It is rather interesting that Hitler uses religion to try and define his 'folkish' concept, especially with the Jews being the "chosen" people by God. "Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise." (pg. 383) If this is the case, Hitler is committing sacrilege against God by laying hands on the "chosen" people. Of course this doesn't align to the idea that the Aryan race is the superior race, but regardless of that fact, Hitler continues to bring forth a religious backing to his argument of ethnic superiority and so should also be subject to a religious bias.
Another interesting issue that Hitler brings up in Mein Kampf is one about Germanization. It is understandable to see why Hitler was so against Pan-Germanism as he saw Germanization as only being applicable to soil, not people as race is all in the blood. His ideology of promoting the superior race was fueled by a need to not only preserve their race but to make it the dominant race. This would be accomplished through not only preventing intermixing but of only promoting healthy people to conceive. It's sad to see that he sees any mental or physical disability to be a "germ" even among the Aryan race. It makes me wonder how traumatized Hitler was in his own dealings with his weaknesses and failures. There is undoubtedly an inner struggle within himself to overcome his weaknesses by addressing others and their weaknesses.
Hitler's entire ideology seems to revolve around racism, just only in disguise behind all these political words and tautological reasoning. It really doesn't make much sense how people saw Hitler as such an influential speaker or leader, as it is shown contrary to this fact within his writing.
One of the things that baffles me most about Hitler’s ideology is his obsession with “blood” and the importance of blood purity. He that Germanization would only truly occur if by “transforming the blood of the subjected people” (389). The issue I have with this argument is he quite literally means blood, that nationality and race are one and the same. And Hitler’s solution is to remove those whose blood is not the same.
ReplyDeleteI’m compelled to comment on how far social standards on racism have developed in the last hundred or two hundred years. Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism in Germany. In the 1800s, the “Voelkisch movement” sought to spread the notion that Jews were not truly German. I wonder how much of the rise of Nazism was a result of previously existing social thought supporting anti-Semitism. I have an incredibly hard time understanding how Hitler captivated a nation by espousing the idea that racial coexistence is “culturally backward” (389).
Although it is not related to the rest of my comment, I thought I would share the following quote. I was struck by its irony.
“What, for example, could a royal and imperial university professor formerly write about the sense and purpose of the state in a country whose state existence embodied the greatest monstrosity of the twentieth century?” (386)