Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Mein Kampf

Very seldom do people take the time to read literature which flatly rejects what society deems appropriate or normal. Especially effective in the form of an autobiography, I thought Mien Kampf was an accessible way of crawling under Hitler’s skin to interpret some of his ideas and experiences. That being said I thought the book was almost mental torture, long and largely tedious, unrepresentative of my previous notions of a charismatic, exciting speech-giver.

During the excerpts I read Hitler never clearly defined or set commandments for Nazi ideology, which made sense because he was not yet in power when the novel was published. He does however make disturbing statements of things to come, in his raw racist and antisemitic comments. He blames the Jews basically for everything he does not like, such as modern art, pornography and prostitution. He then claims that the Jews were responsible for the German loss in the war. Moreover he says that while they made up only 1% of the population, they were slowly taking over the country by controlling the Social Democratic Party.

And this only lists some of the political grudges the man had against the religion, Hitler also compared Jews physically and hierarchically with the “Aryan race.” But the surprising thing is that he includes such hate-filled statements amongst repetitive patriotic talk, as well as some surprisingly rational opinions regarding the state of affairs in Germany after the first World War. Some of his opinions about struggle Germany experienced after the war included tension between Marxism and National Socialism within the country, increased population and property rights transferred to stock companies. He maintained that the major downfall was the countries failure to recognize what he deemed as a racial problem.

He thus seems to say that while we have all these national epidemics, stemming from a variety of instigators, such as the allies, it is important to focus the energy and power of the people into the common goal that could solve everything at one. Narrowing in on a single foe maintains the concentration for the masses, instead conjuring their emotions to instigate passion for a common cause. This is representative in his writing since he reiterates the frustrations of the German people while inserting antisemitic, extremist views, all geared towards hatred.

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