Hitler’s Mein Kampf Seen As Self-Help Guide For India’s Business Students
Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory... More by Charles Mudede
Exactly, it’s so much easier to bend the people to your will when you learn from the best.
“Mein Kampf” is a big bestseller in all sorts of places in the world. Not long ago it was Number One in Turkey. A while back I saw a copy in a (terrible, terrible) bookstore in Banff, Alberta.
Capitalists aren’t even remotely interested in it.
Mumbo. Jumbo.
Stalin’s body count = 35,000,000
Mao’s body count = 60,000,000
Hitler was a rank amateur compared to these marxists
@4,
When you include the people killed in the war Hitler started, Hitler surpasses Stalin.
I’m not defending Hitler. I just fail to see the Marxist as superior to the Facsist.
@6: Saying that Hitler was a “rank amateur” at killing people is a remarkably crude and cretinous way to treat the memory of those who perished. The fact that you’re attacking some strawman leftist/socialist who supposedly admires Stalin doesn’t make it any better.
@4:
Considering that the Nazis made exterminating people into an efficient programme, whereas Mao’s victims were mostly casualties of the stupid economic and political campaigns he started, I think Hitler is not so much of an amateur. Just think how many people Mao could have offed if he had used capitalistic efficiency!
Just wanted to interject here, in this discussion of the relative egregiousness of Marxism, Nazism and Fascism, that the original article seems rather scurrilous. The HuffPost got it from the Telegraph, in the UK:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew…
and while the headline says that these copies are being bought by “Indian business students,” there’s really no accounting of how many of the buyers are in fact students in business programs.
For a book that’s out of copyright (in India), which means it probably sells for a dollar less, 10,000 copies is not a big run and could represent more a localized fad, rather than a nation-wide phenomena. I think, as an Indian immigrant in the US, that the sales represent more a certain level of curiousity rather than any idea that Hitler’s ideas are genuinely useful to a study of business success.
Having said that, I agree with what I think is the underlying message in the article, that Indians don’t relate with as much moral repugnance to Hitler’s legacy. For young Indians, Hitler would seem like just another European imperialist, out to grab land for himself just as a bunch of other white people did in the early twentieth century. The colonial distance from which an average Indian might view the debate about the banality or enormity of Hitler’s evil does reduce some of the emotional force that accompanies these discussions in the Western hemisphere.