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Mediterranean race

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The Mediterranean race (also Mediterranid race) is one of the sub-races into which the Caucasian race was categorised by most anthropologists in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries.

Quotes

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  • Our area, from Morocco to Syria, is the homeland and cradle of the Mediterranean race. Mediterraneans are found also in Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Greece and the Mediterranean islands, and in all these places, as in Southwest Asia, they form the major genetic element in the local populations. In a dark-skinned and finer-boned form they are also found as the major population element in Pakistan and northern India ... The Mediterranean race, then, is indigenous to, and the principal element in, the Southwest Asia, and the greatest concentration of a highly evolved Mediterranean type falls among two of the most ancient Semitic-speaking peoples, notably the Arabs and the Jews (Although it may please neither party, this is the truth.). The Mediterraneans occupy the center of the stage; their areas of greatest concentration are precisely those where civilization is the oldest. This is to be expected, since it was they who produced it and it, in a sense, that produced them."
    • Carleton Coon, The Story of the Middle East (1958), pp. 154–157
  • On the south and west this type comes into contact and mixes with the "Melanochroi," or "dark whites" ... In these regions are found, more or less mixed with Xanthochroi and Mongoloids, and extending to a greater or less distance into the conterminous Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australioid areas, the men whom I have termed Melanochroi, or dark whites. Under its best form this type is exhibited by many Irishmen, Welshmen and Bretons, by Spaniards, South Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and high-caste Brahmins ... I am much disposed to think that the Melanochroi are the result of an intermixture between the Xanthochroi and the Australoids. It is to the Xanthochroi and Melanochroi, taken together, that the absurd denomination of "Caucasian" is usually applied.
  • This is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State. To what extent the Mediterranean race entered into the blood and civilization of Rome, it is now difficult to say, but the traditions of the Eternal City, its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as the Roman ideals of family life, loyalty, and truth, point clearly to a Nordic rather than to a Mediterranean origin.
  • Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians.
  • The struggles in early Rome between Latin and Etruscan, and the endless quarrels between patrician and plebeian, arose from the existence in Rome, side by side, of two distinct and clashing races, probably Nordic and Mediterranean respectively. The northern qualities of Rome are in sharp contrast to the Levantine traits of the classic Greeks, whose volatile and analytical spirit, lack of cohesion, political incapacity, and ready resort to treason, all point clearly to southern and eastern affinities.
  • It is admitted that the various groups of the Mediterranean race did not speak, in the first in stance, any form of Aryan tongue. These Aryan languages we know were introduced into the Mediterranean world from the north. We have in the Basque tongue to-day a survival of one of the Pre-Aryan languages, which were spoken by the Mediterranean population of the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of the Aryan-speaking Gauls of Nordic race. ... The native Mediterranean race of the Iberian Peninsula quickly absorbed the blood of these conquering Gauls, just as it later diluted beyond recognition the vigorous physical characters of the Teutonic Vandals, Suevi, and Visigoths. A certain amount of Nordic blood still persists to-day in northwestern Spain, especially in Galicia and along the Pyrenees, as well as generally among the upper classes. The Romans left no evidence of their domination except in their language and religion; while the earlier Phoenicians on the coasts, and the later swarms of Moors and Arabs all over the peninsula, but chiefly in the south, were closely related by race to the native Iberians.
  • It is not possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands, and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.
  • Hitler... informed Mussolini when the two met in June 1934 that all Mediterranean peoples were tainted by Negro blood.
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 44 (with reference to Dennis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire, p. 58; Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, p. 231)
  • Italy, Gobineau claimed, had been bastardized since late antiquity by foreign blood. Miscegenation in Italy, he wrote, produced mediocrities, "men with the herd mind", "nations dulled by a fatal somnolence", "people like buffaloes chewing the cud in the stagnant wallows of the Pontine marshes".
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 13
  • Mussolini specifically objected to Gobineau's claim that (as Mussolini put it) the Aryan is the race that carries in its womb the superior forms of civilization. Two races are today on the soil of Europe: the superior Indo-Aryan race, living in the North, and the Latin or "chaotic" race, mixed with the Semite, swarming in the South. This last is a continuous threat, a permanent danger for the former. Germanism must therefore purify Europe, reducing to slavery and gradually eliminating the inferior race, the chaotic or Mediterranean race incapable of an elevated tenor of life. Naturally all that is noble, grand, and heroic is the work of the Aryan race; all that is vile is certainly a product of the "chaotic" race. Furthermore, Gobineau equated the psychology of the Mediterraneans to that of the indisputably (to Gobineau and probaly also to Mussolini) inferior black races.
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 15
