Hitler is idolised in India: WTF???

It is true he united Germany, build a great economy, united the people

Hitler didn't unite Germany, he dismembered it – he grabbed bits and pieces of German-populated land in the short term and ended up losing Silesia, Prussia and Pomerania to Poland/USSR.

Hitler didn't build a great economy – it was a totally unsustainable war economy that required constant expansion and expropriation of others, hence the invasions.

He didn't remain sane, and with hindsight the entire world knows what a maniac he was to become, but to the 100,000 odd people he would speak to in some of the rallies he was an alternative to the more mainstream german politicians at the time.

He wasn't sane at any point in his leadership of the NSDAP – he was a neurotic, psycopathic murderous bastard. They didn't need hindsight to work out what a frothing, dangerous mentalist he was – they just needed to read his book, which he published in 1925, which detailed his plans for rearmament, an invasion of France, a war against Judeo-Bolshevism and lebensraum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf . The "ooh, we didn't know how bad it really was until after the war" thing was a complete lie by (both) German postwar governments.

On a lighter note, the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen has two huge stone Indian elephants with mahoosive swastikas on the side which were built into the facade in the 1920s. The guides claim that the workers covered up the swastikas during the German occupation. Hmmm…

DrJ – Member
Plus – he was a better painter than Winston Churchill.

Speed fiend v alcoholic.

Carlsberg elephants 🙂

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyrh/3959704472/in/set-72157621875764117/%5B/url%5D

However, I am reliably informed that 'milk milk lemonade' is based entirely on sound scientific fact.

That's something, I suppose …

"The killing of Jews was not good, but everybody has a positive and negative side."

Yeh, and haven't we all got a "at least the trains ran on time" tattoo ?

No just a number on your wrist

just seeking some understanding of how someone from the far side of the world might be a fan of his 50-odd years after his death.

Robert Burns in Russia
Norman Wisdom in Albania
David Hasselhof in Germany (ok he's still alive, I think)

…..and you expect an answer on a cycling web site that will allow you to understand these things……

NORMAN WISDOM'S DEAD?!?

The Boer war was a worse case of genocide than the holocaust ? Not sure that the Boer war was a case of genocide at all. Not all concentration camps are camps for the systematic killing of people.

OK, not genocide on the scale of Nazi Germany, but the British at times routinely imprisoned boer woman & children into laagers, subsequently concentration camps. Because the British were already struggling to survive they then had the problems of trying to feed & water these prisoners. Ultimately the prisoners were not a priority, so many starved to death or died of dehydration.

Merely illustrating that while the world sees WW2 as the origins of concentration camps, the history goes back longer. If it had been something positive we'd have been blowing our trumpet about it a long time ago.

That makes sense. I never understood why the other one would be in the Albert Hall anyway.

Really? I was reliably informed that the other is in the Leeds Town Hall.

So he started out with three testicles?

So he started out with three testicles?

Someone, somewhere, is spreading stories. I think we need to be told The Truth!

Apologies if I shocked you Coyote. He's still alive and kicking at 95 😳

The beauty of history is that it's usually very subjective and with the benefit of time people can pick and choose the bits they like. Plus if you're studying someone from a completely different culture it's even easier to discard the bad bits.

As a study of the cult of personality Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are superb examples, as are many classical figures going back millennia. Unfortunately such individuals normally have a tendency to impose their will very forcefully.

As others have said the youth choosing to idolise some pretty shady characters from the past is nothing new, especially when said character is so heavily removed from their own way of life.

Dare I think it, but give it a few more years and I'd imagine general European opinion toward the Nazi's may well soften into something more objective. Every nation soaked its hand in the blood of the WW2 conflict and the way the Americans finished the Pacific campaign could be seen quite easily as genocide by some…….

Someone, somewhere, is spreading stories. I think we need to be told The Truth!

It's all a load of bollocks.

The swastika is a religous/lucky symbol for many in that part of the world, maybe this has skewed their view somehow?

