Replies

“I want to clarify that it was not my opinion earlier, but a reason for the negligence of Nazi/Communist history.”

- I understood all along you weren’t aiming at making excuses for anybody, but I still think it’s important to point out that something is very, very wrong in the case of India (and many other nations with an ‘inferiority complex’ towards the West).

India suffers from a self centered, ‘introspective’ approach to many issues, be it education, culture or politics. Often, this attitude is characterized by an almost laughable degree of chauvinism (for instance, people in India are taught by education, media etc that India is the home, the ‘Mother’ of more or less every aspect of human civilization. India is said to be the ‘Mother’ of all religions, of every field of learning, of every science and of every trade, invention etc).

Another aspect in the case of India (which, in part, explains the poor interest for genocide's abroad) is the absence of what we would call the idea of ‘human dignity’. In reality, a human life doesn’t matter at all.

The well known Indian concept of ‘Karma’ isn’t about ethics. Karma is only a way to explain the ‘order’ of the Universe. It’s about the interdependence of cause and effect, of ‘now’ and ‘eternity’. Using Karma logic, one could well say the Nazi genocide was bad Karma for the people who took part in it, but on the other hand, the Jews MUST have done something bad to ‘deserve’ this fate.

India is admirable in many ways and I feel optimistic about the future of that great nation, but I also hope India one day will discover the world beyond its borders, just like so many foreigners have discovered India.

Back to Communism/Fascism/Totalitarianism.

There are two major reasons why everyone ought to know about WWII and the evils of Communism and Fascism/Nazism:

1. They are comparatively recent events that, to a very large extent, shaped and reshaped the modern world and few other individual occurrences in World History provide more of ‘keys’ to understanding why the world looks like it does today.

2. Communism and Fascism are still phenomena we have to deal with. They are NOT defeated.