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Why Does India Love Hitler So Much?
This is the weirdest of weird fetishes
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and something came up that I thought had to be an exaggeration. The guest said that Indian culture persistently fetishizes and idolizes Nazism, up to and including Adolf Hitler.
If true, I found this to be shocking in its weird, brash indifference to the sufferings of the Jewish peoples who were inhumanely targeted by these monsters during the Holocaust. I couldn’t see how a culture would allow such blatant Antisemitism to be put so boldly on display within its borders.
But some quick research found that this is in fact reality in India. It took next to no digging whatsoever to find that this cultural phenomenon flourishes to this day in that nation. I found things like an ice cream company calling themselves Hitler Ice Cream. A clothing store that simply called itself HITLER. And even an Indian member of Parliament showing up to work dressed as the iconic murderer of six million Jews as recently as 2018. For what exactly? For shock value? For laughs? I can safely say that this is a fetish that makes zero sense to me.
It doesn’t stop there apparently. Mein Kampf is a yearly bestseller there, and is found sold prominently in every bookstore. A Dehli publisher even put Hitler on the cover of a children’s book called Great Leaders. The swastika can be found on products such as coffee mugs, sweatshirts, cell phone cases, you name it. Teens proudly can be seen walking the streets adorned in images of Hitler giving the Nazi salute.
All of this seems excessively strange to my Western brain. Nazi symbology and texts are generally considered vile and evil in the Western world. Many nations have gone so far as to make their imagery illegal to be displayed, for fear of history somehow finding a way to repeat itself. Much of the world remembers all too well the not-so-distant past of World War 2, and in fact is still attempting to…
