Awesome quote from my Indian coworker

[erratio]

"I wish Hitler came to my country, then there wouldn't be so many people"

4 hours later and it still amuses me :)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, that's HILARIOUS!
And yet, on a slightly unrelated note, I have heard statements regarding the worthiness of Hitler from Indians before. Aside from the fact that the second world war really didn't affect them at all, Hitler's focus on the supremacy of the Aryan people was received favourably by many Indians and Iranians. We can ignore the bastardisation of this term as it featured in Nazi rhetoric; etymologically speaking, the Aryans (lit. 'nobles') were an Indo-Iranian people who, migrating south from Persia found themselves in India. While the savages in Northern Europe were still killing each other with sticks, the true Aryans were writing beautiful literature in Persian and Sanskrit. I also think they're a superior race: but superior to Hitler's, not mine.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just? Although I'm still trying to work out whether its intrinsically funny or just funny to us 'hypersensitive about anything involving Hitler' people.

Regarding Indians/Iranians approving of Hitler, it seems somewhat counterintuitive. The Indians I've met have been almost universally dark-skinned and so wouldn't have been one of Hitler's Aryans and eventually put to death. And yet some of them approved because he was effectively saying that their ancestors were the Master Race?

[(Anonymous)]

I think that, at the end of the day, the only real enemy of the Nazi Party was the Jew. The Japanese received "honorary Aryan status", whatever that means, and Hitler was a big fan of the Arabs. Who knows how things could have worked out had Germany won the war. Hell, I'm tempted to believe that Hitler would have even made peace with the Jews if they all moved to Palestine and became Zionists. I wrote a post about that once (shameless plug!): HERE (http://deba.wordpress.com/2006/09/24/intentionalism-vs-functionalism/)

[erratio.livejournal.com]

heh, speaking of shameless plugs I just told my friend (who was bugging me because he was bored at work) to go read you instead.

Fascinating stuff, I didn't really know the details of the 'honorary Aryan' status. Although I think that could just as much have been a way of saying "I'll deal with you later" since the one thing the Nazi party was not was militarily stupid, they did their best to minimise the number of fronts they were fighting on.
In any case, I believe that Mein Kampf points strongly towards Hitler having planned the destruction of the Jews from the outset. If Israel had been created a decade earlier the Jews would have been strongly encouraged to emigrate purely so that they would stop contaminating Germany, and after the Third Reich was well established in Europe they could then go after the rest of their racial enemies.

[(Anonymous)]

I think that Mein Kampf definately indicates Hitler's hatred of Jews, but his desire to exterminate them? (I haven't read it, by the way; have you?) Your point regarding honorary Aryan status is a good one, but once we start speculating about what would have happened afterwards we end up on some pretty rocky ground, and we only get back to the original intentionalist/functionalist thing anyway.

Thanks for the plug! They are so much less shameless when they come from another...