“Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.
Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.
Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.
Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.
“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.
“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.
More at The Telegraph, UK”
My Comment
April 20 was Hitler’s birthday and I suppose the anniversary provides the justification for stories like these. Mein Kampf is a book that I’ve never read myself and haven’t felt curious enough to read, either . It’s apparently selling briskly to Indian students, not for its anti-semitism but for the inspiration it provides management students.
More mischievously, the article goes on to insinuate a link between Gandhi and the Nazis.
There was one, but nothing that would please any Nazi-hunter. Gandhi was not unusual in seeing the European war as intra-imperial and seemed to think that satyagraha would work on the Germans as well as it had done on the British.
He went so far as to advise Jews to let themselves fall before the Nazis as a kind of sacrificial gesture that would turn the consciences of their oppressors. Many scholars have – unsurprisingly – reacted to this with repugnance, but the advice was more a symptom of Gandhian quixotry than anti-Semitism – conscious or unconscious.
I don’t know, if you think about it, _Who moved my cheese?_ is basically a book extolling people to resignation in the face of soul-crushing authority. That book and _Fish! Philosophy_ both tell you that you’re a helpless victim of circumstances that aren’t anyone’s fault, so you might as well learn to smile as these forces of nature (that aren’t caused by anyone in particular, no! Although they don’t seem to happen to the boss, weird, huh? But don’t dwell on that!) that control your work environment continually wash over you.
Being happy or miserable is a choice, and you should be happy because this is the only choice you have left to make, lackey!
Arbeiten macht frei?
Dr. D makes a great point.
I am frequently astonished by americans who tell me that–life is what you make of it! Clearly, they have not spent too much time in Port Moresby or Zagreb or Burkina Faso in Ausgust. A fair portion of our fellows believe that you can alter reality and “choose” to be happy–whatever that happiness means–I suspect some sort of delusion of adequacy with naricissitic tendencies. Point–people have forgotten physical reality.
As for the Indians reading Mein Kamp–well it is indeed another culture and sensitivity and somehow a meme got started. I suspect that the stigma of reading the book in india is virtually non-existent versus picking it up in the U.S. West is west, east is east…..
Yes – this seems to be a cultural misperception to me…
“Antisemitism” is a kind of blanket term with connotations that doesn’t seem correct applied everywhere..
It’s like the blanket use of the word “racism” – it is completely meaningless and a term of abuse, like “fascist” – more often it just means “I don’t like the way you think.”
Which could be dangerous because real antisemitism and racism exist….just not where people tend to go looking for them…
re – “life is what you make of it” – I don’t know if it is narcissism…
I think there’s a healthy side to the attitude – it fosters individualism and optimism
But, as you point out, it can become delusional about physical reality.
Some of the New Age material strikes me as unrealistic in that respect
I have read Mein Kampf, and while it’s interesting in a weird sort of way, I didn’t find any management or self-improvement lessons in it. And I really doubt students are reading Mein Kampf for management lessons (I hope not). Sometime back I met a freshly minted management graduate who held Adolf Hitler in high regard because he was (supposedly) a great patriot and industrialised Germany. I suspect the Indian students’ interest in Mein Kampf results from the upswing in political arguments for militant nationalism, centrally managed economy and Hindu racial superiority. Except that here it’s driven by anti-Islam/Christianity rather anti-Semitism. Having read Mein Kampf I find the thought very scary.
Hi –
I just saw this comment.
OK…that makes sense. Since I don’t know the book, I figured there might be something about mass manipulation in it that students were picking up on.
But it makes sense if you see the anti-semitism as anti-semitism directed against Arabs..
I can’t understand Indians being anti-Semitic because there are Jewish communities in India who are very ancient and there’s no history of prejudice against them..