About the Republication of Mein Kampf

As the executive editor of Bindlesnitch, I often publish stories that I don’t necessarily agree with but, when I do that, I often add a comment of my own to put the story into a different perspective.

Recently, however, I published a story about the republication of Mein Kampf so that I could discuss the meaning of the story in a comment. Because many of you read the article, but not the comment (we keep track of such things,) we have decided to republish the comment here as a separate article. (click here to read the original article.)

Some 90 years ago, a deeply disturbed World War I German soldier serving a five-year prison sentence for attempting to overthrow the government of Bavaria wrote a book that would eventually cost the lives of 60 million people and throw the world into a turmoil from which it has not yet fully recovered. Many of the issues that we are confronting today actually originated during or immediately after World War II, just as World War II itself was the result of the unfinished business left behind by World War I….but that is a separate article from this one.

Mein Kampf is an ugly book, an evil book….and, if you have never read it, you should, because, in Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler describes exactly what he was going to do to the world, and exactly how he was going to do it. It was all there in black and white, By 1939, it had been sold more than 5.2 million copies in eleven languages.

Why should you read the demonic ramblings of a poorly educated, quite mad, Austrian corporal, written more than 90 years ago about a world that no longer exists?

First of all, the book is now being republished in Germany because the copyright, held by the Government of Bavaria, has expired, putting the book into the public domain…and a commercial publisher thought there was enough of a market for the book to turn a profit. It is already a runaway bestseller, in a country where the vast majority of the citizens were not even born when World War II was tearing the world apart. In other words, they have no connection to the visceral experiences of that war. War is hell, but only the people who have actually been to war really believe that.

In the meantime, despite misconceptions to the contrary, there is no law in Germany prohibiting the purchase, sale or ownership of Mein Kampf. On the contrary, the only reason that the book has not been through numerous printings in Germany is that the German State of Bavaria, which “inherited” all of Hitler’s personal assets after his death, refused to allow the printing or release of new copies of the book. Once the copyright expired, however, there was no way for the German government to prevent the republication of the book.

Realistically, there’s no one in Germany who has not been able to read Mein Kampf. The book was widely available before this republication.

Why then did a commercial publisher undertake the printing and distribution of the book? For the same reason any publisher publishes any book: They expect to make money on it.

The fact that this edition is heavily annotated suggests that the editors have tried to correct many of Hitler’s misconceived notions about economics, history, philosophy, and even art (the man was a Philistine) but the fact remains that Hitler’s core arguments will now be available once again in trade book editions for any curious person to pick up and read.

Well, we don’t believe in censorship, do we? Or do we? We have all kinds of unconscious censorship, when we censor ourselves before we say things that we know are politically incorrect, except for those people who make a living saying politically incorrect things they don’t really believe. We have commercial censorship: if you can’t get something published because no publisher or editor wants to give you the time or space, then you have been censored as effectively as if the government had done it. Employers fire employees for comments made on the Facebook or Twitter accounts. But the most important censorship is the censorship we impose upon ourselves because we KNOW the government is listening to everything we say, reading everything we write, and keeping track of everything we read.

The implications of a publisher releasing a new edition of Mein Kampf is that the publisher’s market research determined that there was a market for the book., In a Germany that is currently re-assessing itself and its posture toward immigration, with a rising tide of anti-Muslim feeling, both in Germany, France, and around the (non-Muslim) world, a book like Mein Kampf could be the match that sets off the fuse that will trigger another blow to civil society.  The implications of the existence for a market for the book suggests that Germany, at least, is returning to the same levels of wide-spread dissatisfaction with the government, the culture and the economy in which the German people – perhaps the wealthiest population in Europe – are living now.

Conditions today are nothing like the conditions in Germany in the 192os, when the rest of the world was enjoying a flood of prosperity in the wake of the Great War, but the Germans were saddled with an enormous war debt, and the costs involved in rebuilding a shattered country.  But, the perceptions of the people have also changed: today, people expect a great deal more than they expected during the first half of the 20th century and, when those expectations are disappointed, the people get angry.

That was the environment that produced National Socialism and thrust Hitler into power.  It is the same environment that exists in the United States today where, in the midst of the greatest wealth and the highest standard of living (collectively if not individually) in the history of the world, the people believe that they are oppressed, economically disadvantaged, and poorly served by their government…the exact same conditions that existed in Germany in 1924.  Today, as then, cynical politicians and equally cynically oligarchs are playing upon these anxieties to create an atmosphere of fear, using the same techniques that Hitler and his cronies used to gain and hold power.

With a Jewish politician now standing within striking distance of the Oval Office, it is important for us to remember that in Germany, before Hitler, the Jewish community was widely accepted and it was said that the best place in the world for a Jew to be was Germany, at a time when a Jew could not get a room in a first class hotel in New York (unless he owned the place.) In fact, the widespread acceptance of Jews in Germany was fodder for Hitler’s propaganda machine, because it gave him a visible enemy to rail about.

Many of Hitler’s beliefs, especially about Jews, came from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1902 forgery produced by a tzarist intelligence officer based upon an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly. When the Nazis came to power, they put copies of the Protocols into the hands of every school age child in Germany as proof of the justification for Hitler’s animus toward the Jews.

The point is this: it is possible to create great evil in the world simply by stringing some words together on a page. Tracts like Mein Kampf have the ability to seduce young, naïve readers, and twist their psyches to the point where they will cheerfully do heinous things without thinking twice about it.

Right now, we in the United States are in the midst of a political campaign, where the leading candidates of one party are telling us, in clearly, unambiguous language, about the illegal and immoral things they will do if one of them – any one of them – is elected president of the United States. A few of us are outraged by this behavior. Most of us are simply amused.

Before you laugh too hard, remember that this is exactly how the majority of the German people reacted to Hitler, in the beginning at least. They thought he was a joke, but the joke was on them, because Hitler was in deadly earnest, as the world found out to its disgust. You should also remember that Hitler did not take power by force: he won power in the polling booths of Germany.  Sometimes we elect the dictators who rule over us.

So, when you watch Donald Trump repeated his nauseous plans for America, think about Adolph Hitler, and “Mein Kampf” and think twice about your complacency. Like Hitler and Goering, Trump is a practitioner of the Big Lie, proclaiming his absurd beliefs at the top of his lungs, asserting that he is beyond the rules, any rules, repeating his lies over and over again as they become more and more outrageous because he knows that many people believe that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, even when the guy who sees the smoke was the same guy who started the fire.

Don’t purchase copies of Mein Kampf because that enriches the publishers of the book.  If you want to read what Hitler wrote, get Mein Kampf here free of charge. It is always dangerous to make dangerous books accessible to young readers, but it is even more dangerous to remain ignorant about what they say about us.