On the 30th of April 1945, exactly 75 years ago today, Hitler shot himself in the head; Just two days before, on the 28th of April, the Italian premiere Mussolini was shot by few of his own party members when he tried to run to his safety in disguise. Two men, two world leaders, both enamoured with power and respect, had to die such sad deaths within days of each other. Why? What did them in? Not only did they lose their lives, but also became the scorn of the world for years to come. What do we learn from them?
Mussolini was the biggest leader of Italy leading them to the world war II. He became the country's youngest prime minister in the year 1922 through democratically elected means and was its premiere for two decades, almost till his death. He wanted to make Italy the biggest country in the world, and bring back the glory of the Roman empire. At the same time, he had the idea of bringing together a group of people to have a shared sense of purpose and destiny. The very idea of a government was to give people a shared identity! Revolutionary nationalism was what it was called then.
When we think of Adolf Hitler, images of the holocaust and the gas chambers come to our mind. He led Germany for more than a decade, till falling over dead by the end of the second world war in 1945. Hitler had a fascinating ideology of the state(government). His construct of the state is to preserve the racial characteristics of mankind! In short, he wanted the state to preserve the purity of his race.
In a world and more so in a country, which is having a re-look at nationalism, and starting to have a monolithic ideology of the concept of state, Hitler and Mussolini stand as a stark reminder of what can go wrong in this path.
A philosopher once said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". Are the nationalists listening?
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