Debetro
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[The nobles] They are called, for example, "the truthful": the first to do so is the Greek aristocracy... the aforementioned word becomes the badge and motto of the aristocracy and begins to have the complete meaning of "aristocratic" , as a delimitation against the lying vulgar man...
With the Latin malus ["bad"] (next to it I put μέλας ["black" in Greek]) perhaps the vulgar man was characterized as a man with dark skin, and especially as a man with black hair (hic niger est ["this one is black", Latin]), as a pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who was most clearly distinguished by color from the blond race, that is, from the Aryan race of the conquerors, that they had become the owners; at least the Gaelic has offered me the exactly parallel case, "fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive word of the aristocracy, which ends up meaning the good, the noble, the pure, originally meant the head." blonde, in contrast to the primitive inhabitants, with dark skin and black hair. [I would compare this phenomenon with that of the English word fair, which meant "fair", "ruddy", "luminous complexion", and which ended up also meaning "fair", "good", "desirable"]. The Celts, by the way, were a completely blonde race; An injustice is committed when those bands of essentially dark-haired population, which can be observed in careful ethnographic maps of Germany, are connected, as Virchow does, with a Celtic origin and with a mixture of Celtic blood: in those places appears, rather, the pre-Aryan population of Germany. (The same can be said of almost all of Europe: essentially the subjugated race has ended up predominating again right there in the color of the skin, in the shortness of the skull and perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can tell us? guarantees that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism and, above all, that tendency towards the commune, towards the most primitive form of society, a tendency today typical of all socialists in Europe, do not essentially mean a gigantic backlash - and that the race of conquerors and lords, that of the Aryans, is not succumbing even physiologically?...)
Our very German word "good" [gut]: could it not mean "the divine" [den Göttlichen], the man of "divine stock" [göttlichen geschlechts]?, and be identical with the popular (originally aristocratic) name of the goths [Gothen]?
("The genealogy of morals", 1887, First Treatise, 5. Speaking of the aristocracy in Europe).
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