The hypothesis that somewhere, sometime, an Indo-European race has existed has always been anchored in linguistic observations. But during the ninete… - Stefan Arvidsson

It was thus from this area (which Germany had recently annexed) that the greatest of all cultural peoples, the blue-eyed, long-skulled, Indo-Germanic race, had emigrated to civilize the world. According to Kossina, the Indo-Germanic race had attended its cultural-hero status purely because of racial-biological factors. On their migrations, southwards, the racially pure Indo-Germans had nonetheless become contaminated and this was why their cultural-heroic exploits in Greece, Rome and India had not become enduring (Arvidsson 2006, p.144).

It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out­ look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology.

Lincoln argues that Dumézil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobie French Fascism.