In the Soviet Union, scholars even argued that ”it is absolutely necessary to make clear to everyone that the belief in the original homelands comes … - Stefan Arvidsson

In the 1970s, the Mankind Quarterly, which alternates articles about race and genetics with articles about the Indo-Europeans and prehistoric cultures, became a model when one of Europe’s leading neo-Fascists, Alain de Benoist, founded his own journal called Nouvelle École. In the journals so-called Comité de patronage were, among others, Roger Pearson, Mircea Eliade, the German classicist Franz Altheim (formerly of SS-Ahnenerbe), Marija Gimbutas, Stig Wikander, and the Swedish racial anthropologist Bertil J. Lundman. There was also the Benoist sympathizer Jean Haudry, who publishes Frances foremost journal for Indo-European studies, Études indo-européennes . Some people were probably on the Comité de patronage because they were unaware of its political sympathies, or because they wanted to sun themselves in the glow of great scholarly names; others were there because they supported the neo-Fascist views of the journal. Georges Dumézil was also on the journals Comité de patronage. But when Benoist in 1972-73 (no. 22-23) published an honorary issue for Dumézil, which made the French press speculate whether Dumézil sympathized with Benoist’s neo-Fascism, Dumézil withdrew his support from the journal. In newspaper interviews, he later made it clear that he did not support Benoist s neo-Fascism, at least not without reservations. However, this event triggered the ideologically critical examination of his work...

The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future. The “Aryan” colony of India came to have a special place in this context. The scholars' racist at­titude made them seek evidence in the Vedic texts that the ancient Aryan immigrants (aryas) had had a racial consciousness, and that the caste society was a kind of apartheid system from the very beginning. But reference to the higher castes as “Aryan brothers" could also be used for humanitar­ian aims. By referring to the relationship between Europeans and Indians, people imagined that they could more easily reform the Hindu culture and modernize or “Indo-Europeanize" Indian society. (310-11)

Formulated in accordance with R. G. Collingwood's thought, the same question would be "To what "ideological" problem were the Indo-Europeans the solution?" More recently, Quentin Skinner has pointed to the philological rule that a text can be understood only if one also understands why it exists in the first place; understanding is about understanding not only what is in the text but why it is there. The aim of this book is, in other words, to examine what ideological motives causes an array of scholars during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to become interested in Indo-European religion and culture and made them prioritize certain historical areas and sources, choose certain perspectives and hypotheses instead of others, and make certain kinds of associations or use a certain rhetoric (Arvidsson 2006, p.5, emphasis in the original).