Tuesday - April 21, 2009

not sure BMEWS is ready for this: Indian business students snap up copies of Mein Kampf.Good Grief!

Hey ... I’m only the messenger.  Boggles the imagination but really. This is the report as it appeared in the morning paper.  Bizarre. To say the least.

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.

By Monty Munford in New Delhi

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”.

Jaico Publishing House, one of the publishers in India, said it reprints a new edition of the book at least twice a year to meet growing demand.
“We were the first company to publish the book in India and there are now six other Indian publishers of the book, although we were first to take a chance on it,” said Jaico’s chief editor, R H Sharma, who dismissed any moral issues in publishing Mein Kampf.

“The initial print run of 2,000 copies in 2003 sold out immediately and we knew we had a best-seller on our hands. Since then the numbers have increased every year to around 15,000 copies until last year when we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops,” he added.

Senior academics cite the mutual influence of India and Hitler’s Nazis on one another. Mahatma Gandhi corresponded with the Fuhrer, pro-Independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army allied with Hitler’s Germany and Japan during the Second World War, and the Nazis drew on Hindu symbolism for their Swastika motif and ideas of Aryan supremacy.

Dr J Kuruvachira, Professor of Philosophy of Salesian College in Nagaland and who has cited Mein Kampf as a source of inspiration to the Hindu nationalist BJP, said he believed the book’s popularity was due to political reasons.

“While it could be the case that management students are buying the book, my feeling is that it has more likely influenced some of the fascist organisations operating in India and nearby,” he said.

India is not the only country where Mein Kampf is popular. It has been a best-seller in Croatia since it was first published in while in turkey it sold 100,000 in just two months in 2005. In Russia it has been reprinted three times since the de facto ban on the book was overturned in 1992.

In Germany the book’s copyright is held by the state of Bavaria where its publication is banned until 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death.
In India, any book more than 25 years old is free of copyright, which has paved the way for six separate publishers to print the book.

the Nazis drew on Hindu symbolism for their Swastika motif and ideas of Aryan supremacy.

I’m not too certain about the Swastika comment because I know for a fact that the Swastika also was a part of Mongolian Buddhism that goes back hundreds of years. But I guess it could be Hindu as well though I never saw it there. Didn’t look for it either come to that.  My reading on the subject in one book years ago claimed that AH got the symbol from a church decoration. And btw ... right here in Winchester,England, at the museum in town, there are ancient Roman artefacts including floor tiles that have been dug up here.  And there it is. Plain as day.

Posted by peiper     on 04/21/2009 at 02:41 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous • News-Briefs •  
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