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Kurt Caz: The Physiognomy of Colonization
I don't follow travel vloggers in general, but there's one who is more anthropologist than tourist, documenting a phenomenon that no modern academics would dare acknowledge in this day in age. Kurt Caz, the Aryan Wanderer, mostly travels alone, sometimes accompanied by a beautiful woman of the local variety. He only visits non-tourist locations, strides the peasant countryside like a colossus, shows up uninvited and unannounced where the locals have likely never seen a tourist, and is instantly treated with respect by the men and admiration by the women. This is a pattern which is perfectly consistent in his videos across all continents and villages he has traveled through.
Once he visited a village in Papua New Guinea, and I'm not sure how to describe what happened other than they started worshipping him, declaring his visit as the fulfillment of some local prophecy of a white man coming to the village.
Kurt is clearly aware of the racial dynamics at play (and drops hints that he's secretly Based), but he leans into them in the best way. He uses his physical presence and charisma to engage with the locals, who immediately show admiration and respect, and Kurt reciprocates with a genuine racial tolerance that is more real, but completely unlike, what passes for it today.
You see, today "racial tolerance" means fixing the dynamics which are obviously at play in Kurt's content. Don't believe your lying eyes, beauty is relative and the engrained reactions we seem to have is a conspiracy of White Supremacy. Body physique is just a trait with an attractiveness that is brainwashed into us by an intolerant culture; the indigenous reaction to a White Man showing up uninvited and unannounced is just an artifact the legacy of colonization.
And to be sure, there are many factors at play here. Conventional wisdom would likely point to these factors exclusively:
These factors surely come into play, but they also beg the question. White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool. Much ado is made about technological supremacy and the violence of colonization, again there's a lot of truth there, but the uglier reality is that the colonization was in many cases more peaceful than existing cultural practices and conflicts if the locals had been left to their own devices.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods. That dynamic can be seen as a microcosm in Kurt's interactions throughout his travels. In general, the phenomenon of a race of people regarding another race as divine is much more common than we would expect at first glance. Many people who would laugh at the idea of the Aztecs believing the conquistadores to be emissaries of the Aztec gods also themselves believe in the literal truth of the Jewish covenant, that Jews are a people Chosen by god and they are a race of god-creators vis-a-vis the ancestry of Jesus Christ.
This dynamic also serves an important counterpoint to IQ supremacy. Imagine being a short, weak, ugly nerd with somewhat higher IQ than Kurt. The Rationalists would tend to regard that person as the Superior Being, taking for granted the relativity of Beauty and dismissing the importance of a Noble physiognomy and charisma to civilizational achievement.
This dovetails with @naraburn's post about the Pokemon Go avatar changes being designed, apparently, to challenge conventional beauty standards- especially the sub-question in that thread regarding a conspiracy to promote ugliness. That conspiracy exists, in its declaration that there is no Noble Physiognomy, and our attractions are just manipulated by White Supremacy. Whereas Kurt can just show up and use his physical presence and charisma to exert command, they are trying very hard to engrain - "don't believe your lying eyes, ugliness is beautiful." But in the same way educational interventions constantly fail to close the IQ gaps, these cultural initiatives will also fail because our brains have been tuned to perceive a person's physical attractiveness as a proxy for genetic fitness.
While they will never make Ugly become Beautiful, they absolutely can and will destroy Beauty through Ressentiment. Culture War has fomented a large amount of hostility towards White People from non-white people in the West, but it will never be able to reproduce the racial dynamic that Kurt is able to tap into in his content.
This is very bad history. Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords. The British didn't rule India in their own name; they slowly accumulated alliances and legal rights and privileges through local intermediaries.
This is also very bad history. The Aztecs didn't think Cortez was a god - they in fact whipped his men out of Tenochtitlan in La Noche Triste, after killing the collaborator Moctezuma. Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown. The influx of more and more Spaniards into the region, coupled with the massive disruption to Mexica society caused by the plagues of the Columbian exchange, was what finalized the ultimate subjugation of the locals.
Well if British rule isn't a close enough basis of comparison for you, then certainly we can go back further to the Aryan invasion of India and even more clearly recognize a similar dynamic. Those racial dynamics did become deeply embedded in their religion and have had a profound impact in the ethnogenesis of those peoples.
Whereas people today can point to, ostensibly, historically contingent factors like the Western economy and media, in the Bronze and classical age we see evidence of a similar dynamic, of a quasi or often literal worship of a noble, Aryan phenotype.
You even see this within European culture, for example in the Aryan sun-god Apollo the Hyperborean, demonstrative of a Noble Phenotype worshipped and posited as a physical ideal in ancient Greece.
Apollo is identified as a founder of civilizations, with his epithet Archegetes, we see a physiognomy associated with the social orders that others identify as being so crucial to those racial dynamics and colonial development across the world.
Apollo, the Greek god of colonization, and beauty, is directly associated with this same phenotype even in Ancient Greece. These racial dynamics are even at play in intra-European civilization, and have been for thousands of years.
