Thursday, June 12, 2014

Fwd: NEW POST: Hindus for Hitler – Koenraad Elst



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From: Ishwar Sharan




 

Hindus for Hitler – Koenraad Elst

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Admin 

 "Germany must become the sword of the Catholic Church." – Kaiser Wilhelm II quoting Pope Leo XIII; Leo Lehmann in Behind the Dictators

"Thus the Catholic Church is more secure than ever. [...] She will remain as a beacon light." – Adolf Hitler; Leo Lehmann in Behind the Dictators

"The Third Reich is the first power which not only recognizes, but puts into practice, the high principles of the Papacy." — Avro Manhattan quoting Vice Chancellor Von Papen; Bill Hugh in Secret Terrorists

"The National Socialist commandments and those of the Catholic Church have the same aim." Edmond Paris in The Secret History of the Jesuits 

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." – Adolf Hitler; John Toland in Adolf Hitler 


 

Hindus for Hitler

Anti-Hindu writers love to portray Hindu revivalism as a form of "fascism". Given the Hindu movement's record of service to democracy and abiding by democratic norms, they have a hard time sounding serious. Fortunately for them, they find perfect allies in the rare but vocal Hindus who do applaud Adolf Hitler.

Wendy Doniger

During the commotion around the publisher's withdrawal of Wendy Doniger's book

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Hinduism, an Alternative History, the author herself held a plea pro domo: her article "Banned in Bangalore", NYT, 5 March 2014. In it, she mocked the ignorant Hindu objection by Dina Nath Batra in his official complaint "that the aforesaid book is written with Christian Missionary Zeal". When an internet Hindu reproduced this allegation, she replied: "Hey, I'm Jewish." So far, so good: it is fair and correct to notice that Hindu activists are too smug and too lazy to study their enemies, so that they make embarrassing mistakes about Wendy, including her religious denomination.

Prof Wendy DonigerBut then: "I was hit with a barrage of poisonous anti-Semitism. One correspondent wrote: 'Hi. I recently came across your book on hindus. Where you try to humiliate us. I don't know much about jews. Based on your work, I think jews are evil. So Hitler was probably correct in killing all jews in Germany. Bye.'"

This may be an invention: the New York Times readers would not know the ins and outs of Indian politics, but they can be counted on to hear the alarm go off at the mention of anti-Semitism. So Wendy may have invented this case of anti-Semitism so as not to have to bore her readers with categories on Indian public life which they don't know nor care about. As Vishal Agarwal (The New Stereotypes of Hindus in Western Indology, Hinduworld Publ., Wilmington DE, 2014) has documented, her contentious book contains hundreds of wrong statements, from innocent slips and incorrect data to wilful and ideologically motivated misrepresentations. So, we should not deem her above inventing this outburst. On the other hand, there really are internet Hindus who are capable of utterances like this. They don't write books or papers, but the inboxs of Hindu activist websites have dozens of examples.

If the above-quoted e-mail really exists, we can infer that it was written by a Hindu who had thus far been ignorant of Jews and anti-Semitism (most Hindus are ignorant about the "Jewish question" in Europe and the Middle East), and who became anti-Semitic on the spot, namely by extrapolating from Wendy to her community, which upon her own declaration is Jewish. The generalization from an individual to her community is of course logically unsustainable, but very common among the kind of people who vent heated reader's letters. But all these details will be lost on the average reader, who simply comes to associate "Hindu" with "anti-Semitism". And that was the point of her whole exercise. But Hindu loudmouths don't see through such tactical schemes and readily take the bait, freely providing their enemies with all the anti-Hindu ammunition they need.

Vinayak Damodar SavarkarHindu pro-Semitism

Hindu activism has always been sympathetic to the Jewish people and Jewish state, at least since 1923 when Hindu leader V.D. Savarkar in his trail-blazing book Hindutva expressed his

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support for the Jewish project of a state of their own. He had nothing with the Jewish theology of the Promised Land, which he may even not have known, but he observed the nationalist logic that the Jews were a really existing nation and therefore were entitled to their own nation-state. That is also why the Hindu nationalist parties were the only ones in India who, until the advent of diplomatic recognition in 1991, advocated full relations with Israel.

Hindus in general have always admired the revival of Hebrew as mother tongue of Israel, where Hindus themselves are not even capable of pushing through a common second language to replace English. They also feel familiar with Judaic believers as a fellow target of the Christian missionaries, and feel an affinity with the Jewish quasi-Brahminical book-orientedness and the ritualism, food prescriptions and sheer ancientness of Judaism. For what it is worth: Aristotle

thought the Jews descended from "the philosophers of India".  

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