[INDOLOGY] Lexical challenge for the OIT

[Arnaud Fournet]

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
The linguistic evidence merits better than to be discussed in the middle 
of a less scholarly controversy, so I will leave that for another 
occasion and probably another platform. More important to Arnaud is 
clearly this statement of mine:

Well, it's your own subjective selection in my whole post.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
I have never applied the Reductio ad Hitlerum to Indo-European studies.>
Which he calls
Good joke. It's all what your shit-and-muck sprinkling system is about.
Wow, there he says this dirty word again.

The dirty word adequately and aptly describes your dirty method and your 
dirty discourse.
I think that cats are cats, and should be called cats, for the sake of 
clarity.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
At least it provides an answer to Paolo's question: yes, the list rules 
have changed, such colloquialisms are now an approved part of list's 
discourse, and the scholars on this list don't object to being 
associated with them. Well, since these unprovoked attacks on me are 
being allowed, I have a right to answer them. And no, this does not mean 
that I want or need the right to answer them in kind.

More jokes. Don't try to victimize yourself.
Who can seriously believe that your shit-and-muck sprinkling system is 
"unprovoked attacks"??
I'm quite convinced most people on the list see clear in your tricks.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
Of course I should have realized that for some people, highlighting the 
historical fact of a Nazi association with their own AIT is unbearable. 
Still, I sign and persist, confident that the first-hand evidence amply 
supports this position. But is highlighting a connection also a 
reduction to that connection? Is this a Reductio ad Hitlerum? Unlike 
Arnaud, I happen to have a record of actively *opposing* such discourse, 
which among Hindus is very common.

Again, more jokes.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
There, in an effort at criminalizing the specific AIT, many polemicists 
undiscerningly demonize the entire discipline of Comparative & 
Historical Linguistics, and do indeed reduce it to colonial racism, 
which later was taken to its extreme by the Nazis.

I don't want to defend the Germans, but at the time Germany sank into 
Nazism in 1933, it had no colony left since 1918...
So the link between Nazism and colonial racism is definitely odd.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
(Hints at a much-diluted similar reduction are also present in Western 
scholarship: Poliakov, Lincoln, Arvidsson…)  But, while on the one hand 
opposing this grim over-interpretation of the historical fact of a later 
association with the Nazis, I do on the other hand acknowledge that same 
historical fact: yes, the AIT was taught in the Nazi-controlled schools, 
not just as an ephemeral detail but as a cornerstone of Nazi 
*Rassenkunde*, as theorized by Nazi race theorist Hans Günther and 
summed up briefly by Hitler himself.

Be it true or not, this is irrelevant as regards the nature and status 
of Indo-European studies as a whole, throughout the world.
Again, it's odd that you seem to think that Nazism is the Greenwich 
Meridian of everything, when most people think Nazism is a complete 
failure that led Germany into the deepest abyss.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
 > The usual attitude in the West is to let sleeping dogs lie: not soil 
our discipline with an annoying consciousness of this historical 
association. That is alright, except that too many AIT defenders do 
bring in political associations themselves. Some of them even slander 
the OIT by falsely linking it to those same Nazis; one example of this 
you have just seen. Does that mean the Nazis located the Homeland in 
India? Of course not, and Arnaud avoids mentioning this obvious 
refutation of his own claim.

Apparently, you do not seem to have understood what I wrote.
I'll develop more on this below.

@ Koenrad Elst scripsit:
So he brings in something else as a common element: "autochthonicity". A 
general objection here is elementary logic: this is a "cum hoc ergo 
propter hoc" fallacy. Indeed, all AIT defenders except the remaining 
deliberate racists among them are defying this pamphleteering fallacy 
all the time: they don't feel themselves to be Nazi just because they 
defend a Nazi-approved theory. Specifically, it also happens to be 
factually wrong: the Nazi doctrine about the Homeland was not 
"autochthonicity". Neither Belarus nor Atlantis are in Germany. What 
mattered for them was only that the Homeland was not in the territory of 
an "inferior" or "mongrel" race, India. There is also a chronological 
problem: when the later Nazis were still WW1 frontline soldiers, the 
first arguments against the AIT were already being developed by Sri 
Aurobindo (partly in a paper called Arya), whose secretary KD Sethna was 
later, in old age, to write the book Karpasa (1982) that set in motion 
the OIT 2.0 (i.e. Indian version).
 >
 > And by the way, for me the reason is not "autochthonicity" either. 
Unlike for Indians, India is not my country. If I had a say in the 
matter, I would locate the Homeland right in my garden so I could open 
an Urheimat theme park. But history is not there to fulfil our wishes, 
and some historical facts just have to be accepted even if inconvenient. 
Historians take dispassionate note of such facts, not the shrill 
rhetoric we have just been treated to. Some facts, like the 
"association" of X with Y, need not be treated as important, but they 
should not be denied either.

Basically, I will summarize my opinion by stating that the OIT is not a 
scientific theory but rather a kind of politico-religious belief.
I would personally distinguish three types of politico-religious groups 
and beliefs: Traditionalism, Millennarism and Ancestralism.
Each of the types is focused either on Present, Future or Past, 
respectively.

Typically, Judaism and Pre-Vatican2 Catholicism belong to the 
Traditionalist tendency. The motto is "let's keep being what we are".
Protestantism rather belongs to Millennarism, especially American 
Protestantism. Communism is also a Millenarist thinking. The motto is 
"Let's break away from the Past, and Future will be an ocean of myrth 
and happiness".
Ancestralism is exemplified by Islamic Salafism, and their completely 
invented Islam of the Origins, which is nothing but 100% myth. The motto 
is "The mythical past is what we need now".

Nazism is a bit peculiar because it mixes Millennarist and Ancestralist 
features: the 1000-jähriges Reich (in the future) and the mythical pure 
race (in the past). I suppose this mixture bears testimony to the severe 
cultural breakdown and collapse of Germany at that time.
Obviously the OIT is an politico-religious belief of the Ancestralist type.
That's why the OIT shares features with Nazism and Islamic Salafism: all 
of them sell a completely mythical past.

That's why I wrote that the OIT has more in common with Nazism than the 
usual theories about the PIE homeland.
So, yes, you Koenrad Elst and your OIT comrades have more in common with 
Nazism than what you believe.
Basically, you-all have the same intellectual mold as Nazism to a large 
extent. You're Ancestralists.

Besides, neither the Pontico-Caspian homeland nor the Anatolian homeland 
have anything to do with Traditionalism, Millennarism and Ancestralism.
Contrary to the OIT, they are scientific theories and they are not 
politico-religious beliefs.