Mein Kampf

Rating:
Summary: One of most important historical books yet slightly obsolete
Review: The book is obviously a must read for understanding Hitler's early thought. But, as many of his associates would attest, he himself declared the book obsolete, irrelvant, poorly written and he regretted publishing it (which is why he never published his second book). Most high ranking National Socialists never read it, with the exception of Goebbels. The book probably has more emotional impact on people today than it did back then, and I personally don't understand how it's now become so significant to neo-nazis and censors. The book would probably be more useful to historian types than to the general reader. The prose is turgid and disorganized, and definitely seems to simply be rant put to paper (it's not simply the translation, the German edition is the same way). The book is also difficult to read all the way through. The chapter on propaganda is proably the most useful one, and is the only here where Hitler shows his brilliant understanding of persuasion. Most of the book is still filled with his typical perorations with his pseudoscientific, somewhat simplistic understanding of things (although he probably read more than most people). Despite his intelligence, most of this book is by no means a masterpiece, especially given many of his problematic beliefs. For insight into Hitler's mind, his second book would be a better read, but even more important would be his 'secret conversations'. It's definitely a worthwhile read for us serious students of history, just like the Communist Manifesto, but otherwise I would pass, as I think it's significance has been way overblown. I nonetheless gave it a five for it's significance as a historical text, but without that, I would have given it a 2 or a 1.

Rating:
Summary: Important and interesting, but not for everyone
Review: This is a review of the Mannheim translation.

After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and von Mises' Omnipotent Government, I wanted to see what the relationship of Nazism to socialism was in Hitler's own words. I also wanted to know whether the German people were simply predisposed to Nazism, as Shirer insinuates in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or whether Hitler had presented an agenda that appealed to them economically, as Brustein finds in The Logic of Evil. I found surprises in both respects.

Hitler was no great writer, and admitted his preference for oral communication. He was a master of propaganda, and explains his method throughout MK, including especially his belief that the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party should recruit primarily from the working class, rejecting intellectualism and adopting a defiant, menacing, and if necessary, violent stance. His philosophy, though bizarre, is self-consistent on the surface. The anti-semitism is a recurring theme, but he neither explains nor defends it. For me, there were three main thematic surprises: Hitler's embrace of socialism and simultaneous rejection of Marxism, his equivocation between Jews, Marxists, and capitalists, and his foreshadowing of events to come.

After his parents left him orphaned just as he reached his early adulthood, he moved to Vienna to pursue his intended career as an artist. Unfortunately (both for Hitler and for history), he was rejected and became a poor day laborer. The passages in which he describes the demoralizing effects of poverty read like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Somehow, he managed to reject Marxism in those days, possibly because the tabloids he seems to have preferred wrote it off as a Jewish conspiracy. However, he does seem to have genuinely embraced a brand of socialism which would uplift and allow working classes to embrace German culture and to produce little German warriors for the "coming struggle". Indeed, throughout MK, wherever he refers to socialism, it is positive, and he is careful to distinguish it from Marxism, which he consistently rejects on the grounds of its Jewish origins.

In addition to conflating Jews and Marxists, Hitler also rejected capitalism as a Jewish ideology. He euphemistically uses communist, democrat, internationalist, and other epithets to refer to Jews-as-Marxists, and "international finance", Manchesterism, hyperindividualist, and other such epithets to refer to Jews-as-capitalists. In his theory, the Jews are a supranational state, a nation who attached themselves parasitically to "real" nations like the Germans. They had been taking from the German state in their role as financiers, and were especially successful in using the treaties concluding WWI to do so. However, he claims that they were also using Marxist theory to seal the trap, playing both ends against the middle. How this worked, he never explained, but he does steer Nazism through the middle as a philosophy that protects German workers (as opposed to all workers, or German landowners, intellectuals, and capitalists) against foreign parasites (which meant, of course, Jews).

Finally, he strongly suggests the events yet to come. That was surprising given the context in which MK was written: at the time, Hitler was in jail for leading a silly coup in a corner of Germany, his party had been outlawed, and Germany was thoroughly out of the picture as a military power. Just as von Mises claims, Hitler's economic program calls for wage and price controls. Those controls would be pressured by international trade (conducted against the Germans by Jews, of course), so Hitler realizes that Germany would have to be self-sufficient. WWI came about in part because it had been thought that Germany could achieve self-sufficiency by obtaining colonies to produce food paid for by manufactured goods sold in them. Hitler rejects this approach and outlines a plan for taking land in the East. Although Hitler always describes such struggles as if they would have to take place over the course of generations, we need no longer guess at what was to become of the inhabitant Slavs.

Ultimately, Hitler was freed, reinvigorated his gang/party, obtained a third of the votes in the country, gained the Chancellorship and implemented the dictatorship implicit in his Fuhrerprinzip theory of responsibility and leadership. From the perspective of the Austrian economists, this was the culmination of decades of socialist theory in German politics. Hayek dedicated TRTS to "socialists of all parties" because he saw similar trends in England in 1944. Today, if we replaced the word "Jew" in this tract with "multinationals", "outsourcers", or "jihadists", and if we dropped the references to race out of the 25-point Nazi economic-political program, would their programs be palatable to a majority of voters in a western nation? Finding answers to current problems is the reason we read historical texts, especially when the ideas in them led to great evil.