*Dries eyes*

Thank you <sniff>

As a sense of perspective (God forbid) and Hitler bollock jokes aside.

to quote the article;

Books and memorabilia on the German leader's life have found a steady market in some sections of Indian society where he is idolised and admired, mostly by the young.

The numbers are small but seem to be growing.

Thats jounalist talk for, "we've found a couple of Indian teenagers who idolise Hitler, and needed to make a story out of it."

I'm not sure the vast majority of Indian do not idolise Hitler.

Hitler didn't unite Germany, he dismembered it

he did it was dismemebered after his death/defeat

You are correct he was a flaming loon but remember this as there has been some with hindsight revisionism but yes a **** nutter.
This is Hitler as Time magazineman of the year for 1938 published 1939

from thwe article

Adolf Hitler.

Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.

All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over Czechoslovakia. When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe's defensive alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting a "hands-off" promise from powerful Britain (and later France), Adolf Hitler without doubt became 1938's Man of the Year.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html#ixzz0rCwGwjXw
WTF am I doing defending Hitler am like his Alstair campbell 😯

nothing so terrified the world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events

I'm not very familiar with Time Magazine, but I suspect that these sorts of phrases generally don't appear in their "man of the year" articles these days. 🙂

yes I dont think the Iran leader [ no way am I trying to spell that name 😐 ] or bin ladden are in with a shout this year iirc BP all the way for the yanks this year

Junkyard: Hitler was still alive when the Soviets entered Berlin itself! He "achieved" that.

Man of the Year is not "great" man of the year, just "person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse, …has done the most to influence the events of the year."

They copped out and said Rudy Giuliani (!) instead of Bin Laden for 2001.

OK, not genocide on the scale of Nazi Germany, but the British at times routinely imprisoned boer woman & children into laagers, subsequently concentration camps. Because the British were already struggling to survive they then had the problems of trying to feed & water these prisoners. Ultimately the prisoners were not a priority, so many starved to death or died of dehydration.

Yes, all absolutely true – but was it genocide or a different form of (what would now be a) war crime?

yes but the corridor was gone and technically Germany was still unified.
You only have to ignore the post war partition of the country and the conquering forces running amok in Germany surely you can do that.
IGMC you win.

I seem to remember reading that Hitler is credited with helping bring about Indian independence, by weakening the British Empire, which he possibly sort of did in a roundabout way

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3684288.stm

Intriguingly, Stalin was Man of the Year twice. List here

British imprisonment of boer non-combatants was undoubtedly a war crime by modern standards (and was widely perceived as such at the time). It was not genocide, because there was no intention to eliminate the people, the miliatry objective was to deprive the enemy combatants of the civilian population who were supporting and supplying them. While the ridiculously high death toll was grim, predictable and preventable it was not the intention of the policy.

What does semantics mean?

The swastika is a religous/lucky symbol for many in that part of the world, maybe this has skewed their view somehow?

mirror image IIRC, bit like displaying a cross upside down?

p.s. no one's mentioned quite how racist(insert other workd here for irational hatred depending on the group) some Indians are against Pakistan, anyone of a poorer class, other religions.

What does semantics mean?

If this (presumably rhetorical) question is aimed at the issue of why you're wrong about genocide then the problem is that you aren't understanding the issue from a legal perspective.

Words can, as Humpty-Dumpty points out, mean whatever you want them to mean. The word "genocide" has a particular legal meaning derived from the Rome Statute. If it means something else to you that's fine, rock on. 🙂

To be fair, as my politics tutor put it, Hitler pulled a large and varied country out of recession and made them into an international superpower very quickly and very efficiantly.

I've recently taken to just lurking on here, rather than posting, but that comment ^^^ really is complete nonsense. And it offers perhaps an insight as to why Britain is on such deep political shite ……. if "politics tutors" are teaching that sort of bollox.

Of course I should have guessed that konabunny would come along and inject a bit of sanity and reality into the thread – with some factually based comments.

