Nietzsche on the Aryan race

Excerpted from
Twilight of the Idols,
chap. The “Improvers” of Mankind:

1.-

My demand of the philosopher is well known: that he take his stand beyond good and evil and treat the illusion of moral judgment as beneath him.

2.-

A first, tentative example: at all times morality has aimed to “improve” men—this aim is above all what was called morality.

To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the “blond beast” were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an “improved” Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian”…

3.-

Let us consider the other method for “improving” mankind, the method of breeding a particular race or type of man. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian [Aryan] morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the objective is to breed no less than four races within the same society: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are no longer dealing with animal tamers: a man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the only one who could even conceive such a plan of breeding. One breathes a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells!

Yet this method also found it necessary to be terrible—not in the struggle against beasts, but against their equivalent—the ill-bred man, the mongrel man, the chandala. And again the breeder had no other means to fight against this large group of mongrel men than by making them sick and weak. Perhaps there is nothing that goes against our feelings more than these protective measures of Indian [Aryan] morality.

Manu himself says: “The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and rape (crimes that follow from the fundamental concept of breeding).”

4.-

These regulations are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan “humaneness” has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become genius—primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.