Who are We? Nordics, Aryans, & Whites

                           By Greg Johnson

             

White Nationalism presupposes an answer to the question “Who is white?” White Nationalism is a political movement, whereas white identity is a metapolitical question. A precise answer to this question provides the foundation for effective white advocacy. False or imprecise answers, however, lead to confused and ineffective efforts. I wish to deal with two such misleading answers: “Nordicism” and “Aryanism.” Both attitudes undermine White Nationalism by introducing confusions about white identity.

The archetypal Nordic is tall, long-headed, and fair-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Nordic types and traits are found throughout Europe, but as the name suggests, they are more prevalent in the North. As I define it, Nordicism is the view that the Nordic type is the model, paradigm, or archetype of whiteness, with the implication that non-Nordic is non-white, or white to a lesser degree. The most childish Nordicists actually imagine that the only way Europeans could acquire dark hair, eyes, and complexions is through racial admixture.

The Aryans were the creators of a particular language and culture. Their homeland, apparently, was in Eastern Europe, somewhere between the Baltic and Black Seas (an area now populated by Slavs and Balts, whom some Nordicists consider inferior breeds). In the second millennium BC, the Aryans began to migrate West into Europe, South into the Middle East, and East as far as India and China, diffusing their language, culture, and genes in the process. Because of the expanse of this diffusion, Aryans are also called Indo-Europeans. The original Aryans are thought to have been Nordic types, hence the same physical traits are described as Aryan and Nordic. Just as Nordicism regards the Nordic as archetypically white, the Aryanist makes Indo-European languages and cultures normative.

What’s wrong with Nordicism? Nothing really, if one is a Nordic. It seems perfectly natural and healthy for Nordic people to prefer the company of genetically similar people. Indeed, the brain is hard-wired to do so. I am a Nordic type, and I am most comfortable in northern climes among Nordic people. Other things being equal, I would prefer a Nordic mate who shares my recessive traits and can help pass them on to the next generation. These attitudes would only be objectionable if I expected non-Nordics to share them as well. This would be to take a natural preference that is relative to a subracial group and turn it into an absolute standard for all groups.

I don’t even object to the idea of Nordic superiority. If groups really are different, then every group is bound to be objectively better than others by some standards. But we must remember that this also implies that the same groups are bound to be inferior by other standards. Nordics are objectively superior at creating prosperous, egalitarian, high-trust, low corruption societies. As a Nordic, I am most comfortable in such societies, and many other peoples are attracted to such societies, if only as sponges and plunderers. Nordics, however, are proving objectively inferior at preserving our societies due to low ethnocentrism, high trust, and extreme credulity in the face of predatory tribal peoples out to dispossess us. Nordic superiority becomes objectionable only if (1) we assume that Nordic excellences are the onlycriteria for judging societies, and (2) we forget that Nordics are not superior in everything.

Although such White Nationalists as Wilmot Robertson and William Pierce were strongly Nordicist, and their attitudes linger on, in my experience Nordic White Nationalists are the most aware of the weaknesses of our own people. Beyond that, the Nordics that have the most naive and ingrained supremacist attitudes tend to be the liberals and Leftists who believe that non-white immigrants can become citizens of Nordic societies, that they want to become citizens, and that apparently we don’t even have to try to assimilate them, because the Nordic way of life is so intrinsically compelling that everyone would spontaneously and voluntarily want to adopt it (without, I might add, divesting themselves of their own ethnic identities, which are apparently only superficial matters of clothing and food anyway).

Nordicism is problematic for White Nationalists because it undermines cooperation and trust among different European groups. This damages the ability of White Nationalists to advocate for white interests in European colonial societies like the United States and Canada, which were peopled by many different European ethnic groups which are increasingly blended into a generic “white” identity. In Europe itself, it also undermines the pan-European solidarity necessary to prevent European infighting and to unify Europe in the face of extra-European threats.

Imagine, for instance, the feelings of a Greek or Italian American toward William Pierce’s National Alliance if he read Pierce’s Who We Are, in which he laments that the Nordic invaders of Greece mongrelized themselves with the indigenous European populations rather than exterminating them to keep their blood pure — an exterminationist agenda that he envisioned for the future in The Turner Diaries. Such attitudes follow logically from the premise that Nordics are the only authentic Europeans, which implies that non-Nordics are lesser men. The National Alliance accepted non-Nordics as members, but such people could legitimately ask if the organization could really take their money and represent their interests in good faith.

The idea that Nordics are authentically and archetypically white is simply an intellectual error.

1. First, there is no reason to think that the first Europeans were Nordic.

2. Second, even if the first Europeans were Nordic, there is no reason to suppose that all departures from the Nordic type represent a decline from the ideal.

