You are welcome!
Were Italians considered aryans?
That’s a good question! Before the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in late 1935, relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich were mixed at best, thus for a few years many Reich philosophists considered the Italians to have been ‘non‐Aryan’. Quoting from Aaron Gillette’s Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, page 44:
The [anticommunist] ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, building on the ideas of Chamberlain and others, had wondered in his 1927 work The Future of German Foreign Policy (Der Zukunftsweg einer deutschen Aussenpolitik) if the Italians had enough “Aryan” blood in their veins to make the fascist experiment succeed.45 Rosenberg claimed in his address inaugurating the 1934 academic year at the University of Munich that Europe had received its culture “five times consecutively from the ‘Nordic epicentrum.’”46
Rosenberg wrote that the Germans had defended the Aryan race from the legions of Varius, which were not composed of Aryans. Other [NSDAP] writers claimed that Roman law was not a genuine expression of Aryan thought and civilization.47 Nordic racism […] viewed the downfall of the Roman Empire as a consequence of polluted blood. Thus, the Italians were not a pure race, but a motley hybrid of various races, including the black African. Hitler certainly agreed with these sentiments, and informed Mussolini when the two met in June 1934 that all Mediterranean peoples were tainted by [African] blood.48
However, with the gradual improvement in Italo‐German relations throughout the remainder of the Fascist era—both German and Italian Fascists realized that they needed each other—their racial philosophy became more nuanced and they distinguished Northern Italians, an ‘Aryan’ population, from the Southern Italians, a ‘Mediterranean’ one. Page 56:
Mussolini had always resented the inferiority complex many Italians felt based on German and Anglo‐Saxon racial propaganda. By Nordicizing the Italians, he now took an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. German propaganda against the non‐Nordic peoples certainly wouldn’t sting if Mussolini decided that the Italians were themselves Nordic. The Italians could now bask in the prestige of the Nordic race, as proclaimed by many of the German, French, and Anglo‐Saxon racist circles.
Mussolini’s […] conviction to assert this racial identity would reach a fever pitch in the summer of 1938, when the racial campaign was launched in earnest. The Aryan element was at that time awkwardly added to the fascist myth in an attempt to translate German martial values into the Italian psyche.
This Nordic transformation was probably aided by his low esteem for Southern Italians, the most indisputably “Mediterranean” element of Italy. Of course, Mussolini was himself a Northerner, from Romagna. Early in his premiership of Italy, Mussolini told Sem Benelli that he had “low esteem for Neapolitans in particular and southerners in general, exclaiming that, from Tuscany on down, the Italians, deep down, were not willing to do anything to be Italians.”39
Thus, after 1936, when [Fascist] Italy was chained ever more tightly to its aggressive German neighbor, and Mussolini felt waves of admiration for the German military juggernaut, we find that the Italian people are transfigured into paragons of the Aryan race.
One of the most striking examples of the new racial orthodoxy transpired during a meeting in June 1938 between Mussolini, Guido Landra, Dino Alfieri, and probably Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of Education. At the meeting, Mussolini identified himself as a Nordic, and declared that Aryanism would replace Mediterraneanism in fascist propaganda.40
(Emphasis added.)
I once saw several neofascists on a white nationalist forum make a similar contrast between Northern Italians (the ‘good’ ones) and Southern Italians (the ‘bad’ ones), in a thread griping about Italian‐Americans.
I really don’t know what aryan means, I guess.
Page 13:
Friedrich von Schlegel, in 1808, announced that German, Greek, and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. Schlegel concluded that most Europeans and northern Indians must have a common ancestor, which he called the Aryans. Linguistic and historical evidence suggested that the Aryans most likely originated from India or Central Asia, and had migrated as a body to Europe around 1000 BC. These Aryans were thought to embody all the moral and intellectual virtues that had eventually made the Europeans masters of the globe.
Thus began the history of a mythical concept that would cause so much controversy and pathos over the next 150 years. Still, the Aryans remained a great mystery. Were the Aryans one racial group, or simply a linguistic family of varying races? If they were one particular racial group, were they “pure” or “contaminated” by lesser breeds? From precisely where did they originate? What current European people (it being assumed that the Indians were greatly corrupted) had deviated the least from the original Aryan stock? What was the culture of the Aryans, and what of this culture had survived into modern times?
As you can see, even European racial philosophists couldn’t agree on the concept, so don’t feel guilty that you don’t understand it either.
I always find it really funny that Italy tried to invade Ethiopia twice and both times they got their shit kicked in.