You made a claim about the British colonisation of India and the Aztec response to Cortez. Both of those claims are false, and you were challenged on them, and your response is to... what? Assert that the Indo-Aryans somehow prove it as well? Despite not presenting anything that would plausibly indicate that?
And then you somehow pivot to ancient Greece, where Apollo is actually a deity of many things (including prophecy, music, light, disease, archery, healing, etc.), and the only arguments you make are firstly that one of Apollo's many epithets relates to the founding of cities (never mind that that is also true of many other deities), and that... you think one statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur? Okay? This isn't even considering that an ancient Greek 'colony' is something very different to British India.
This is all, frankly, bullshit. You have some sort of general theory about superior racial archetypes - it's basically just a recapitulation of the old Nordic/Aryan category you get from people like Gobineau - but whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.
Let's try to clarify this a bit.
Motte: More attractive, more physically capable people are more likely to successfully reproduce.
Bailey: There is a well-defined Aryo-Nordic race that is recognised across many cultures for its superior beauty and intellectual capacity.
The motte is true, sure. But the position you're arguing for overall is under-specified, you haven't made any actual argument for it beyond gesturing at a handful of isolated observations that fail to cohere into a theory, and whenever any one of those observations is indicated to be false, you ignore it and immediately jump to a completely different observation, often centuries or even millennia away. This is not a real argument.
What are the actual points of evidence here? Some guy on YouTube makes videos of himself flirting with girls around the world. The British colonised India. The Aztecs thought Cortez was a god. Indo-Aryan peoples conquered northern India around four thousand years ago. Apollo was revered as a founder of cities. One statue of Apollo has a similar nose shape to some guy. Even if all these points were true, they don't cohere into a plausible macrohistorical theory. Anyone could, with a similarly arbitrary process of selection, cobble together a theory of racial superiority from the same random noise. There is no rigour to this hypothesis.
It's not exactly a pivot to point towards more evidence of the deification of a certain phenotype, which was explicitly associated with the founding of cities and colonization. To say "the statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur" is a pretty dishonest handwaving for what is very obviously a Northern European phenotype being venerated as the physical ideal of a Founder and Colonizer racial-type in ancient Greece and Rome. Yes, I do think that despite the obvious differences there is a similar dynamic at play in European colonization across the entire world, and this behavior was explicitly identified with a European phenotype in the ancient world.
An of course the Physiognomy of Apollo is just one piece of the puzzle. The broader mythos accounts the race of Hyperboreans emerging from the northern most land in existence and constructing the temples to Apollo at Delphi and Delos. The Ionians in particular, who constituted the Athenian elite, claimed descent from Apollo and were associated with tall stature and blonde hair by ancient sources. In Greek myth, among all the Olympians, only Apollo was worshipped by the Hyperboreans.
I do see a coherence in this dynamic in both the ancient and modern world, I don't think it's all a coincidence or that these myths and symbols have a non-racial meaning. They do point towards a racial archetype if such a thing can possibly exist, and of course I think they do.
None of my specific claims have been false, they have all been true. The British colonization of India, the Aryan invasion of Iran and India in which the word "Aryan" was synonymous in civic society with "noble", the colonization of North and South America, the colonization of Australia and Africa. It's not exactly a stretch to relate this behavior to a racial archetype, especially when we have evidence for cult-religions in the ancient world which venerated Colonization with a racialized portrayal that is identical to the race of people who have colonized almost the entire world. Your comment reminds me of the mainstream which says "oh those race realists are just repeating the debunked claims of ye olde' racists who measured skulls", but actually the old theories were the correct ones and the new theories based on fraudulent science from the likes of Stephen Jay Gould or Jared Diamond are false.
It should also be noted that the "old theories" about the Aryan invasions of Indo-Europe were proven true by recent genetic evidence, whereas the politically correct post-War narrative that emerged about cultural diffusion of Indo-European languages were proven false. So the "new theories" are already on very weak footing, it's passe at this point to make fun of the old racial theories which are proving to be more accurate than politically correct post-war theories with every passing year.
What we call "wokeism" also picks up on the primordial reality of this racial archetype, they simply resent it and want to see it destroyed, and I interpret this as having a large amount of overlap with the war on beauty discussed by others here.
I do think Kurt's videos are evidence of this phenomenon, that was the point of my post. You can take a look at another video of him wandering through a city in Bangladesh, the only foreigner in sight. You can say "he would get the same reaction if he were an attractive/physically fit Chinaman or African, but I simply don't believe you. I do think the dynamic Kurt leans into in his content is racialized specifically in relation to White people, the only question is whether this dynamic is contingent on historical factors or if it's pointing to something different.
One could say, for example, that since the English colonized Bangladesh then the people are primed to behave this way in Kurt's presence, but that's just begging the question.
The pattern of behavior, for thousands of years, of European people colonizing the world is very strong evidence that points towards a certain racial archetype. Furthermore, there is direct evidence that one of, perhaps the most important, god of the Greco-Roman world associated a European, Nordic phenotype to that archetype. That is very strong evidence, and Kurt's content is a modern-day demonstration of a certain phenomenon which is taboo to acknowledge as anything except historically contingent brainwashing by Western media and the legacy of colonization.
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