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Today, "Ayan Race" is a descredited "ethnic classification". The stereotypical image of an Aryan in popular culture is a tall Northern European with blond hair and blue eyes.

The Aryan Race is an ethnic classification. The word "Aryan" has it's roots in ancient Hindu texts, from the word Arya, which means civilised or enlightened.

It was later used to distinguish Indo-European language speakers from the rest of the world, and this distinction included Iranians and Europeans.

By the 19th Century, the term was being used for a subset of Caucasian Europeans, and their descendants (for example, in the Americas and Australia/New Zealand). While the term referred only to their languages (of Indo-Iranian origin), many came to associate the term Aryan with a difference in biology that we now know to not be present. Furthermore, it came to be believed that the Aryan Race originated in Germany and Scandinavia, which is popularised well in to the 20th century.

Today, Aryanism is closely related to the German Nazi ideologies of the first half of the 20th century. In this Aryanism, the European Aryan Race was superior to other races, especially the Semitic races (those ethnic groups with origins in the Middle East and Northern Africa, especially Jews.) The Nazi Party worked to maintain the so-called purity of this Aryan Race, with systematic imprisonment and, ultimately, genocide. It is for these reasons that Aryanism is a discredited ideology.

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15y ago

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