So just to add to konabunny's comment, Hitler and the Nazi Party were indeed hugely incompetent. Yes, Hitler did indisputably lift Germany out of recession, but he did that to a very large extent through rearmament and preparation for war.

This was not however a clever plan thought out by a "genius" – the consequence of massive government spending which war preparation invariably involves, is of course self-evident. Exactly the same situation occurred in the United States – from the Wall Street Crash right through until Pearl Habor, the US economy was in recession. After Pearl Habor the frantic activities of the US war economy created so much stimulus that the US emerged wealthier at the end of WW2, than it had been at the start of the war.

Actually Hitler's frenzied rearmament program caused huge problems for the German economy, and as a result Germany was plagued with recurring balance of payments crises. One solution offered to deal with this problem was to give absolute priority to imports for the armaments industries whilst rationing food and consumer goods.

Hitler however would have none of this, realising as he did, that his popularity would take a severe knock ….. he so wanted to be loved by his people. In fact, as an example of Nazi incompetence Germany only introduced rationing after Britain had. And initially in the early stages of the war there was very few restrictions, eventually severe rationing was introduced – when it was far too late.

Furthermore, at every other level of government activity the Nazis were hugely incompetent. Internal rivalries in particular, caused massive bureaucratic inefficiencies. Many ministries and state security/organisations/apparatus duplicated each others work/brief.

And it was something which Hitler himself actively encouraged – winning the Fuhrer's confidence/favour was what every ambitious Nazi strove to do. However, when those in power are constantly stabbing each other in the back, and then only telling the Fuhrer what he wants to hear and/or lying to him, then it is hardly conducive to an efficient and competent society.

I am not sticking up for Hitler here, merely pointing out that there are many far worse genocides that have taken place and that some have been carried out by the british.

Is that some sort of joke ?

Hitler industrialised genocide, no one else in history has done that. From the time the trains packed with victims pulled up at the extermination camps, they were marched to be gassed, and finally cremated, could be sometimes measured in minutes.

And these men, women, children, and babies, weren't murdered because they were political opponents or posed in any way a threat – their only crime was that they were "breathing".

Hitler is unique in history.

.

In terms of absolute numbers killed the holocaust ranks lower than Stalin's murders

That is quite false. In terms of absolute numbers, somewhere in the region of 700,000 were executed during Stalin's Great Purge. This compares with 6 million put to death during Hitler's Final Solution.

And putting 'absolute numbers' to one side for a moment, it's worth remembering that Stalin's Great Purge was exactly that – a purge. Because Stalin's victims were primarily communists, which he understandably, perceived to be the greatest threat to his power.

And not just any old party member – invariably it was the most able, gifted, and outstanding communists, which his paranoid mind deemed to be a threat.

Individuals such as Nikolai Kondratiev the Marxist economist who's brilliant analytical mind formulated what we now know as the "Kondratiev Waves", a theory which was used by some western economists recently to explain the present global economic crises.

And Marshal Tukhachevsky who, despite coming from an aristocratic family, was completely and totally committed to the Bolshevik revolution, and was a brilliant military commander during the Civil War.

Whilst undoubtedly there must have been been some who would have wanted to plot against Stalin, most were utterly innocent of any crime and were simply victims of Stalin's paranoid mind – he is famously quoted as having said "I trust no one, not even myself".

Stalin did presumably believe these individuals to be a threat, and he did at least go through the pretence of Show Trials on trumped-up charges before having them shot.

Hitler on the the other hand didn't bother or worry about such stuff, and had old women and children loaded onto cattle trains to be gassed without any pretence that they were guilty of any crimes.

So that's another difference, apart from the "absolute numbers killed". And one which makes Hitler unique.

Say what you like about his politics, but he was clearly a very powerfull leader.

erm… he was a dick head. A chicken sh1t so full of fear and scared of his own shadow.

Is it too late for BarnsleyMitch to be nominated for the Labour leadership?