I started to think about this reading Turtledove's "In the Presence of Mine Enemies". It is now often overlooked that "Aryanism" (the notion that the spread of an "Aryan" people speaking Proto-IndoEuropean languages throughout central asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Europe) was once a widely (although never universally) accepted explanatory tool for the evolution and development of civilization in these areas. This theory came to be associated with more overtly eugenic and racist movements in the late 19th century - culminating in the racist physical anthropology and crimes of the Nazis, but was in fact an acceptable scientific theory to many mainstream American and European anthropologists, linguists, and archaeologists into the 1920's. It can be argued that universal disgust with the Nazis' use of such theories - more than their disproof on archaeological, historical, or linguistic grounds - is what lead to the sudden and total repudiation of genetic/biological determinsm in anthropology in the early 1940's.
I'm interested in PoD's or time lines which explore what might have been the result to the social sciences and political culture at large if such theories had never been appropriated and used by a group like the Nazis to murder millions and enslave millions more. Did they make the rise of something like "naziism" inevitable? Would they have eventually died a silent, slow death as some of their underpinnings came to be disproved? Would they have remained acceptable - but minority - scientific/historical theories? What might have been the broader effect on issues such as decolonialiization and equal rights in the democracies.
I'm interested in PoD's or time lines which explore what might have been the result to the social sciences and political culture at large if such theories had never been appropriated and used by a group like the Nazis to murder millions and enslave millions more. Did they make the rise of something like "naziism" inevitable? Would they have eventually died a silent, slow death as some of their underpinnings came to be disproved? Would they have remained acceptable - but minority - scientific/historical theories? What might have been the broader effect on issues such as decolonialiization and equal rights in the democracies.