Of course I did. I didn't bring Hitler into this, you did, with your bizarrely racist and troglodytic notions that all Indians must literally love Hitler, or even that all Indians are unaware of history (and not that, being in a different part of the world, they might have a different set of historical priorities than white, bougie Westerners).
I mean, do Western schools teach you of the horrors of Tamerlane or Aurangzeb or Genghis or Churchill or even Indira Gandhi's forced sterilization program? No, not you, oh super intellectuals of CFC. The average pleb on the street, does he know about these things? When you factor in the fact that India is a rather poor country with sub-standard education compared to where ever you come from, in all likelihood, your statement becomes all the more bizarre and all the more casually racist. The fact is, people from different parts of the world have different senses of history, and this is only natural. It is not more or less "bad" that the word "Hitler" conjures up all that is evil in the Westerner's mind than it is that Churchill brings up all kinds of unsavory ideas in the mind of an Indian that would be wholly absent in the mind of a Westerner ("Great orator. Great statesman," they note, forgetting to add, "Brutal imperialist barbarian. A racist who matched Hitler's hatred of the Jews with his hatred of the Indians.") You think an Armenian is gonna think of the Young Turks the same way a Frenchman or a Turk or you might? To the Westerner, the hatred of Hitler and everything he stands for is visceral, is recent, is like a fresh wound. But the average Indian, who does not share such a historical experience, why would he feel the same way? As someone who straddles these two cultures, I feel your pain. I casually use Hitler as an example of extreme evil just as everyone else seems to in the West. It's an ingrained part of my psyche. But I do not see that in my relatives over in India, no matter how educated. To them, the crimes of Hitler are as emotionally distant as, say, the pain of St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre might be to the average Westerner (assuming he knows of it). Something to be studied with aloof intellectual curiosity, nothing more. The Holocaust is just another atrocity happening in some far-flung corner of the world, like every other one they write about in the history textbooks (as Voltaire said, "Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes."). Initially, I found this bizarre and even reprehensible. Don't they know how bad Hitler was? How could they? But I've realized, with age and maturity, that I cannot really blame them for this. History is one thing, but how we respond, emotionally speaking, is another matter altogether. I have little doubt in 500 or 1000 years we will have moved on to another demon, and Hitler will accompany Genghis Khan and others as just another far-removed conqueror. The fact that some or even many Indians seem to take a rather lackadaisical approach to Hitler is not a sign of moral degeneracy, nascent Fascism, or even just plain ignorance (I believe it is the last one you assert, but I have heard others assert the other two). It is simply a people responding within the contexts of their historical and cultural realities.
Seriously, this is how you sound: "Hurr durr someone teach the dumb savage primitives about history, will you? I bet those dumb hindoos aren't even aware of the evil connotations of the Swastika, or they'd stop using it, guffaw-guffaw-guffaw! I love making blatant generalizations about one billion people, it's a sign of my superior culture and civilization!"
) when all western people know the Japanese chemical/human experiment heads by heart.
