SV: Sanskrit translations in Nazi hands

[Lars Martin Fosse]

>
> >Robert Zydenbos, in a bit of defensive revisionism, argues against the
> >charge of Jung's nazi affiliations.
> >
> >>Je pense que non.
> >
> >Sadly, for all those so enamored of Jung, he was indeed a virulent nazi who
> >wrote position papers for the nazis, believing that his notion of
> >collective unconscious and the nazi aryan ideal were of the same stuff.
> >[...]
> It is not the first time that we have had this kind of witch-hunt on this
> list, fuelled by Anglo-Saxons from countries that make big cash out of
> making stereotyped war movies and paperback novels and are afraid of the
> euro. :-)

Well, what's wrong with killing a few krauts, Robert?

> I am reminded of one of the most popular 20th-century Dutch poets, Hendrik
> Marsman: he completed a translation of Nietzsche's _Zarathustra_ (that
> already must make him suspect, I suppose) and openly flirted with the idea
> of a 'strong man' etc. etc. But later he moved away from this, and when
> politically things came to a head, he tried to escape to Britain to join in
> organising the resistance but drowned on the way. So the question arises:
> must we condemn Marsman to burn in hell forever?

I think this is an important point. I have personally known people who were
involved with Fascism in the thirties  and - worse - in the fourties. Some of
them simply changed their opinion and left the movement at an early stage.
Others went with it the whole way, some of them risking their lives in the
service of a bad cause and paying for their political folly with the hatred and
scorn of all those who didn't have the courage to fight them when it would have
been dangerous. I have seen too many of Hitler's speeches on TV to have any
sympathy with his admirerers, but I realize that many of them in their private
lives were fully normal people who could be both friendly and noble. Thus, it
is a mistake to believe that people who were Nazis to the end of the war were
evil as *private* individuals. I have seen striking examples to the opposite.

Please remember that we live in a century where people (and very often people
who should have known better) have been able to convince themselves of the most
atrocious political ideas, left or right, often under the pressure of unstable
and difficult social conditions. When totalitarianims prevailed, even
non-believers were sucked up the the maelstrom of events and had little
opportunity to resist, mentally or otherwise. In Nazi Germany as well as in the
Soviet Union, opposition could spell catastrophe not only for yourself but for
your family as well. (Now ask yourself what you would have done in their
place). Thus, totalitarianism corrupted everybody and everything. But after the
war, placed in a democratic setting, the German majority gradually melted into
the democratic fold. This process was studied by sociologists in the first
years after the war. They found a significant change in peoples' attitudes
about 1960. Therefore, I think the acid test is whether a person with a
totalitarian past loses his or her old ideas in a democratic setting and adopts
new attitudes. We must assume that this happened to quite a few of the
Indologists and other intellectuals who were involved with Nazism, or for that
matter, Communism. Their extremism was born in difficult times, and was
sometimes cured in a more benevolent society. Therefore, we have to judge their
work by its merit, not by the ideological past of the author. The person
writing in 1960 or 1970 may be a very different person from the one that wrote
in 1940.

> And for everybody's information: I am not a (neo-)Nazi and am not German /
> Swiss / Austrian / Rumanian / Ukrainian / Finnish / Italian / Spanish etc.
> So none of that kind of innuendo will stick.

My goodness, Robert, what ARE you then?????

Best regards,

Lars Martin

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19
Email: lmfosse at online.no