Yugoslavia was created out of a bunch of different slavic peoples from various Baltic countries (those who spoke a "south slav" language), and Zionism which had started as just a pipe dream for radically nationalistic Jews became a serious movement as the UK officially agreed to support the creation of a "nation of Isreal" in Palestine (although not necessarily a state, yet).
After returning that, I checked out one called "FDR" which is about FDR's whole life... unfortunately, that hasn't caught my interest quite as much yet though. Maybe I need to give it a rest and come back to it in a few years. What has seemed to have caught my interest though is lots of other stuff I've been reading on Wikipedia, mostly surrounding Nazis, Jews, race, language, and ancient civilizations. I know that a lot of this stuff (and the stuff I mention above) is probably common knowledge to more history/anthropology type people on my friends list... but I have been fascinated by it for the past month or two, so if anyone has anything interesting to add please do.
The main thing, I guess, that I wanted to try to understand, was where the concept of an "Aryan race" came from and what it meant to the National Socialists. This took me down the rabbit hole to loads of different related topics. The first thing I realized I needed a background understanding of was where different languages come from. I never knew before where the term "antisemitism" came from... I knew that it meant anti-Jewish but that was the extent of my knowledge. Turns out, it makes both more sense and less sense once you start looking at the tree of languages in the world.
One of the most fascinating things for me was looking through the entire Indo-European language tree, and then realizing that Indo-European is but a fraction of the languages spoken in the world (maybe a third? I can't remember), not even as big as Sino-Tibetan, the langauge family Chinese comes from. Nevertheless, looking inside Indo-European really gives you a sense of how connected seemingly totally different groups in the world are in their ancestory. For instance, I have always wondered where on earth the term "Latino" (or "Latin" America in general) came from, if Latin was the language spoken in ancient Rome, or the language that's only still used to name plants or in catholic churches. Well, it turns out that Romance is one of the brances of Indo-European langauges, it's the branch of languages derived from "Vulgar Latin", and includes Italian, French, Spanish, and Portugese. Another branch is "Germanic", the languages that dervied from Proto-Germanic, where German, English, and Dutch came from (although modern english seems to me to borrow just as much from romance languages, but maybe it's my imagination). Anyway, at some point a French scholar came along and made a comment that South and Central America seemed to be more aligned with "Latin Europe" (Europeans who spoke romance languages, namely France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) whereas North America seemed more aligned with Germanic Europe (Germany, Austria, the UK, Scandinavia, etc.). At some point after that, the term "Latin America" stuck and here we are today. Anyway, I never knew that but thought that was really neat.
Continuing in my search to figure out where the Nazi ideas about race came from, here is a map of where different language groups are spoken today:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families
Notice that there is a pink region stretching from Iran, through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India where "Indo-Iranian" languages are spoken. This is one branch of Indo-European. There are about 10 branches, one of them being Romance which I already mentioned, another being Helenistic (Greek), another being Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc.)... curiously, Albania and Armenia each get their own branch of Indo-European to themselves... must have been isolated for a long time! The Indo-Iranian branch can be broken into Indo-Aryan and Iranian. The Iranian branch is where Persian came from, and the Indo-Aryan branch is where Sanskrit came from. I think originally "Aryan" referred to all Indo-Iranian languages, because there's a self-identifying word in Sanskrit *and* a self-identifying word in Persian (or some predecessor to it? I forget) that sounds like "Aryan". Indeed, the modern name for Persia is "Iran" which is derived from the word "Aryan". But the real mind-boggling thing is... if Aryan refers to people who settled Iran and northern India (and in between) a long time ago... what does it have to do with Nazis? Well, apparently, it was one mistake after another, and I still don't fully understand the progression. But basically, there were a lot of sketchy European race theorists who built off of each other, with progressively more racist theories, and eventually the Nazis just took what were the popular racist theories of the time and used it for propaganda. But the first mistake was deciding that all Indo-European people must have originally called themselves "Aryans", so the name came to mean all Indo-European people. But then, there was this whole Nordic/Teutonic movement where various Germanic European scholars started suggesting that the original Aryans were from Scandinavia, settled Germany and Austria first, and then went down into Persia and India... but after settling India they began to mix with the non Indo-Europeans from southern India and become impure... supposedly the remnant of the original pure "Aryan race" was still in the Germanic regions. It's amazing how far down these weird wrong hypotheses they went... one assumption building off of another. But one interesting side effect of the Nazi fascination with "Aryans" and it's original association with northern India... is that they chose as their symbol an ancient Hindu symbol, the Swastika. Not only that, but there was a big Vedic mysticism subculture within the Nazis (like Alfred Rosenberg)... another thing I find bizarre and amazing. Apparently, Hitler himself was not much of a fan of eastern religion, and for the most part he advocated a version of Christianity the Nazi's called "positive Christianity" which recast Christ as a powerful figure (rather than a humble figure) who transcended the meek "slave morality" of the Jews. Although he seemed perfectly tolerant towards any religions (as long as they weren't Semetic) and cared more about politics and race than about spirituality. Speaking of the word "Semetic"...
Stepping back from the entire Indo-European language tree, another category on par with Indo-European is Afro-Asiatic (yellow region on the map above)... languages originating in northern africa and the middle east. The largest branch of this is the "Semetic" languages, notably Arabic and Hebrew. I always found it strange how members of the KKK and neo-Nazis could hate not only black people but Jews who seemed to me to be totally different ethnic groups... but I guess at least there is some loose connection if they both had ancestors who spoke Afro-Asiatic languges. Another interesting tie is the Rastafarians, who apparently believe that the Isrealites were dark skinned and originally from Ethiopia... they still speak of "Zion" but to them it does not mean Jerusalem. Of course, everyone, including Indo-European, is from Africa at some point, as far as I understand it. But for some reason, the Nazis made this huge distinction between speakers of Indo-European languages and speakers of Semetic languages. Ironically, some neo-Nazis today have openly requested an alliance with Al-Qaeda to help fight Isreal... if only they read their own propaganda, you would think they would realize that Arabs are just as "Semetic" as the Jews =) At any rate, my guess is that all of the posturing and bullshit about language and ancestors was just an elaborate excuse the Nazis used to dehumanize a particular subgroup of the population in Germany at the time. It made the whole thing seem more legitimate to them, but really it was the same type of good-old-fashioned "hate anyone in your neighborhood who looks or acts differently from you" that goes on when just about any different ethnic groups try to live with each other for a long time... they just took it a few steps further.
Now one thing I have still not succeeded in understanding, despite reading several Wikipedia pages on it, is how the hell white Europeans and North Americans ended up being called "Caucasians". Apparently, it has something to do with the Caucasus region where the Caucus mountains lie (parts of Russia, Gerogia, Azerbaijan, Turkey), but what I don't understand is that none of the people who lived there seem to have anything to do with the people who today are called Caucasian (presumably me, or at least that's what I usually check on the box)... for example, on this map, it lists "Caucasian people" and "Indo European people" separately, and the only Indo Europeans listed are Armenian, Greek, Iranian, and Slavic. But the Caucasians listed (which presumably were not even Indo European at all, so would have been the types that Nazis wanted to throw into the ovens?) are Georgians and various ethnic groups I've never heard of. So what gives? Anyone know the story of how "Caucasian" came to mean what it does on an affirmative action questionaire today?
