Noted Belgian Indologist and Hindutva theorist Dr. Koenraad Elst describes how the false Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) provided white nationalist David Duke with the inspiration for his racialist mission. The racialist goal is to wake up white Americans to their fate as a threatened minority in a future colored world.

So, for anti-Zionists to team up with people like Duke, or other racialists, even those who have foresworn their pasts, is to my mind very risky. My misgivings extend also to black racialists like Louis Farrakhan, although I’m not familiar with the details of Farrakhan’s theories, and they may well be more benign. 

(I use the term racialist to mean someone who recognizes the existence of race or racial categories but in a benign sense – say, for studying them for correlation to disease.  I consider a racist someone who categorizes races for malign purposes – to evaluate them for eugenecist purposes, to proscribe their movement or employment, or even commit ethnic cleansing or genocide. I consider racial epithets to be just vulgarities, unsuitable for public discourse, but not necessarily indicative of racial antipathy, let alone racism).

On the other hand,  I am also against the system of ideological “untouchables” we have. It is fundamentally regressive and anti-liberal.  One solution to this dilemma would be to bring people like Duke and Farrakhan into mainstream discourse, but actively criticize them and subject them to the test of reason and evidence. That would tarnish the aura of things forbidden and dangerous that now tempts iconoclasts on the left and right to their side.

How India woke David Duke up

So, David Duke, like many old-school Western scholars and like Hitler before him, sees in the Aryan invasion scenario a perfect illustration of his racialist world view. But it gets even better. Duke did not merely add the AIT to an arsenal of arguments which he was already building up in support of his racial politics, as just one more illustration. The AIT, in its racial version, played a completely pivotal role in his decision to devote his life to the cause of the White race.

In the countryside around Delhi, Duke visited a temple, and next to it,

“I saw something that will forever remain in my memory. In the shade sat a little, brown, half-caste Indian girl. She was thoroughly emaciated and resembled some sort of hideous doll except that she moved slightly, and her animated bones and skin had a terrifying effect. (…) On one cheek was an open sore the size of a quarter. More sores covered her arms, chest and legs. Dozens of flies covered each sore, jockeying with each other to feast on her flesh. (…) The child held her hand out to me, begging for a few rupees. I dug my hand deep into my pocket, pulled out all the Indian coins I had, and carefully tipped them into her dark, skeletal hand. I turned and stumbled back out into the hot Indian sun, my eyes blinded by tears.” (p.523)

Yes, tears for so much human misery, i.e. for a victim of Nehru’s counterproductive Soviet-oriented economic policies, just human fellow-feeling for a suffering child? That is what you would expect in this situation, and it may have been there in young David’s mind, of course. But his belief in the AIT put a most peculiar spin on this experience:

“On the way back to my room I wondered if, in a few hundred years, some half-black descendant of mine would be sitting among the ruins of our civilization, brushing away the flies, waiting to die. Every day our nation grows a little darker from the torrential immigration of non-Whites, high non-White birthrates and increasing racial miscegenation (…) To the plaudits of the media, the Pariahs — the Untouchables — are slowly replacing the Brahmin of America and the entire Western world. The hideous skeletal girl in the prophetic setting of that Indian temple was my glimpse of the future of the Western world. (…) The huge populace of modern India cannot sustain the level of culture and economic well-being that its high-caste forebears created. (…) Our race’s struggle for survival and evolutionary advancement became the meaning of my life when I looked into that little Indian girl’s forlorn face (…) I determined that my life would be about awakening the Aryan within every person of European descent. When I grow weary in this battle and I find my character smeared or my personal life attacked, that girl’s gaunt face is there to haunt me, to drive me onward. (…) that girl’s countenance is there to remind me, in the most graphic terms, what failure would mean for our progeny.” (p.523-524)

On seeing this pitiable girl outside a Hindu temple, Duke might have resolved to do something about poverty, unjust international trade relations, foolish economic policies, the starving of Hindu temple personnel and their families by Nehruvian secularism, or any other worthy cause somehow related to this poor girl. But because he believed in the invasion of white Aryans in India and their subsequent degeneration due to their biological Indianization, he resolved to do something entirely different: to blow new life into White racism. Who says that the racist understanding of the Aryan invasion scenario has become irrelevant in the West? It is the Aryan Invasion Theory that gave America the racialist politician David Duke:

“Before my journey to India, the racial ideals that I believed in were abstract concepts and principles. In the moment I saw that emaciated child in the ruins, all my ideas were dramatically transformed into the reality of flesh and blood. (…) Seeing the child in the temple changed an intellectual commitment into a holy obligation. (…) I realized that day, in the scorching Indian sun outside that temple, that I had to adopt the spirit of an Aryan warrior who understood that the current struggle of our race transcends the centuries. (…) The flame that ignited in me on that hot August day in India in 1971 is still white hot and imperishable.” (p.525)

If the Aryan Invasion Theory is refuted, or alternatively, if its holds out against the present wave of criticism and gets confirmed and stronger than before, it will have consequences not only in the Indian power equation between Hindus and their enemies, but also in America.