Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

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Toenail
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Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by Toenail »

[Mod note: Claims are unverified.]

Always struck me as very strange. With the Nepali I kind of get it because of Gurkha etc... There is at least some connection. But tibetans saying Hitler was an emanation of Gesar? I heard this a couple of times from uneducated lay people. Wondering what the reasons for this are.
Constructelf
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by Constructelf »

Toenail wrote: Sat Nov 20, 2021 7:25 pm Always struck me as very strange. With the Nepali I kind of get it because of Gurkha etc... There is at least some connection. But tibetans saying Hitler was an emanation of Gesar? I heard this a couple of times from uneducated lay people. Wondering what the reasons for this are.
What the actual frak? I guess it's understandable; lack of knowledge of the European Theatre of WWII in Asia is comparable to Westerner's lack of familiarity with the War in the Pacific. Still, I had to make a double-take there... Can you give more details as to where and when you saw this kind of stuff? Any links?

Can you clarify what you mean by the connection between Hitler and the Gurkhas? As for Tibet, I guess that 1938–1939 German expedition to Tibet, and also Heinrich Harrer seven year stay there might have shaped Tibetan attitudes towards Germany.
Tenma
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by Tenma »

Toenail wrote: Sat Nov 20, 2021 7:25 pm Always struck me as very strange. With the Nepali I kind of get it because of Gurkha etc... There is at least some connection. But tibetans saying Hitler was an emanation of Gesar? I heard this a couple of times from uneducated lay people. Wondering what the reasons for this are.
Source? Saying that you heard it from some people isn't exactly the most credible thing to hear.

Closest thing I could find of this was Gesar fighting against the demon king (the latter being considered Hitler in some cases), of some Mongols considering the Russian warlord Roman von Ungern-Sternberg as Begtse, and Mao Zedong even being considered a form of Vajrapani but that's it.
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ratna
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by ratna »

Perhaps these people misunderstood or misremembered the episode written by the eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche in which Gesar goes to Germany to help vanquish Adolf Hitler.

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FiveSkandhas
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by FiveSkandhas »

At some point, the Nazis made an expedition into central Asia and Tibet, looking for supposed traces of ancient "Aryan" culture.

Heinrich Himmler, the boss of woo-woo wing of the Nazi party, was obsessed with exploring any hint that he thought might shed some light on the origins and early history of the "Aryan race." Of course it was a fool's errand, because there is no such thing as the Aryan race.

Himmler fancied himself a mystic and kept a copy of the Rg Veda on his bedstand. He was mostly informed by a mishmash of romantic lunatics and table-tappers like madame Blavatsky, Julius Evola, maybe even a dash of Crowley...the lunatic fringe of late-victorian orientalist claptrap. He had a real bee in his bonnet about Christianity, seeing that it involved worship of a Jewish man, and spent his career feverishly seeking some kind of alternative spiritual and mythic orientation for European culture.

So Himmler sent expeditions everywhere: North India, Iran, even Ethiopia. Into Finland to research ancient oral poetry near the Arctic circle, down to the Canary islands (investigating whether they were the tips of submerged mountains of lost Atlantis...). A trip was made to look into the Incas and the Olmecs. No theory was too crackpot.

Somehow in his crystal-meth-addled mental travels, Himmler got hold of some kind of hazy, garbled version of the Shambala myth and seized on it as a potential lost Aryan utopia from prehistory. Off the gang went in search of the fabled kingdom.

The expedition into Siberia and Tibet involved using special calipers to measure skull size in an attempt to see if any distant relationship might pertain. Apparently the Germans hit it off quite well with the government in Tibet (well...they could barely communicate, so each side just believed what they wanted to about the other), and there was a pledge of "friendship between the Swastika of the east and the Swastika of the west". Then they went home and everyone promptly forgot about it.

Wild stuff.
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Zhen Li
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by Zhen Li »

Hitler did try to win over Nepal in WWII, but they ended up siding with Britain (an obvious choice if you consider the geography).

If by Gurkhas you mean the foreign regiments rather than the ethnicity that ruled Nepal at the time, they all fought on the allied side, primarily Malaya and Burma, but also in Europe. There's no reason to suppose that they worshipped or worship Hitler.
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Ayu
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Re: Nepali and tibetan people worshipping Hitler

Post by Ayu »

Because the OP couldn't make the claims about those Tibetans comprehensible by sources, this topic seems to be invalid.
It's always very precarious to discuss about people of one nation in general. People are different and various.
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