From a piece in Foreign Policy titled “The Developing World Thinks Hitler Is Underrated”:
In the West, Hitler is known above all as a practitioner of race-based genocide, the architect of the Holocaust. He is also remembered as the hypernationalist who, in the hope of expanding German power across all of Europe, and later the entire globe, plunged the world into the most destructive war in the history of mankind.
Yet in much of the developing world, where ignorance regarding the Holocaust and Hitler’s fantasies of world domination is rife, he is perceived less as a mass murderer and ideologue of global conquest than as a stern disciplinarian who addressed social ills in a briskly efficient manner. His is a legacy of “law and order,” not of horrific chaos and collapsed cities. Additionally, and crucially, in the non-Western world the name Hitler can connote “anti-imperialist rebel” due to the German leader’s nationalistic struggle against “Anglo-French-American-Zionist domination.”…
In Hitler’s own home ground, the West, rejecting this child of the Occident and his poisonous legacy goes hand in hand with a respect for human rights, racial diversity, and due process (which does not mean that these ideals are without their native detractors and potential saboteurs). Across much of the globe, though, openly expressed admiration for the Hitler legacy can be seen as just one more indication of the tenuousness of these social and political values in our modern world.
