Mein Kampf is selling in India

Three words 'the casts system', most Indians are raciest. Racism is not just for white people you know. Also the Indian caste system was created by the Aryans. Aryan race is at the foundation Indian culture and Hinduism.

Caste.

What concerns me is that as the Holocaust generation dies off and the new kids are not educated, not made to realize the significance of studying the holocaust, not made to realize how easy an afraid, impoverished, and angry nation can be swayed by one man who claims "I know who you should fear! I know where your anger should aim!", it will be easier and easier for Anti-Semites to sell "the Holocaust is a hoax".

The Diary of Anne Frank was outlawed (isn't everything?) in North Korea until some lobbying. They decided to allow the book, but all references to Nazi Germany have been replaced by America.

that were the saying " history repeats itself" come from.

"raciest".

"Whoa" on many levels.

They're THE raciest of all racy peoples, I hear.

So my T.J. Hitler Indian Steakhouse idea might just fly after all? And they said I was crazy.

Somewhere Danny Boyle is writing about this in Bollywood mode.

What? so anyone who reads this book will believe that Ms Frank was killed in America?

The shared use of the term "Aryan" relies on a pretty major misapplication of the word by Europeans in the last century or two. By the time the Nazis started using the term, it had undergone a pretty significant transformation from the sense in which it would have been applied among Indians, Pakistanis, etc. In its original sense, "Aryan" basically referred to language, not race, and it definitely had nothing to do with blond-haired, blue-eyed people. The Wikipedia entry condenses the complicated history of the word fairly well.

Of course, the word has been repurposed so thoroughly at this point that I can believe some modern-day Indians might accept it in the new "master race" sense, yet interpret it as applying to themselves rather than Nordic Europeans. eenin may have a point.

'The caste system' is based on the lightness of your skin. The lighter your skin the more "Aryan" you have, and the higher up on the social latter you are. The untouchables have always been of the darkest skin color. That is what I remember from Collage world civ classes.

I tried reading Mein Kampf. I made it through the first chapter. Does it have a good ending?

The ending of Mein Kampf will give you severe gases.

It sounds like that was a repurposing due to British colonialism. Basically, the British brought the term back to India with the new, racially-loaded definition (courtesy of de Gobineau) and used it to co-op the existing caste system for their own purposes. The British were using the Indians' own language to keep them in line, but it was with an entirely Eurocentric understanding of the vocabulary. It's pretty messed up.

Thank you for that DaveB, I can now blame Britain (and the West) for another world ill!

Maybe but "Aryan" is more then just a language. They were a race or culture who influence was felt all the way to ancient Greece. The Aryans were the ones who change the ancient Greeks from Mother Earth worshiper to the Greeks who believed in the Zeus Father Pantheon. Not much is really known about the Aryans, so all you have to go on is ancient myths and writings through out the Indo- Euro regain. The whole supermen thing were made up whole cloth by 19 century Europeans, but saying Aryans are made up by Europeans is just as fucked up in different ways as what the Europeans did with the myths.

Not to say that the British didn't use the system to their advantages, but the system was already there way before the British got there. Read some of the history of the spread of Buddhism and Islam to India.

Hmm. Maybe it's my own education that's lacking, but I'm fairly certain that "Aryans" weren't an actual race of people - at least not in the quantifiable sense. The term has been used to apply to several different groups, but "Aryans" as a race are as real as "Atlanteans" as far as I've always known.

Feel free to provide scholarly evidence to refute this.

Here is something else to think about DaveB, most of the world throughout history has lived under some kind of caste system. India like a lot of other parts of the world is in a topical and subtropical regain of the world. India has a lot of sun light, unlike say Europe. Any caste system in either a topical or subtropical regain of the planet is based on skin color. There is simple scientific fact for this. The lower down on the caste system you are the poorer you are. The poorer you are the more you work hard labor. Most hard labor is out doors, and the more sun light you are exposed to, the darker you are. The higher up on the caste system you are the richer you are. The richer you are the less sun light you are exposed to and the fairer your shin color is. It just happen to be quick of fate that Europeans are very faired skin. The European empire builder used this quick of fate to their advantage.

I can not disagree with what you are say, Aryans are quit mythological. One can't say whether they ever existed or what they really looked like if they did. All one can go on is the mythology. The Aryan mythos is quit wide spread though from Greece to India. You can't say they didn't exist though either. Whether the Aryans existed it mostly beside the point at this time. Beside a Indian or even a Greek ideal of Fair skin is different from a Germans any ways.

I didn't say Aryans were made up by Europeans. I'm saying that there's a large distinction to be made between what Europeans considered "Aryan" and what Indians considered "Aryan" - until the British conflated the two concepts in the 19th century. And, yeah, Aryan-in-its-original-sense was a culture, but it was largely defined linguistically, at least initially. It wasn't about physical features.

It sounds like it's highly arguable whether the Aryans, specifically, were responsible for the evolution of Greek religion. There's a shared background, but it's not like the magical Aryans came sailing over to Greece and introduced the Mycenaeans to polytheism. There's shared ancestry in terms of myths, language, and culture all over the middle-east, Greece, and India.

Sure, the caste system was there. But the British reinterpreted it to correspond to their own class system, in part by using their mistaken idea of what "Aryan" meant. I'm not saying it was substantially worse or better (although colonization is generally pretty unpleasant, no matter how bad conditions may have been prior), but that it was changed substantially.