Twenty years after Samuel T. Francis published "The Roots of the White Man" in a 1996 issue of American Renaissance, at least two of his claims need to be revised thanks to archaeological finds and advances in genetics; namely that we cannot conduct genetic analyses of ancient Aryans, and that the Aryans were not the inventors of the wheel.
Nevertheless, his essay remains highly relevant to the quest of rediscovering who we are. Below are some selected excerpts.
Indo-European gods are considerably less powerful than the deities adored by the non-Aryans. Zeus, Apollo, Odin, Thor, and the rest did not create the universe and are in fact subject to most of its rules. The subordination of Aryan gods to the regularities of the universe itself points toward a deep Indo-European belief in Cosmic Order, a belief that has major philosophical and ethical implications.[...]
It is also the dynamism of Indo-European man that accounts for the comparative absence of “Oriental despotism” in the political history of the Aryan peoples. Both Greece and Rome were originally ruled by kings, but the kings were never absolute monarchs and were elected or confirmed by the aristocratic warrior classes. Very early in their histories, the kings were dethroned, and republics, also originally aristocratic, were established. The Roman historian Tacitus noted similar institutions among the warrior bands of the ancient Germans, whom he held up in part as models of virtue against whom the decadent Romans of his day fell short.[...]
Those despots who have gained power over Aryan peoples usually never last very long, and those who overthrow or assassinate them usually become heroic figures. The individuality and dynamism of Indo-European man simply does not tolerate one man or institution monopolizing all the power and dictating to everyone else.[...]
Already in prehistoric times, then, the Germanic peoples exhibited an archaic form of republicanism that was fundamentally aristocratic in nature. The “free men” of the community did not include all inhabitants but “the great mass of independent landowners and the wealthier or more aristocratic class of recognized families, which might be called the nobility.” The unfree, or “thralls,” had no vote or standing in the assembly. The free men were also those who bore arms,[...]
When the Framers of the American Constitution guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, “being necessary to the security of a free State,” they were following this ancient Aryan custom of the assembly of armed free men, and much the same custom was observed among the early Greeks and Romans.[...]
The natural form of government among the Aryan peoples, then, appears to be this kind of aristocratic republic, tending toward democracy but with well-recognized rights and duties for non-aristocrats. A limited democracy thus has deep racial and cultural roots among Europeans, but it properly derives from those roots, not from the rootless ideologies that today have grotesquely expanded it far beyond its natural role. The natural Aryan aristocratic republicanism is a form of government encouraged by the tripartite structure of Indo-European society; by its distinctions and balances between the warrior, priestly, and producer classes; by its tendency to separate the sacred from the secular; and by the apparently innate dynamism of the Aryan race itself, which resists and rebels against any effort to impose autocratic rule or to induce the passivity that allows despotism to flourish.[...]
Despotism, even in its European forms, is not naturally an Indo-European institution but derives ultimately from alien peoples.[...]
Aryans were also closely attached to family units, not only the nuclear family but also the clans in which their society was organized, and clan warfare in Ireland and Scotland, family-based political factionalism among the Romans, and conflicts among the many independent city-states of ancient Greece were notorious as forces that tended to keep these populations divided. It was groups such as race, nationality, clan, community, class, and family that established the social fabric of early Aryan life, and individualism in the modern sense of a John Stuart Mill or Ayn Rand—as a belief that justifies the individual’s neglecting or betraying his social bonds—did not exist.[...]
The “sense of reciprocity” as well as the rule of law are no doubt reflections of the Aryan concept of Cosmic Order, a view of the universe that holds that both nature and man behave according to universal, perpetual laws or regular patterns and in which rights and duties are in balance. But the concept of Cosmic Order did not imply an egalitarian or homogeneous social order in which everyone is equal and there are no distinctions between groups, classes, sexes, races, and nations. Indeed, early Aryan society was hierarchical, organic, and aristocratic; the natural form of Aryan government was an aristocratic republic in which distinct classes and social groups participated and expressed their views and interests freely, and a high level of political participation was necessary for such dynamic and restless populations of independent, armed free men as the early Aryans.[...]
Free speech, for example, certainly seems to have pertained in the tribal assemblies, and it is doubtful if the early Aryans were such bluenoses as their Victorian descendants or such totalitarians as late 20th century academics. But free speech did not include the right to commit sacrilege, subversion, or obscenity and was circumscribed by custom and the high courtesy that is universal among warrior peoples.
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