Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler

Preconceptions: The author's a nut. Will it show?

Reaction: Yep, it shows.

So you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe chatting with some friends about politics and personal beliefs, and suddenly two cars collide out on the street. Everyone winces, but one of your friends shakes his head and says, "Damned Jews."

That's what Mein Kampf is like: a litany of random topics punctuated by occasional bursts of reason and more frequent bursts of crazed anti-Semitism.

Given the volume of verbal feces ejected into Hitler's literary toilet, some kernels of corn had to appear. I shuddered to find his insights on nationalism, propaganda, parliaments, Marxism, and other topics to be surprisingly lucid--probably by accident.

Though Hitler can parrot the smart things he's read, he cannot form many of his own. His terrible logic undermines his own work.

• Hitler, raised in Austria, loves the German people and longs for a unified German state he can call home.
• Thus, he hates the Habsburgs, who have diluted the state and allowed foreign interests to invest in Germany and buy it out.
• Thus he hates the press who support the Habsburgs and attack the Kaiser.
• Thus, he has to turn to the anti-semitic press in Munich to get "the real story."
• Surprisingly, he discovers from the anti-semitic press that the Jews are behind all of his moral outrages, including the other Kaiser-attacking press! "The Jew and his newspapers always lie," he says. "Anyone who picks up a Jewish newspaper in the morning and does not see himself slandered in it has not made profitable use of the previous day."
• Then, he learns that Jews lead the Social Democrats and Marxists!

That's how his mind works. Once he "notices" that the Jews are to blame for the sell-out of Germany, he finds it easy to see them everywhere pulling the strings.

"If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another," he says. They are striving for a homeland merely to have "a central organization for their international world swindle." Worst of all, the Jews want to dilute the blood of Germany: "With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people."

Indeed, Hitler is oddly preoccupied with sex. He dedicates many pages to the horrors of prostitution, the worst being syphillis. He suggests that rigorous education for men with "young healthy bodies" should include physical training so as to distract them from being tempted by prostitution. Hmmm. I wonder if Hitler has some experience, here.

Mostly, though, Hitler raves about preserving the German "race" and providing it with sufficient resolve, focus, purpose, and room to grow.

He insists on a form of education and government that enables men to take responsibility for their decisions instead of hiding behind parliamentary procedure. In Hitler's Reich, a single man is elected to lead and his orders are followed with complete obedience. He is then eventually tossed out of office and the next man is obeyed.

The book is filled with the kind of lullaby logic that only works in oration, after you're tapping your feet to that inexplicable rhythm of oral madness. "Sure--if the glove don't fit, I must acquit. Makes perfect sense."

Oh, and all you Germans who claimed you had no idea what was happening during the war?

I call bullshit.

Mein Kampf was given to every newly married couple in the Reich. Helmut and Helga, after their first state-sanctioned Aryan congress, could roll over in their sweat-soaked sheets, puff on some Lucky Strikes, and say, "Hey, let's open that crazy book Hitler sent us for the wedding." Then, ten minutes later, they'd probably say, "Holy shit! This guy's going to kill the Jews!"

He all but says he's going to do it. If you can't read the whole thing (and who could?), some of the section headings give it away: "Sterlization of Incurables" and "The Jew a Parasite" don't exactly meander around the subject. One can easily connect his discussions of how a nation exists to ensure the safety of a race to how marriage ensures the purity of that race's blood to how a society must allow its undesirables to die off to save future generations.

Even in a Depression-ravaged Germany desperate for national glory, I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not thinking, "Wow. This guy's as crazy as a shithouse rat. Good thing he'll never be elected to--oh, fuck." This book is an extended threat that Hitler carried out with the tacit approval of his people, killing millions.

If you didn't read it, you should have.

If nothing else, you should all be ashamed for allowing a person who writes so badly to ascend to high office. Same goes to the citizens of New York for electing Hillary Clinton after It Takes a Village.

Verdict: Though I feel kind of dirty having read it at all, I feel no more evil having done so. As for the book itself being harmful, that premise assumes people actually hacked their way through its tangled linguistic jungle, grasped the enormous leaps of logic from its swinging vines, and then crawled back to civilization with the results.

There's no way this clumsy, mastubatory exercise in self-aggrandizement persuaded anyone of anything they didn't already believe or suspect. This book merely articulates the evil lurking in people already.

This book amply demonstrates that evil is an aesthetic function as well as a moral one: evil things even look and sound ugly, like this book. Even the most ignorant person can tell when something just doesn't look or sound right, and this book reminds us that we need to be vigilant for the things our leaders are actually telling us they plan to do.

I will say this much: it sure got me thinking about how creepy my weblogs seem, and if I just sound like a crackpot, too. Yikes.

Return

Return to the Books of Evil.