The Aryan racial view that entered Fascism does not derive from the Ariosophy of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. It is also a concept in fact, not originally integrated into Fascism, as it is in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism.

Giovanni Gentile as well as other early Fascist intellectuals despised introducing Ariosophical racial theory into Fascism. Yet, it entered into it under the influence of other Italian Fascist intellectuals. Benito Mussolini did not adopt the “Aryan theory” after allying with Hitler, because in the early 20s he had stated, that Fascism was born out of a need for the “Aryan race.” The idea of the term describing a race did not exist prior to Max Müller and Arthur de Gobineau.

I explained in Jean Mamy’s Anti-Masonic Propaganda Film, “Forces occultes” (1943) that:

“The National Socialist vision was a new mythos of the blood, and “preservationism of the godly essence of the Teuton,” they newly termed the “Aryan,” with Mussolini desiring that the Italians be recognized as Aryans. According to minister Goebbels in his appeal to Christian Germany, God created the Germans. The myths believed in by the National Socialists were not at its basis, different from those ideas that preoccupied any other fraternal secret order, or public organizations of a religious and philosophical nature. Germany [like Persia] bore many such groups [throughout its history like the Rosicrucians], and National Socialists like Himmler were not free from the occult fad. Attacking and suppressing Freemasons, Theosophists, Jews, Anthroposophists, etc., hence appears very odd, hypocritical, and suspicious. Yet again, the Fascist State could have no element outside of itself, and therefore, they sought to subvert [or destroy] these groups.”

Just before he died, leading nationalist philosopher at the time, Houston Stewart Chamberlain became one of the most influential minds to the National Socialist movement (From Humanism to Nazism: Antiquity in the Work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Johann Chapoutot). The aim of Chamberlain’s work was in using studies of antiquity, through the “völkisch” perspective.

The work clearly describes to us these aims, to:

1. demonstrate the superiority of white mankind;
2. inculcate the idea that the Germanic race was the pillar of civilization (and should rule);
3. to prevent further decadence of Western civilization; and avoid mixing with Jews and others (considered inferior races) to do so.

These ideas are circulating once more in our time.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain proclaimed that the German blood must heal the world. Chamberlain became part of Wagner’s inner circle after becoming his son-in-law. The idea of the special quality to the German blood in this particular Aryanism involves German occult theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples. There is no avenue through which this thought comes, than through the gradual coming into being of the concept of the “Aryan race,” but even before then, pre-scientific and alchemic blood theories in the cultural milieu preceding Chamberlain’s time, back into the Renaissance.

Published by Dominique Johnson

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