12.04.10
Problematic character of Gita
mybrainisafleamarket said,
11.04.10 at 6:13 pm ·
Fascinating, Nemo. I swear, that when I belatedly tried to read the Gita, I was increasingly dismayed. It seemed to me that right at the outset, Arjuna, who had already demonstrated his bravery and resourcefulness multiple times earlier in the Mahabharata, demonstrated compassion and a vast perspective as he beheld his relatives and teachers in the ranks on opposite sides of the battlefield. He finds it unbearable that he must be part of a war that will kill the people he loves, people on both sides, and that will also mean the death of all the rites, the entire culture of both clans.He has the courage to face this and to want to renounce this horror and find a way to stop it.
To me, reading this, Arjuna seemed to have reached the pinnacle of human achievement and I even thought, ‘He sounds like he would have been a great Buddhist.’
Instead, Krishna plays on all of Arjuna’s human weak spots. He suggests that Arjuna is a coward, that his compassion is mere delusion.
As I read all this I swear I thought to myself, ‘This reads like Nazi indoctrination material.’
Then…months later, I found this.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=gita+himmler+masseur&btnG=Google+Search
It appears that the Bhagavad Gita may have been favorite reading material for Heinrich Himmler. This is always traced to Himmler’s masseur Felix Kersten.
Info about Himmler
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ikou7mhBVHEJ:http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Heinrich_Himmler+himmler+bhagavad+gita+felix&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&strip=1
It is intriguing that this pro-fascist website writes Kersten off as ’self promoting’.
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=535524&page=7
One denizen of this ‘den’ writes“The connection is the self-promoting Felix Kersten who was the personal masseur for Himmler, after WWII, used his insider postion for is own personal gain, most of his claims including Himmler reading the Bhagavad-Gita are not verifiable. Felix Kersten used his position to aid people “persucuted” by Nazi Germany after the war. He also claimed in his memoirs that he was personally responsible for saving all of Finland’s Jews from the Nazi’s as well as saving all the Dutch people from exportation to the East!..more lies. ”
(As if any of this is a bad thing??!!)
Here is some scary material.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A11KKxsa2HAJ:http://zoonpolitikon2.blogspot.com/2008/12/geert-wilders-leurope-lislam-entrevue.html+himmler+bhagavad+gita+simon+wiesenthal&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&strip=1
(small quote)it turns out, and not surprisingly, moviemakers and others who braved the stormy days of our clash with fascism were far better acquainted with it than the revisionist historians who peddle the Christianity-birthed-Nazism narrative. What was it they knew? It was that the Nazis were not one of the fruits of Christianity, but of its rejection. The Third Reich sought to replace the ancient faith with a neo-pagan “religion of the blood” with Adolf Hitler as the godlike figure at its heart. For they realized Christianity would ever be an impediment to their aims and knew that, ultimately, it had to be destroyed.
Hitler’s Final Solution for Christianity
While this fact is well documented, the lie peddled in its stead has proved harder to sink than the Bismarck. But about six years ago came a godsend in the form of papers and the person of Jewish attorney Julie Seltzer Mandel, a woman whose grandmother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. While a law student and editor of the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, Mandel gained access to 148 bound volumes of rare documents — some marked “Top Secret” — compiled by the Office of Strategic Services (or O.S.S., the WWII forerunner to the CIA).
After scouring the papers, she published the first installment of them in 2002, a 120-page O.S.S. report entitled “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” Reporting on these O.S.S. findings in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward Colimore wrote: “The fragile, typewritten documents from the 1940s lay out the Nazi plan in grim detail: Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith — in Germany’s Third Reich.” He then quotes Mandel: “A lot of people will say, ‘I didn’t realize that they were trying to convert Christians to a Nazi philosophy.’… They wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity…
“There are many other such pro- and anti-Christian Hitler quotations (and no small number of bogus ones, I might add), all existing within a maelstrom of fierce debate between Christians and atheists about Hitler’s worldview. So how do we reconcile these contradictory statements? The O.S.S. report provides the answer. Columnist Joe Sharkey wrote about the relevant passage in the New York Times:
According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement” from the beginning, though “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power.
