Dreaming of a Third Reich
By Mohajer Ansari
US
As the sociopolitical upheaval unfolds, the rule of anarchy is becoming a reality with every subsequent dawn in India. It has become almost impossible, even for seasoned analysts to grapple with the fast-moving sand of surreal realities in Indian fractious politics.
How the so-called largest democracy in the world has slipped into such an abyss of immorality, is in fact, very easy to understand. All one has to do is to look for parallels in the world history. In this case, one needs to go back only three-quarter of a century.
Let us begin with Heinrich Luitpold Himmler. He was a trusted confidante of Adolf Hitler. His notoriety as a leading member of the Nationalsozialistiche Deutschland Arbeiterpartie (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, is well-preserved in the pages of world history. As the Reichsfuhrer of the Nazi SS (schutzstaffel, the infamous paramilitary death squads), Himmler was one of the most powerful men - after perhaps Hitler himself - in Nazi Germany.
He successfully transformed a less than three hundred-man battalion into a million-strong paramilitary force (SS) in just 16 years. It was Himmler with SS under his command, that controlled and operated the Nazi concentration camps with ruthless precision and exemplary apathy. He was the main architect of the Holocaust.
He directed the execution of about 6 million Jews, and some 200,000-500,000 Romani (Indo-Aryan ethnic) people, itinerants, Gypsies and others. By the time the Nazi regime was defeated by the Allied Forces, an estimated 11 to 14 million people - most of them Polish and Soviets - had perished.
Himmler was an ardent subscriber to a mixed concoction of archaic German paganism and Volkisch beliefs. Both these ideologies were centered around the ethnic and national sentiments deeply embedded in the idea of sacred ‘blood and soul’ of the Aryan race. This concept of self-purity and superiority was entrenched in the mythical notions of rebirth of the ancient German nation’s traditional paganism.
Does it ring a bell in the current context on India? Just replace German Paganism with Hindutva!
In the early to mid-twentieth century Europe, Christianity - an Abrahamic (hence, Semitic) faith - was the most dominant religion. The only path to the revival of a pre-Christian Germanic paganism depended on the outright rejection of the Christian heritage that was firmly rooted in Germany. In their zeal to root out Christianity (hence Semitism), the ultra-conservative and ultra-nationalist Germans became xenophobic; their mission of extermination included European Jews too. This culminated into what became known as the anti-Semitic movement.
Does it ring a bell in the current context on India? Just replace German Jews with Muslims of Indian heritage!
Nazi Germany was eventually defeated. But as the world recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of that landmark event, antisemitism is still very much alive and kicking. The only difference is that it is no more confined to Germany alone; it has pervaded the rest of Europe and has found sympathizers across the Atlantic Ocean in North America as well, especially in the United States.
The German paganism nurtured in the mid-twentieth century by the Nazis against Jews has mushroomed and flowered well in the twenty-first century into Islamophobia worldwide. Though the geography has changed, fundamental causes have not. In Europe and the US, these haters call themselves ‘far right’ while in India they recognize themselves as the ‘soldiers of Hanuman’ and ‘protectors of Hindutva’, among others.
Does the stark similarity ring a bell?
It should. The iron-fisted campaign of India’s ruling political party about six months ago in Muslim-dominated Kashmir, and countrywide in the guise of NRC/CAA/NPR two months ago, has the Nazi blueprint written all over it. It is not under any veil or even subtle anymore. Just replace the antisemitism with Islamophobia.
One wonders. Are Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath imagining themselves to be the reincarnated twenty-first century Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, dreaming to establish the Third Reich in India with the help of the hired goons of RSS and Hindutva zealots?
Two historical facts are relevant here. Himmler committed suicide by cyanide self-poisoning. At the time of his death, he was only 44 years and some months old. In a study published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine in May 2018, it was unequivocally established that Adolf Hitler died by consuming a cyanide pill and shooting himself in the head in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945. He was 56 years and 10 days old!
What a miserable end of two lunatic xenophobes! There is a lesson for the Indian looneys who are following the Hitler-Himmler script verbatim!!
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