Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
No philosopher is going to dare write it down, but one possibility is that these worlds weren't shaped only by Nazi thought, but by the collective unconscious of all of humanity at the time they came into existence. At the time, most of humanity had a pretty low view of Germans, for obvious reasons.
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That's a possibility, but would the collective unconscious of all humanity really imagine the complexity of a whole bunch of extinct languages with unclear relations to existing language families?
I mean, most people, whether in the 1940s or today, are laymen and prone to ignore most complexities in their imaginations. Wouldn't a world based only on what people
thought about the past be
a lot simpler and easier to understand?
Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
A way to check this idea would be to take a look at Japan.
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That's a
long trip, but what would they be looking for, specifically?
The Japanese were declared 'honorary Aryans', but I'm not sure that this implied that mainstream Nazi thought imagined that they were blond and spoke German in the past, merely that they had some distant kinship, despite looking, well, Japanese.
Were there archaeological theories current in Nazi Germany about a prehistoric race of blond and blue-eyed Aryans that migrated to Japan at some point in history (that is, while the first cultures to have writing were starting to record history, at least, not necessarily while the Japanese were writing anything) and gave rise to the modern Japanese?
The places I had imagined would occupy
Ahnenerbe archaeologists for the first few generations are, well, obviously Germany and that whole area, Scandinavia and the northern polar circle, and then various places further away that someone proposed as the Aryan
Urheimat.
They'd probably be
really annoyed not to find any decent evidence of Goths around the Black Sea, but most of them would probably conclude that this meant that they were merely in a very distant past, before the Nordic and Germanic Aryans had migrated from their pure northern homelands.
Well,
or, as I noted earlier, contort their pseudoscientific versions of anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, philology and archaeology into pretzels trying to claim that the fairest and most blue-eyed Thraco-Dacians, Getae, Cimmerians or Scythians they could find were '
actually' the ancestors of the Goths.
Ironically, the closest analogues to true Aryans on
Germania Hyperborea are probably not 'Aryan'-looking enough for any serious Nazi historians to accept them as ethnically related in any way. I'm not sure how the various Indo-Iranian peoples moving in and out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe would have looked before all the migrations, intermarriage and cultural diffusion of the past several thousand years, but somehow, I doubt that many of them looked like Waffen-SS recruiting posters.
The fact that 'Scythians' probably were a multi-ethnic culture with many different languages and tribes of widely differing physical appearance would encourage the ASNs to consider those that fit their preconceptions and prejudices most closely 'Aryan', and the rightful owners of all land they lived on, and the more 'Asiatic' looking individuals or tribes as foreign invaders.
This would probably happen regardless of actual linguistic relations of the languages in question and the fact that there is every possibility that some populations with an 'Aryan' appearance and customs that pleased the ASNs might speak languages that have
no familial relationship with any extant Indo-European languages.