Sanatan (Hindu) Swastika V/S Nazi Haken Kreuz (Western Scholar interpretation)

INTERPRETATION by a Western Scholar, Matt Riggsby, Archaeological Studies, Boston University : “European meant by Aryan is not what you probably mean by Aryan. Back in the 18th century when scholars were first working out the existence of the Indo-European language family, the historical model for the spread of those languages was that a population of “Aryans” expanded out of a home territory (probably somewhere in western Asia) to take over a large swathe of territory from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal. By the 1850s, these Aryans were becoming the central characters in a racial mythology. Arthur de Gobineau, in his Essay on the Inequality of the Races, hypothesized that the Aryans were naturally good and noble and smart and so on, and everything good which had ever happened in Europe came from the descendants of this Aryan race, and Aryans could still be recognized among Europe’s aristocratic or other ethnic classes. THE IMAGINED ARYAN-NESS OF VARIOUS EUROPEAN NATIONALITIES BECAME A POINT OF PRIDE, and that was the environment in which Hitler came up. It wasn’t his idea; it was a widely held idea which he latched on to. It was pretty much entirely made up, but there it was. Of course, scholarship started diverging from that nonsense over a century ago. The term Aryans is these days used only for likely descendants of the early Indo-European speakers who headed to the subcontinent, and the idea of a “race” of Aryans as opposed to a bunch of people who happened to speak similar language was abandoned long ago. So, then, Nazis and many other Europeans accepted to some degree or another a particular use of the term which has since been discredited. They didn’t know in the 1920s what we know in the 2020s. (Can’t say anything about German neo-Nazis. Do they call themselves Aryans? I wouldn’t know.)”