India is a target market for many commercial organisations and of course the media is no exception. From being one of Britain’s most well established newspapers, the Daily Mail has pioneered online journalism. Indeed it has a special section for India, and it is here that we encounter the latest offering by that country’s journalist Heena Kausar.
On 25 November 2014 Ms Kausar vent her frustrations at Dr David Frawley, founder and director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies, with her headline:
Right-wing US historian insists ‘Aryans were indigenous to India’
At no point does Kausar explain by what she means by ‘right-wing’ yet is happy to refer to Marxists in the following terms:
“Noted historians like Romila Thapar and D. N. Jha support the theory, while right-wing historians claim that Aryans were indigenous to the country.”
Thapar is a well-known Marxist who has been exposed as such by not just Frawley, but her own writings. The ‘theory’ she speaks of is that of white-skinned invaders called Aryans invading India in 1500BC and subjecting the dark-skinned aboriginals to a form of apartheid known as the caste system.
Nor is this Kausar’s first foray into the field of Aryan racial origins. Only 4 days earlier she wrote:
US author on board for ‘Aryan project’: Hindu scholar to give lecture at Delhi University
And laments:
Kausar does seem to have this unhealthy habit of labelling any opposition to the colonialist and racist theory as ‘right-wing’. On 21 October she wrote of:
The RIGHT way? Delhi University is asked to tweak history for schoolchildren by purging ‘Left slant’ in all history textbooks
What is very surprising is that the Daily Mail would feel aghast at Leftist ideas being attacked. Its own journalists such as Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips are the standard targets of left-wing ire. Yet when it comes to India, this right-wing tabloid with its obsession with illegal immigrants and benefit scroungers suddenly becomes a mouthpiece for orthodox Marxist intellectuals. But when we look deeper this should not come as a surprise.
The Aryan Invasion Theory was an invention by German Indologist Max Muller, a manufactured product to justify British rule. Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, put it candidly in 1932:
Our historic right to be in India is the same as the historic right of all our predecessors: the power of original conquest.
So who are these “predecessors”? It is of course those Aryans, the ‘invaders’ in the writings of Marxist thinkers such as Thapar and their slavish journalists like Kausar. It is also standard fare of the ‘extreme-right’. Former leader of the violently racist and pro-slavery organisation, the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke is one hundred per cent in agreement with Thapar and Kausar on this racist theory as can be gleaned by his book My Awakening, on pages 517 and 518:
Aryans, or Indo-Europeans (Caucasians) created the great Indian, or Hindu civilization. Aryans swept over the Himalayas to the Indian sub-continent and conquered the aboriginal people … Composed in about 1500 B.C., the Hindu religious texts of the Rig Veda tells the story of the long struggles between the Aryans and the aboriginal people of the Indian subcontinent
It is these racist ideas which Frawley has picked apart by reasoned argument. On page 251 of his book ‘Gods, Sages and Kings’:
If the Aryans were a racial type, they were already predominant in India by 2000 BC or they had no real impact upon the physical types of India. This latter view has been the conclusion of modern scholars who believe in the Aryan invasion theory.
Who were these invading Aryans if they left no mark on the racial types of India? How did they manage to change the language and religion of a subcontinent and leave no traces of their physical type among the people? It is hard to imagine that an invasion of a foreign race could change the language and laws of a culture and leave it with a respect for its sages as the greatest teachers of humanity, near Gods in status, and yet have no impact racially.
Moreover, there was no memory left of any such invasion, even in the very ancient lore of the Dravidian people said to have been conquered and displaced
Further in his book The Myth of The Aryan Invasion of India, he writes:
The idea of a monolithic cultural group chauvinistically promoting ethnic and linguistic purity is the product of nineteenth century colonial thinking. It mirrors nineteenth century European views of humanity, in which dark-skinned people were regarded as inferior and used as slaves. It is quite different than the Hindu and Vedic view that the One Being masks itself in numerous names and forms which are all ultimately the same.
Such a monolithic group is incompatible with the image of the Aryans as nomads, who as a scattered and disorganised group could not have had such a uniform idea of their own identity and been able to impose it upon a larger population of more civilised peoples. The Aryan Invasion theory is an example of European colonialism turned into a historical model. Its simplicity is compelling but also questionable
So how exactly is this ‘right-wing’? If anything it takes apart the racist and colonialist ideas of the Victorian period, ideas which Muller himself disowned but which remain standard fare of David Duke and it appears the Daily Mail’s own journalism.
On 1 July 1935, at the SS offices in Berlin, the pseudo-academic wing of the SS was formed to propagate this Aryanised racist version of history, archaeology and culture. This was the Ahnenerbe which would push scholarship more in keeping with Nazi thinking. Centuries of careful research and academic rigour would be swept away in the desire to prove how the tall, white, blond master race of Aryans brought civilisation to the darker inferior races.
From the first, ideas of western science, scholarship and academic rigour were openly flouted in the desire to prove the superiority of the Aryan race.
Dr Herman Wirth was a leading pre-historian of Germany, who pioneered this use of fake scholarship, and was placed in charge of the Ahnenerbe by Himmler. A perfect example was the issue of writing, which Wirth insisted had their origin in ancient Aryan hieroglyphics, which one could observe in the form of wooden folk sculptures on farmhouses in Friesland in the Netherlands. There was of course no scientific proof of any of this. Writing was a development which had occurred in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
On 1 February 1937, Himmler appointed him president of the Ahnenerbe. He was impressed by his racial interpretation of Vedic text, and his talk of a blond haired, blue eyed white master race ruling India. Expeditions were sent as far afield as Tibet and Japan to somehow prove the archaeological foundations for a distinct Aryan race. Zoologist Ernst Schäfer and racial anthropologist, as well as former student of Günther, Bruno Beger led an expedition to Tibet to find this much needed material in April 1938.
And during this time what was the Daily Mail doing? Its owner Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, was urging an axis with Nazi Germany. He was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail’s friendly editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.
Rothermere’s 1933 leader “Youth Triumphant” praised the new Nazi regime’s accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by them. In it, Rothermere predicted that “The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany”.
In the summer of 1939, Rothermere was still appealing to Hitler not to provoke a war, saying that Britain and Nazi Germany must remain at peace. He told Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, on July 7 1939:
Our two great Nordic countries should pursue resolutely a policy of appeasement for, whatever anyone may say, our two great countries should be the leaders of the world.
Ten days earlier, Rothermere had written to Hitler:
“My Dear Führer, I have watched with understanding and interest the progress of your great and superhuman work in regenerating your country.”
A month earlier, Daily Telegraph writers Neil Tweedie and Peter Day wrote:
The MI5 papers also show that at the time, Rothermere was paying an annual retainer of £5,000 per year to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, suspected by the French, British and Americans of being a German spy, as he wanted her to bring him closer to Hitler’s inner circle. Rothermere also encouraged her to promote Germany to her circle of influential English contacts. She was known as “London’s leading Nazi hostess”.
The secret services had been monitoring her since her arrival in Britain in the 1920s and regarded her as “an extremely dangerous person”.
Now in 2014 the Daily Mail has found a new advocate for the idea of an Aryan race, in the person of Heena Kausar. It is ironic and poignant that the very scholars she lambasts as ‘right-wing’ are opposed the very Aryan racial supremacy that her newspaper once advocated so enthusiastically in the Third Reich.
