Hitler's Motivational Self-Help Book: "Sieg Heil With a Smile!"

In India right now Mein Kampf is a bestseller among Indian Business School students who are looking to it as a Self-Help Book. This is beyond disturbing. Here is a list of other inappropriate Nazi Self-Help Books:

"How to Win Wars and Exterminate People"

"The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nerve Agents"

For the sassy lady who liked "Skinny Bitch," there's "Skinhead Bitch"

"Doc Mengele's Do-It-Yourself-Surgery Kit"

"The Purpose Driven Life: Drive Your Car Over a Minority"

Forget "The South Beach Diet," Hitler proposes "The South Schwitz Diet."

From the bestselling "Who Moved My Cheese?" comes "Who Moved My Cyklon B?"

So Indians are going Fascist? Good thing they don't have The Bomb, right? I really don't want to see a workplace that these Business School students run. I thought Office Politics was cutthroat enough, but now we have to worry about mini-Hitlers trying to get you fired. If they catch you gossiping around the Water Cooler, they'll waterboard you with it. You'll want the corner office, not for the view, but because that way your back is to no one.

I wonder if they'll win an Oscar next year for "Slumdog Death-Chair?"

Comments

[jaysan]

The report from the London Telegraph is absolutely made-up fiction.

Who came up with this allegation? Friar José Kuruvachira, who is not a detached academic scholar, but rather a sectarian activist. Does he provide any kind of proof? Not in the slightest. Did the London Telegraph immediately report his words as fact, based on the sheer sensationalism of the allegation? You bet they did.

Now others, including the HuffPo, are going around repeating this libel as fact.

What connection does India even have with German history or politics? Is German widely spoken by Indians? Is there some kind of evidence or proof of this alleged Hitler fetish? India, as the most prolific producers of movies and books in the world, has churned out hundreds of movies per year for decades, and many more books. None of them glorifies Hitler.

Many Indians fought and died in the Second World War, fighting the Axis powers, and weren't even fighting as free men. My own grandfather was one of them.

Kuruvachira hopes that if he slings enough mudpies at an ethnic group he doesn't like, that at least some of them will stick. I feel that it's wrong for someone with a sectarian agenda to be masquerading as a scholarly academic. Note how he decides that because these are business school students, they must be with the BJP. He seems to be looking for any opening he can find, to help him link the center-right Bharatiya Janata Party to Hitler.

[TheEnticer]

Of all the shallow, empty, meaningless posts on huffpo, this has got to take the cake... Lets review..

1. If the author had bothered to read the original item, he would have never wrote "So India is going Fascist"... This is a subsection of the Indian 'intelligentsia' and do you know where these fine MBA grads end up ? Wall St., NY. Yup, they are picked up directly by Fortune 100 companies.

2. Everybody here has to understand that 1940s Germany is not viewed the same way as it is here. You have to realize in 1940s, England was ruling India and segregation, rape, torture by the British was the norm. So, any power that stood up to the brutal, oppressive British regime was welcome.

3. For all of Hitler's faults, he had aligned himself with some Indian freedom fighters and provided them military training to overthrow the tyrannical rule.

4. England committed far worse Human rights abuses around the same time (google Jalianwallah Bagh , 1857 etc.). English officers that butchered people (ne of them is said to have famously claimed 'Let there be no tree in india without a Hindoo hanging from it) were awarded and promoted.

So, if a cross section of Indian society was angry at the oppressors and wanted to align themselves with the Nazis to overthrow the British regime, I dont think it can be judged from the eyes of an American who has never had his country enslaved...

[MajorKong]

So how'd that "Thousand Year Reich" thing work out for them?

[JScott]

One would home that it serves as a teachable moment for readers, that if you follow the precepts in the book, read and learn about the history and it will show the consequences.

[NeoLiberal]

Perhaps in our country, but in many, denying the holocaust (a point of view...) is illegal. Haven't you read the news lately about our Louisianan native son David Duke who was arrested and deported from the Czech Republic for his positions?

[larry278]

There is also the Fig Heil salute where one makes a fist then a fig. It is used by some rabidly, radical, leftist, progressives when they encounter rabidly, reactionary, right wingnuts. The rabidly, radical. reactionary. right wingnuts (religious or non-religious) get livid with rage when somebody flips them a Fig Heil. It leaves them incontanent(sp?), sputttering & gasping for breath for hours. It is a weaponless way of disabling rabidly, reactionary, right wingnuts for a few hours. One can disable a rabidly, reactionary, right wingnut from 25 feet away & you don't have to touch or smell the foul stench a radidly, reactionary, right wingnut emits constantly when you flip them a Fig Heil.
It's a win-win situation for deeply committed progressives.

[Atheisto]

I can kind of understand where they are coming from, but I would see Mein Kampf as more of a self-help book for Politicians than business student. There are a lot of important lessons (sans the anti-semitic undertones) in rhetoric and organization in Mein Kampf, but they aren't so well suited to the business world......of course, Mein Kampfs primary value to me when I read it was to understand the psychological development, not the political development of Adolf Hitler.

[Atticus]

Open societies have to be welcoming and accepting of *all* points of view. Otherwise, the society is a living hypocracy.

[Michael Gene Sullivan - Huffpost Blogger]

Then there is no such thing as an open society. All societies take a position on points of view, and limit the "destructive" ones. We would all like to think otherwise, and that if we were in control we would never do such a thing, but the truth is that is how societies work - they define themselves by what is within the pale and what is beyond it. This may explain why there aren't many NAMBLA parades. Or Female Genital Mutilation Champagne Brunches in the park. The points of view are not illegal, but our particular society has deemed them generally unacceptable.

On a slightly different note, there are organized groups out there with the point of view that all black people should be killed. I, for one, do not want their point of view "welcomed," nor do I think we should be real "accepting" of them simply to show our society is not a "hypocrisy."

I'm not saying we should be burning books, but welcoming "points of view" that advocate murder doesn't make you open and super democratic. It makes you kinda complicit.

Hitler advocated the mass murder of those he scapegoated as the cause of his people's problems. This not a danger only to the Jewish population, but it can and has been generalized to any group. Again, I don't think a book should be banned, but I have no problem squaring my democratic beliefs with not welcoming genocidal madness.

[larry278]

That is an interesting point. Perhaps Germany will make it legal to print & own Hitler's books. Don't bet on it. Germans can be resolute.