Hinduism,  Plato, Himmler and Oppenheimer

            Like Himmler,  Oppenheimer stressed the concept of disinterested duty, and his biography reveals that he conceived of this duty as a transcendent project. Himmler thought that the noble dream of the Third Reich justified the elimination of 11 million in the camps. Oppenheimer thought that he was serving the cause of science and democracy by building a bomb that would defeat the Germans and the Japanese.  The principle idea of the Bhagavad Gita is the concept of knowledge of god. The Hindu concept of total knowledge is not only the postulate of the caste system, but also of the belief that war and social injustice is the inevitable consequence of Karma.. The only way out of the "wheel of birth and death" that is Karma is the disinterested service of absolute truth. Knowledge is then seen as the ultimate panacea that excuses all actions, provided that the "fruit of action" is sacrificed to god in advance. One does not kill for oneself, one kills to realize the total truth and this is far more dangerous than mere private revenge, since it systematizes genocide and the mentality of 'them versus us'.

            It should be noted that Oppenheimer, like Himmler, was serving a notion of 'purity', in his case a notion of the purity of science: in Himmler's case, the notion of purity was social and racial. Both cases, while different, concern an understanding of the purity of knowledge. The concept of purity ultimately concerns knowledge, insofar as knowledge is a legitimizing abstraction that justifies actions. Impure actions, people, races or knowledge are considered inferior, having to do with ignorance, if the stress is on knowledge, or with defilement, if the stress is on morality. Both Himmler and Oppenheimer appear to have mixed conceptions of purity. Oppenheimer was concerned with destroying the Germans or the Japanese, both considered morally inferior in racist terms, but he was doing so by devoting himself to the project of the purity of scientific knowledge, which he felt was the panacea that would save mankind from evil. Himmler was concerned with using science, specifically medical science, to eliminate Jews, Gypsies and other people he considered morally and intellectually inferior. The notion of "purity" of knowledge or of race justified and created a detached indifference to atrocities for both Himmler and Oppenheimer. The Bhagavad Gita was used by both men to justify their participation in large scale atrocities, and this book combined with the mythos of science and the Third Reich must be implicated as the knowledge element that helped fuel the atrocities of the 2nd World War.

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