Posted on 06/17/2011 9:05:53 AM PDT by markomalley
The arcane and secretive world of German duelling societies could be torn apart by divisions over whether to restrict membership to those of German blood and appearance.
Dating back to Napoleonic times and with a penchant for fencing with sharpened swords and colourful costumes, student duelling societies have become renowned as bastions of deeply conservative and right-wing thought.
But now divisions between liberals and conservatives within the societies have come to the fore after some members demanded the expulsion of a colleague because of his Chinese background.
Although Kai Ming Au, a member of the Mannheim fraternity, was born in Germany and had served in the army to some his lack of German blood rankled.
They cited a decision issued last year by the Deutsche Burschenschaft, the umbrella group the 100 fraternities belong to, that said members with "non-European facial and bodily characteristics" needed to be checked by a committee.
This apparent racial discrimination prompted comparisons with the infamous Nuremberg race laws of Nazi Germany when anybody deemed "non-Aryan" was excluded from public life. It also led to liberal duelling fraternities to stand up for Mr Au and defeat the conservatives who wanted him expelled in a vote at the annual Burschenschaft conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
But I sure don't want to hear any other Germans lecturing me about the shortfalls of the US.
“student duelling societies have become renowned as bastions of deeply conservative and right-wing thought”
Here in the US, obsession with race is a trait of “progressives” and the “left wing”. Maybe the labels are different in Europe.
Why would he want to belong to a club that doesn’t want him? There are others welcoming him, problem solved. Private club, own rules for membership.
American conservatism has never had a great deal in common with the Euro variety, which grew out of blood, soil, Church and King loyalties.
Just never applied much here, with occasional unAmerican exceptions such as the Klan.
The American Revolution was specifically launched against such loyalties.
I see the world divided into two groups: Individualists and Collectivists. American Conservatives are certainly Individualists. The Nazis were certainly Collectivists. Any group which is centered around racist ideas or Identity Politics is certainly Collectivist.
So is pointing the finger and accusing others of racism. I don't know anything about dueling societies, but I would take the description being given with a grain of salt.
Yeah. They also declared the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem an Aryan, even though Arabs are just as Semitic as Jews.
Apparently the words “Iran” and “Aryan” come from the same Indo-European root meaning, more or less “The Tribe”. Clearly the Iranians are Indo-Europeans and therefore Aryans, unlike the non-Indo-European Finns, Basques and Etruscians.
His club wants him. Some of the other clubs are demanding that his club expel him.
US conservatives are descended from the Whigs of England who overthrew James II in the Glorious Revolution.
Euro conservatives are descended from the supporters of the Crown who sat on the Right in the French National Assembly, most of Europe’s pols from those who sat on the Left.
There were very few equivalents of the Whigs in the Assembly, and they were eliminated pretty quickly, so were not a factor.
IOW, American conservatives just don’t fit on the usual Right vs. Left spectrum, at least not as it is applied in Europe.
OTOH, American liberals are pretty much wishy-washy Europeal democratic socialists and fit quite nicely on the Left side.
Yup. The word for almost all peoples in their native language translates to some approximation of “The People,” with implications that all others aren’t really people.
Most Europeans, Iranians, Kurds, Afghans and Indians are Aryans, though Hitler would no doubt have balked at including many of these groups.
Notably all Slavs are perfectly good Aryans. Why the Nazis chose to exclude them makes even less logical sense than the rest of their racial doctrines.
My understanding of Nazi racial theory, admittedly third hand, is that the Nazis maintained that the original Aryans were blond, blue eyed peoples from Scandinavia. They were a warrior race who spread out and conquered all the lands now speaking Indo-European languages, but with time their blood became diluted with that of the lesser peoples they had conquered. The purest Aryan blood was to be found in the Nordic countries, the second purest in German and Dutch speaking countries, with the Anglo-Saxons admirable Aryans, though their blood had been diluted with French and Celtic.
This theory is not widely accepted today. The origins of Indo-European languages is generally believed to be central Asia, about seven thousand years ago. (IE languages do not have a common word for “sea” or “ocean”, so it is believed that they were landlocked, inland people.) The English word “yoke” is cognate with the Hindu word “yoga”, meaning discipline, which is evidence that they practiced agriculture. They also share the same names for numbers through one hundred, but not further, which seems to indicate that they had a base ten number system (though not numerals) and were familar with numbers through 100, but not above. All the IE languages share words for familial relationships, including very similar words for in-law in Sanskrit and German, for instance.
“His club wants him. Some of the other clubs are demanding that his club expel him.”
Thanks for the clarification; it wasn’t clear to me from the article. Sounds like there will just be a split over this, clubs interested in non-ethnically German members, and those not.
“The origins of Indo-European languages is generally believed to be central Asia...”
I’m no expert, but in my reading there hasn’t been any general belief in that, though I’ve seen what you’ve mentioned also asserted - many locate it to the shores of the Black Sea in Europe, or the shores of the Black Sea in Anatolia.
I am certainly not an expert, but the lack of a common word for Ocean or See would seem to mitigate against a Black Sea origin. In Latin “mare” means sea or ocean, in Germanic languages, the word means marsh or waste land. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=moor
Maybe there are other explanations for it being used for different, but similar things? Like I said, I’m not expert, and my reading on this has been sporadic. What I had seen, and my memory of J.P. Malory’s writing is hazy, was that the words in common among the widespread languages, for botanicals, animals, had natural habitats that intersected only in the Black Sea region.
These dueling societies are like Japanese Sumo. It was only with great difficulty that the Japanese allowed an american of hawaiian extraction fight in their games. their rules are very strict and very Japanese. They remain so. Few non Japanese get to compete.
Both the Germans and Japanese are competent people. We are lucky to have them as allies. It was the generation of our betters that made them so.
The term as a name for girls has become somewhat popular: Aryana, Arienne, Ariana and yet more variants.
Languages get spread across racial divisions very easily through conquest, trade, etc.
Half the population of Iran is not Iranian, but Arab, Kurdish, etc. Persia changed its name to Iran in an attempt to capitalize on the "glamor" of the "Aryan" theme.
The racial theories of the National Socialists were pure pseudo-scientific crap, just like other doctrines of various flavors of socialism. Although the Nazis demeaned Slavs and glorified Nordics, there is a heavy Slavic component in the German population, and Germany is far from being the most Nordic country in Europe.
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