  • As Mussolini later explained, Lapouge believed "the individual belonging to the Aryan race ... was tall, with blonde hair, clear eyes, light complexion, and elongated form of head." Their adversaries, the Alpine race, were an inferior brachycephalic people: The auctonous alpines lived, according to Lapouge, in the mountains and the forests in an almost ape-like state during the Stone Age. The Aryans were served by these beasts of burden. Then in the course of centuries the mix between the two races confused their different characters, so much that today the inferior race, the alpine brachycephalic or chaotic race, seriously menaces the purity of the blonde race. The struggle between these races, Lapouge thought, would end only through the application of the most drastic measures. Mussolini summarized the argument: Lapouge, like Gobineau, declares that the Aryan race today represented in greater part by Germanism is the "elect", but not circumscribed solely by the limits of the current German Empire. The brachycephalic race, dispersed in the territory of the ancient Roman Empire, is inferior. The first is the creator, the second the destroyer of civilization. This latter must disappear or be reduced to the most humiliating and necessary servitude, so as to not obstruct the Aryan race on its ascending path. The ruling classes must apply artificial selection in order to eliminate the chaotic race and gather within itself all that includes the Germanic.
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 15
  • Chamberlain pointed specifically at modern Italy as a symbol of the degenerated state of Mediterranean Europe. He proffered evidence for this view in his "masterpiece" Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts: "He who travels from London to Rome, goes from the clouds to the sun, but at the same time from a refined civilization and a high culture towards barbarism, filth, brutality, ignorance, lies, and misery. It is not a spectacle of decadence that we contemplate in the south: it is a simple arrest of development; that population has remained in the Roman imperial civilization , while the world has marched forward. Today, it is true, they have begun to awkwardly imitate the north, but instead of assimilating the superior culture, they finish by losing the picturesque vestiges of their past originality. "The "Mediterranean" is thus as low in the scale of culture as Seville and Athens are today cities "less European" than are New York and Melbourne. Between the Germans and the "chaotics" there is an abyss over which it is not possible to build a bridge."
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 16
  • In "Il Trentino", Mussolini emphasized that Chamberlain did not even allow Italians the honour of fathering the Renaissance masters. Rather, Chamberlain attributed such Italian achievements as the Renaissance to Germanic families living in Italy: "The Italian or Latin Renaissance in general is the work of German elements. Raffael was blonde, Michelangelo did not want to learn the classical languages (the languages of chaos), Giotto was German." Thus, we should not be surprised to learn that Chamberlain claimed that: "Naturally all the epochs that signal a 'turning point' of history are due to the Germanic element," and "today great Europe is Germanic. Here there is equilibrium. In Mediterranean Europe there is disequilibrium and dissolution. The united future Europe will have the Germanic stamp." Following Chamberlain Ludwig Woltmann in 1905 argued in 'Die Deutschen und die Italienische Renaissance' that all other racial groups in Italy outside of the Nordics were inferior, and had contributed nothing to Italian civilization. Woltmann asserted that virtually all the notable achievements of Italy were produced by German descendants.
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 16
  • Mussolini related an encapsulated Nordic racist view of Italian history, replete with degenerating miscegenation and Germanic cultural superiority: "The black psychology belongs to the Mediterranean people... Then, thick darkness until the Reformation, which was the work of the Germanism, who have not since stopped in their march toward superior forms of life though will not so continue, if they do not remember to keep immune from the Alpine brachycephalic contagion. The Alpine brachycephalics would be assigned to the most heavy and unhealthy work, true beasts of burden, without rights and without a future. Such is the picture of Germanic society..."
    • Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 16
  • The Latin malus ["bad"] (beside which I place [mélas, Greek for "black"]) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired ("hic niger est"), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distinguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color. At any rate, the Gaelic presented me with an exactly analogous case: fin, as in the name Fingal, the characteristic term for nobility, eventually the good, noble, pure, originally the fair-haired [Blondkopf] as opposed to the dark, black-haired native population. The Celts, by the way, were definitely a fair-haired race [eine blonde Rasse]; and it is a mistake to try to relate the area of dark-haired people found on ethnographic maps of Germany to Celtic bloodlines, as Virchow does. These are the last vestiges of the pre-Aryan population of Germany. (The subject races are seen to prevail once more, throughout almost all of Europe; in color, shortness of skull, perhaps also in intellectual and social instincts. Who knows whether modern democracy, the even more fashionable anarchism, and especially that preference for the commune, the most primitive of all social forms, which is now shared by all European socialists — whether all these do not represent a throwback, and whether, even physiologically, the Aryan [master] race of conquerors is not doomed?)
  • The pure inwardness of the German nation was the proper soil for the emancipation of the Spirit; the Romantic nations [i.e. the Latin nations], on the contrary, have maintained in the very depth of their soul - in their spiritual consciousness - the principle of Disharmony; they are the product of the fusion of Roman and German blood, and still retain the heterogeneity thence resulting.
    • Georg Hegel, quoted by Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (2001), p. 12
  • [T]he Mediterranean world isn’t so bad when one goes back to Pelasgic times and takes the Graeco-Roman races! After all, I have dark hair and eyes now, no matter what I used to have; and it is quite as good to be a sanguinary Roman consul as a Norse pirate.
    • H. P. Lovecraft, Letter to Frank Belknap Long, 13 May 1923; Selected Letters I: 1911–1924 (Arkham, 1965), p. 228
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