[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The level of development of the culture(s) in Japan. If the idea is correct, Japanese development would be much below that of China, Korea, and other neighbouring regions.

Ah, I see.

Well, complicating that is that in actual, real history, Japan was a lot less developed than China during the late Jōmon period and early Yayoi period than the Chinese Shang and early Zhou dynasties, let alone if we get into Spring and Autumn and the Warring States.

The Japanese adopted Chinese writing and a lot of technology and material culture from the mainland, with some evidence that many ideas and technologies were transmitted through Korea, which would then also have been at a higher development level than the early Japanese. And, anyway, the prehistoric Japanese, by definition, pretty much, hadn't by that time adopted most of what they would eventually adopt from Chinese cultures.

Sailing technology wasn't all that good around -2,000 to -1,000 BCE and by the time you've got the technology to sail easily between the mainland and Japan, you've got a situation where there was an advanced mainland interacting with 'primitive' island people. We see the same thing in Europe, with the British isles, for example.

So, discovering less technological development in prehistoric Japan than in early historic China and Korean states more closely connected to this mainland culture, for example, wouldn't tell the ASNs whether this was a real history or one moulded by anti-Axis prejudice.

Originally Posted by johndallman

No, the Nazi never thought the Japanese had "Aryan" ancestry; "honorary Aryans" simply meant that they'd arrived at a similar style of politics by a different route.

Yeah, that seems to fit what I've read on the subject.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Oh, no. Indo-Aryans were never considered to be ancestors of the Nazi's "Aryans". Nazi Aryans were supposed to have originated in Northern Europe, and spread from there, degenerating as they went. Their languages had spread to other ethnic groups. Nazi theories were completely unrelated to modern ones.

I agree that it was not mainstream to consider Iranian or Indic peoples proper Aryans (at best degenerative descendants of Nordic people who traveled there), but let's keep in mind that there was no single accepted Nazi orthodoxy on prehistory. I've found Nazi archaeologists who placed the Aryan Urheimat in locations ranging from Atlantis and/or Antarctica, in the Himalayas, in the cradle of the Goths around the Black Sea and the Crimea, Central Europe and even stranger locations. There were theories about a 'Nordic Rome' or the Ancient Greeks being pure Aryans.

I admit that I've only read deconstructions of the theories of the men like Houston Steward Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, not their original turgid racialist screeds, but it seems that they were often fond of Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages and mythologies, but how much that extended toward the modern peoples, I am unsure. Well, Gobineau loved Persians and Persia, but did that find its way into the thinking of his intellectual heirs in Nazi Germany?

The 'Corded-Nordics' theory exemplified by Carleton S. Coon oddball racialist theories, but found in a purer Germanic formulation, more acceptable to Nazis (though never accepted as an official Nazi doctrine), in the work of Gustaf Kossinna, was popular in Nazi Germany, but it was never the only theory around and the Anhnenerbe crowd around Himmler was a fertile source of really out there theories. And a lot of the 'Aryan' theories that shaped Nazi thought idealized Sanskrit and ancient Hindu mythology, including the racialist writings that most influenced Hitler.

Technically, Adolf Hitler, for example, did not believe that the Aryan race originated in Germany or even necessarily in Scandinavia, only that the Nordic peoples were particularly pure examples of Aryans and that the German people had unique ethnic and cultural qualities which were not necessarily merely due to biological descent. Indeed, Hitler seems to have come to accept that the majority of Germans were not Nordic, but that the things that made Germans great were due to the influence of Germanic, Nordic and Aryan blood and spirit.

Many Nazis would accept that there could be genuine mystery about the actual origin of the Aryan people while simultaneously believing that the people who became Germans and their favored Nordic cousins represented a perfection of the Aryan ideal, not necessarily the original source of such people. It was perfectly compatible with being a hard-core Nazi to believe that the first Aryans came from Atlantis, Greece, Italy, the Caucasus, Persia, Himalayas, the Pontic steppes or somewhere else and that they merely didn't reach their perfect flowering as a race until they found Germany and developed into Germans.

Something worth keeping in mind is that Himmler kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him at all times (in a translation by Dr. Franz Hartmann) and that he was apparently uplifted and inspired by the example of the ancient Aryan warriors he read about there. It seems Himmler saw himself as Arjuna.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Jakob Wilhelm Hauer would have been an Antarctic Space Nazi. Sure, it's not like he represented any kind of mainstream thought within Nazism, not even occult Nazism, but at least his presence means that the ASNs have someone who knows Sanskrit pretty well.