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Wednesday, March 31, 2010


Adolf Hitler is considered to be a very bad person.  He failed in his mission.  He was not successful.  But he is a man whom history can never forget.  He is a man of total originality.  No one can dispute that he was the greatest of all patriots in the world.  He loved his country Germany.
His failure was principally due to an error of judgment.  If only he were to have not attacked Russia, probably the course of history would have changed.  He would have been a great success.
The country loved by Adolf Hitler, Germany was at his time in a very bad stage.  It had lost the first world war.  It was brought to nothing in the first world war.  It was broke.  The sanctions that had been imposed on Germany was awfully severe.  It was a country which by no stretch of imagination could have asserted anything.  It is this country that he led.
For the time being I am not discussing the good and bad of Hitler as a person.  I am only trying to tell what circumstances made him so strong that he could lead a country  which was in such an awful state to a level that the whole world was afraid of.
I am only quoting Hitler from his Mein Kampf as to what would the circumstances in which he lived and how did it help him to achieve what he could.
Present day parents do not want any hardship to their children.  Forget about hardship, they do not want their children to have normal life without unwanted pleasures, securities.  They do not want their children to undertake day to day jobs of their own.  They want the servants to do the job of children.  They want all facilities readily available to the children.
Whether parents want their children to become a Hitler or not, is not the question.  The question is would not parents want their children to be competent, capable leaders who would be able to lead their countries even if the country is in bad shape.
This is what Hitler has written.  “Obstacles are placed across our path in life, not to be boggled but to be surmounted. ……….. At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but today I see in it the wise workings of providence.  The Goddess of Fate clutched me in her hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles increased, and finally the will triumphed.
I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I now am.  And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother’s darling was taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother.  Though I then rebelled against it as too hard of fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight. …………… That hunger was the faithful guardian which never left me but took part in everything I did.  Every book that I bought meant renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the intrusion of that inalienable companion during the following days.  I was always struggling with my unsympathetic friend. And yet during that time I learned more than I had ever learned before.  Outside my architectural studies and rare visits to the opera, for which I had to deny myself food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.  …………… From this point of view fate had been kind to me.  Circumstances forced me to return to that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow petit bourgeois education were torn from my eyes.  Now for the first time I learned to know men and I learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.”
Please save the children from the emptiness of a life of ease.

4 comments:

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  2. “Adolf Hitler is considered to be a very bad person.” This statement qualifies as the understatement of the century. He was a monster, who got the end that he deserved. He wasn’t even man enough to stand up to his actions and killed himself like a coward. Are we supposed to get inspired by his life?
    “He is a man of total originality.” Of course, no one had invented the gas chambers before him. He gets total credit for it.
    If Hitler’s misery as a child, made him a strong leader, isn’t it possible that the same experiences also made him the greatest psychopath of the century?
    If giving our children a life of ease, saves them from developing sociopathic qualities, it is reason enough for all of us to work very hard towards giving them that.

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  3. I am in agreement with Bhaskar, but I also agree that emptiness due to a life of ease might not be very good for a kid !

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  4. I agree in general that hunger leads to innovation, hardship steers towards values. The kind of childhood that hitler went thru, abuses by his father (can we call this hardship towards a better future?), etc did in fact turn him into a sadist and led him to perceive the world in an abnormal way. Stalin is another example!

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