Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

A few months ago, I noticed that at the listings of many books about comparative Indo-European linguistics on Amazon.com was the same copied-and-pasted review encouraging browsers to read John V. Day’s The Indo-Europeans: The Anthropological Evidence. The fellow who posted these reviews, which never said anything about the book at whose listing they were posted, had also posted a number of positive reviews to books on white supremacism. What kind of book was Day’s, I wondered, that it would attract such an audience?

I discovered that Prof Day was a student of Prof James Mallory, author of the now-classic In Search of the Indo-Europeans and editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies. In fact, this book The Indo-Europeans was the product of his doctoral studies under Prof Mallory. I proceeded to get the book by inter-library loan. When it arrived, I found that the book itself merely tried to reach some kind of physical description of the Indo-Europeans based on archaeological finds and ancient works of history. It was uninteresting—I like to view PIE as an elegant structure in itself and not try to connect it to actual speakers—but unoffensive. The book’s publisher, the Institute for the Study of Man, has published a number of informative books on Indo-European studies, including Winfred Lehmann’s Pre-Indo-European.

I then discovered an essay written by Prof Day himself, ‘In Quest of Our Linguistic Ancestors: The Elusive Origins of the Indo-Europeans’ which is a presentation for the layman of some of his work. Let us first consider the forum to which Prof Day submitted this essay. The first two points of the philosophy of The Occidental Quarterly journal is that The West is a cultural compound of our Classical, Christian, and Germanic past, and that Race informs culture; it is the necessary precondition for cultural identity and integrity. That Prof Day would choose such a place to discuss his work says much about the author. Just wait, however, until you see what the author himself has to say.

To show the true nature of Prof Day’s beliefs, it is sufficient to simply quote the final paragraph of his essay.

In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper class. Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later historians to determine what became of them. The evidence found in ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type, although that isn’t something one reads in modern books about Roman history. In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny minority. Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to wither away. Consider a bleak statistic. We know of about fifty patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had survived. The decay continued in imperial times. We know of the families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five, but, just one generation later, all trace of half of these families had vanished. If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from Indo-European history.

There you have it. Rome fell due to race-mixing and our modern Western culture will too if we don’t watch out. Disgusting.

I would like to believe that Prof Day is a rare breed in modern Indo-European studies, but if he hasn’t changed his views after being around long enough to submit a doctoral thesis, I am worried that the atmosphere in IE studies is conducive to this nonsense. I hope that some of you out there with more experience can reassure me that I am not entering a field full of bigots.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 at 07:57 and is filed under Indo-European. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.