Nordics are just one branch of the European family tree, and are no more or less authentically European than any other branch.

Another error that is allied to Nordicism is what I call the son-in-law fallacy. Many whites operate on the assumption that the only truly white people are those they would have marry into their family. And since most people’s attitudes about such matters are based on genetic similarity, the son-in-law fallacy is really just a form of unconscious sub-racial chauvinism. It is perfectly natural and healthy to want to marry people who are genetically similar, so one can more reliably pass on one’s genes and culture to the next generation. But this does not imply that groups one would not wish to marry into are less European or less white.

Aryanism is an even more problematic attitude than Nordicism. Again, Aryanism is the view that Indo-European language and culture are normatively white. At its most childish, Aryanism leads to the false inference that Basques, Finns, Hungarians, and Estonians are “not white” because they do not speak Indo-European languages. Equally childish is the inference that non-European Caucasians (Persians, Armenians, Indians) are somehow “us” because they speak Indo-European languages. The reductio ad absurdum of Aryanism is a European who feels more kinship with Persians and Hindus than Hungarians or Finns because of common linguistic roots. Of course, due to colonialism there are also millions of Africans, Amerindians, and Asians who speak Indo-European languages and even carry European genes. Logically, the Aryanist should also prefer these people to Basques or Estonians, but let us hope they shrink back before this absurdity. Europeans can learn a great deal about our own pre-Christian language and culture through the study of Aryan offshoots among non-Europeans. But those who bear these languages and cultures today are still non-Europeans — not “us.”

There is no reason to presume that Indo-European language and culture are normatively European. The Aryans were a branch of the European family that split off from the main stem, evolved a distinct language and culture in isolation for untold millennia, and then migrated back into the European heartland, as well as into the Near, Middle, and Far East.

The Aryans certainly contributed to European civilization but they did not create it. Indeed, when the various waves of Aryans returned to Europe, they were rightly regarded as barbarians. They even regarded themselves as barbarians. Agriculture, ceramics, metal-working, written language, clocks, calendars, astronomy, irrigation, urban life, the wheel, refined arts and crafts, monumental architecture — all of these were pre-Aryan inventions. Europe’s first high civilizations arose around the Mediterranean shore, not in the North. Its creators were subracially Mediterranean, not Nordic. The creators of the high civilizations of Mesopotamia were Caucasian, but they were probably no more European than the current residents of those lands. And when the Aryans diffused themselves throughout Europe and the Orient, they were awestruck by the superior civilizations they found and eagerly to assimilated them, culturally and genetically, until Aryans in the pure form became extinct.

Europeans today, culturally and genetically, are more or less composites of Aryan and pre-Aryans. Thus it is a form of false consciousness — of inauthenticity — to identify ourselves, individually or collectively, with the Aryans, an extinct people who live on only as genetic and cultural ingredientsof modern Europeans. The Aryans are part of us, but they are not us. Dreaming that we are Aryans is like a dog dreaming that he is a wolf.

Who are we then? Who is white? Who is European? A simple but pragmatic answer is that we are the branch of the Caucasian race that has inhabited Europe since the last Ice Age. Pragmatically, this common ancestry embraces all groups that we recognize as Europeans, but also excludes the non-European Caucasians in the Middle East, the Caucasus Mountains, and Central and South Asia.

Europeans and non-European Caucasians apparently had common ancestors. But when I speak of the European or white race, I am referring to the subset of the Caucasian race that settled and developed in Europe. Although there are liminal cases where the two sub-races blended, non-European Caucasians are culturally and genetically distinct from Europeans. Furthermore, non-European Caucasians exist in vast numbers and unlike Europeans, they are in no danger of extinction. Although breeding between European and non-Europeans Caucasians is not race-mixing in the strict sense, it should still be discouraged, since it erodes the genetic distinctness of an already threatened race.

If Nordicists think this definition includes people they would not want to live or breed with, they need not do so as long as they maintain their own distinct homelands.

Whites are united by a common origin, common enemies, and a common threat of extinction. The only common thing we lack is a way to prevent our complete genetic and cultural oblivion. The purpose of White Nationalism is to give our race a future again. Changing the course of history is no small task. It requires white consciousness and solidarity, as well as organization and world-historical action.

White solidarity need not conflict with particular regional, national, and sub-racial identities. Indeed, the whole purpose of White Nationalism is to protect such differences. But sub-racial and national chauvinisms — and imaginary identifications with extinct ancestors and non-Europeans who speak Indo-European languages — do conflict with the solidarity we need to save us. Nordicists and Aryanists are slated for destruction with all the rest of us. Which means that such attitudes are ultimately self-defeating. They are luxuries and indulgences a dying race can ill afford.