Really, this is just common sense. Hitler was many things, but a clumsy politician was not one of them. He knew that until he had “consolidated power,” he would have to erect a façade for a Christian people and the Church; this is probably why virtually all his pro-Christian statements were rendered publicly and before he had closed his iron fist around the German neck. In contrast, his anti-Christian vitriol was spewed privately — and, it seems, with great passion — and often after he achieved absolute power, when he could bear his dark soul with impunity.”(unquote)
now, further on, here is where the Gita comes in–and a ghastly hope of creating a new, Aryan caste sytem.
“But Hitler was no Karl Marx; he obviously felt the “unwashed masses” needed this opiate, at least until a substitute could be provided. Not only that, it seems he was intent on prescribing a designer drug.
In chapter five of Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of this utility of faith, saying, “Nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure.” While he was not addressing the destruction of Christianity when making this observation, it is certain the Nazis applied this principle to that dark endeavor. For sure, unlike the communists, Hitler was too clever to suppose he could simply replace Christianity with the state; something more suitable was needed. Jehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, reveals what it was in his piece “The Trauma of the Holocaust: Some Historical Perspectives”: “They [the Nazis] wanted to go back to a pagan world, beautiful, naturalistic, where natural hierarchies based on the supremacy of the strong would be established, because strong equaled good, powerful equaled civilized. The world did have a kind of God, the merciless God of nature, the brutal God of races, the oppressive God of hierarchies.”
This pagan orientation is no secret; it has been noted by many and was reflected in the Nazis’ most obvious symbols. The swastika, for example, is a pagan symbol whose consistent use dates back to Neolithic India (an area now part of Pakistan) and which is considered sacred in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The Nazis also made wide use of what are known as “runes,” symbols in ancient Germanic alphabets used for casting spells, divination, and invoking magical spirits. Members of the SS attended classes wherein they were taught the meaning of the runes, and many Nazi organizations had their own special rune. For instance, we have all seen the two crooked S’s of the SS; they are actually “Sig-Runes.” Some other runes used by the Nazis were the Hagall, Tyr, Leben, Toten, Odal, and Eif runes.
Religion of the Blood
Of all the Nazis, none was more enamored of this paganism than Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, second most powerful figure in Germany for much of the war and the man who ordered the deaths of millions in concentration camps. A devoted occultist, Himmler was taken with Hinduism’s rigid caste system and teaching on reincarnation, and he traveled with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita; he launched a mission to locate the “Aryan Holy Grail,” believing it would bestow supernatural powers; and he had his own personal occultist, Karl Maria Willigut, who thought himself descended from the Norse god Thor and was called “Himmler’s Rasputin.” Himmler was also the chief architect of the new German religion.
This faith that was to supplant Christianity was a “religion of the blood,” an amalgamation of ancient pagan elements with a pungently racial flavor. It had been advocated by Nazi Commissioner for Philosophy and Education Alfred Rosenberg, an occultist who wrote the book Laying Out the Tenets of the Nazi Religion.
“Mark Weitzman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, explains the Nazi conception of this religion in the documentary Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy (note: all the experts cited here on rendered their commentary in that work): “He saw blood, particularly in a religious sense, as the determining factor. In other words, a church had to be a church of the blood, rather than a church of faith or a church of belief. The blood tied together the Nordic races. So for Rosenberg, the blood, racial stock, racial identity, became the keynotes of this new ideology.”
Yet it gets stranger. The documentary also tells us that some Nazis believed they were descended from a race of Aryan god-men who fell from grace “through evil and vice”; a flood then “wiped these beings off the face of the earth,” except for a few who found their way to India and the high peaks of Tibet. They then mated with inferior races, thereby rendering their blood impure and losing their great powers.”