After the fall of Nazi Germany, the term “Aryan” was replaced more and more frequently by “Indo-European." One contributing factor to this—aside from… - Stefan Arvidsson

Several people who have examined Indo-European scholarship have drawn parallels between research about the Proto-Indo-European world and myths, in the sense of narratives about origin. Indo-European research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the bourgeois class - a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of person, and affirmed certain feelings. Certainly, there have been some scholars who have not identified themselves with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but they are few.

For Hofler and Wikander, it was inconceivable that the "light" and noble Indo-Europeans that the nature mythologists and order ideologists had reconstructed had been able to conquer most of Eurasia. In order to carry out such a deed, they reasoned, the Indo-Europeans would mainly need not a high-standing culture, but a barbaric primal force, a force like the one the Germans had had during the Great Migration. As a commentary to Wikander's book about the Iranian male-fellowship god Vayu, Hofler writes that "the Indo-European expansion toward Asia has the same form of political structure as the later Germanic expansion, the Germanic kingdom of Wodan bears similar strengths as the first heroic age of the Indo-Europeans." According to Hofller it is only in light of the research on male fellowships and the "the discovery of the ur-Indo-German social structure" that the expansion can be understood. In Der arische Mannerbund, Wikander writes something similar: "The Maruts reflect the warrior aspect, which the male fellowships of the Aryan tribes had developed preferentially during the age of migration and conquest." Hofler and Wikander argues that the model of conquest that had been developed to explain the fact that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe and Asia at the dawn of history required the Indo-Europeans to be exceptionally dynamic and uninhibited warriors (Arvidsson 2006, p. 222).

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...