I am disturbed

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by molly bloom

But not all antisemites, even the ones who became Prime Minister of their countries, thought of Jews as 'racial bacilli' or 'tuberculosis' and set in motion a mass extermination programme for their own citizens.

I don't know about the 'racial bacilli'. Those pseudoscientific racial ideas were probably "in the air" at the time. I have a hard time believing they were "quarantined" in Germany.

But its true that not all antisemites went as far as the Germans. There were pogroms, of course, but its not quite the same thing.

Depends what you mean by crazy. He exhibited paranoiac and megalomaniacal tendencies and certainly appeared to have fits of uncontrollable rage- rather like Ivan the Terrible or the Fatimid Caliph Hakim.

Except maybe in the last years of the war, I don't believe he was clinically insane.

[Odin]

WTF? That is just ****ing wrong!

[Ben Kenobi]

Even our Prime Minister at the time, William Mackensie King, was an antisemite.

He was our longest running PM too. He would talk to his dead mother through his seances.

I'm not sure if I trust his judgement on the stability of Hitler.

[Colonâ„¢]

Originally posted by LordShiva


Sums it up. Pretty much all we learn about WW2 over here (apart from Japan vs. Britain in SE Asia and India's eastern border) is that Germany under Hitler fought all of teh world's great powers and was almost a match for them.

Which really ought to be an admiration of Germany's capabilities. Heck, I can't help feeling tremendous respect for Germany during WWI and WWII even though I don't sympathise with the imperial or the fascist system at all. It's just that Germany's organisational, technological and productive strength gets funneled to the person of Hitler amongst some people.

[chequita guevara]

I've met a number of Indians who were Holocaust deniers. Very strange, but with over a billion people, I guess there have got to be more of them.

On the other hand, consider this, Hitler is as much responsible for the independence of India as is Gandhi. If he hadn't worn the Brits out, they might have been able to hold on to their empire.

As for Hitler's insanity, he was a meth addict. According to a program on drug I was just watching, methamphetamine was given to German soldiers during the Blitzkreig and he himself was taking it as many as five times a day. After a few years of that, it's no wonder he didn't have a brain left.

[Maniac]

white Aryans > brown Dravidians => Hitler love?

Eg a Pol Sci professor visited northern India once and encountered some "Aryan bar" where he as a white man was allowed, but "the monkeys from the south" were not.

???????

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by nostromo


I don't know about the 'racial bacilli'. Those pseudoscientific racial ideas were probably "in the air" at the time. I have a hard time believing they were "quarantined" in Germany.

It's what Hitler actually described the Jews as- 'racial bacilli' and 'racial tuberculosis' are his own words.

The 'logical' progression from the Mediaeval attempts at blaming Jews for spreading the Black Death is evident- especially when you see Nazi propaganda films which superimpose images of swarming rats over the faces of Jews.

Jews no longer are blamed for the spread of infectious diseases, they have become the disease itself, in Nazi demonology.

Then again, Nazi racial science has about the same intellectual rigour as Soviet Lysenkoist thinking or Creationism...