Rating:
Summary: A Historic Document
Review: You may hate Hitler, but you can't ignore that he has played an important role in Western experience. You cannot talk about the 20th century without talking about Hitler. You can hate him, but you cannot ignore him. Hitler redefined military history, literary discourse, philosophy, academic discussions, and even theology. You may not want to give him credit because you may hate what he tried to do, but he is probably the greatest mover in history. Hitler gave Germans a sense of pride. Most Germans did not care about killing Jews -- it was in fact a side effect that many Germans tried to ignore or pretend did not really exist. Often, Hitler is only seen vis-a-vis the Jews and that detracts from correctly understanding Hitler and his role in German society. Reading the original document by Hitler is a step in the right direction to truly understand the mind of the evil genius. It is important to go to the primary source in every case and develop your own opinions, rather than take others' words for truth.

Rating:
Summary: People read too much into this.
Review: According to the Preface, this book was not written for the purpose to make friends or influence people. The design from conception is to chronicle a movement, not create one.

As a whole one can have an opinion as to the results of the book. However with out reading it the opinion has no chance to be informed. Another flaw with not reading this work is that you are relying on others opinions and inferences. Taking most of the statements and conclusions from this book and displaying them separately you would be surprised as to how many you would agree with.

Just a sample of what is on the inside:
"I know people who `read' enormously, Book for book, letter for letter, yet whom I would not describe as `well-read.' True they possess a mass of `knowledge,' but their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in... For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end."
These are not platitudes but examples of observations of the time, which you can see are timeless.
Once in a while the reading may seem redundant but it is the nature of writing for the time and place. So again this book is a must read. I have no preference as to translation.


Rating:
Summary: Read history put down decades before it happened
Review: This is one of the most incredible books that you could ever read. Almost twenty years before they occurred, the author predicted catastrophic events that killed tens of millions of people. However, he was not psychic, but a man who drove the events that plunged the world into the greatest cataclysm it has ever known. It is amazing to read the book and see how he sets down some of his history and his plans for the future.
As you read the book, you wonder why the people who opposed him could not have understood the consequences if he were to rise to power. Certainly, if they realized it, his rise to power would not have been so relatively easy. My personal theory is that everyone is accustomed to hearing politicians spout wild ideas and then be tamed down under the "burden of responsibility." Because of this, it was believed that Hitler would follow in the same path. When he was appointed Chancellor, some of the leading Germans thought that they had placed him under control. Therefore, if you examine Hitler's political career from this perspective, he is one of the most unique politicians of all time. He set down a program and he never wavered from implementing it. It is so tragic that the program was so evil, for that kind of achievement could accomplish great things. In fact, had he died in late 1938, he probably would be remembered as the greatest German leader of all time.
I first read the book twenty-five years ago and even though it is disjointed, I couldn't put it down. It is a rare occasion when you read history before it happened, but I found myself relating what he was saying in the twenties to what happened after he rose to power in Germany. In that respect, it was very spooky to read. However, I think everyone should read "Mein Kampf" and realize how serious we should take the statements of politicians, especially when they seem radical.

Rating:
Summary: Work of a True Believer, but not a Madman
Review: Hitler is usually described on TV as some sort of madman. There
are currently attempts to paint him as a sexual pervert or having Parkenson's disease. He was not a madman. His ideas were part of the currency of the time. In his "History of The World" H.G. Wells discusses the atttempt to bring the world under a "firm Jewish heel". It is interesting that Wells takes this as an obvious fact, not out-of-the-blue speculation. Hitler came to the same conclusion. His initial hatred for Jews
was not theoretical, but based on his observations or taking as fact that Jews ran brothels in Vienna where the sexual favors of German girls were sold to all interested. His reaction apppears similar to what a traditionalist White Southerner might think on seeing Howard Stern on TV today. It is unclear if Hitler was aware of Oswald Spengler's view that the German loss of WW I was the first great step in the downfall of Western Civilization to the "colored world" (Spengler's words)
and that the "next war" would determine if Western Civilization survied or died. Hitler's views are far from insane; they in many ways seem the product of a logic machine. "X" is happening; "Y" is promoting "X"; "X" is not desired, therefore
eliminate "Y". Exactly the same logic exists today, but "X" is the destruction of European man and "Y" is the forces
creating "X" and "X" is desired, therefore "Y" is promoted.

It is evident that Hitler's hatred for Jews was not based upon any sort of theology, but upon their more-or-less generally perceived negative impact upon the Western World in general and upon Germany in particular. If the Jews had been any other peoples having the same perceived impact, Hitler would have felt the same about them. This is evident by his dislike for France, based upon his perception, stated in Mein Kampf, that that country would be a Negro state in several hundred years and that France had put Negros on the Rhine. Perhaps the greatest difference between Hitler and conventional politicians is that Hitler though more of the future than the immediate, as he said in the context of the 1938 pact with Stalin. Hitler appears to have had a fair knowledge of Judaism. He once said that Judaism is not a religion, but a philosophy. Einstein said almost the same thing. Interestingly, Herman Cohen said that to be a religion a system had to be true, in the scientific sense, not "I know" when "I believe strongly" is meant, As any casual student of TANACH and Talmud knows, Jewish ethics are based upon the notion that whatever is in the long term interest of the Jewish people, as centuries go by, is a positive good and sin is anything which acts against this end. The reversal of values in America is an astounding exhibit of the power of tightly controlled propaganda. As a whole the European population of the US has become convinced that caring about the future is a positive evil and not caring is a positive good. Judge Learned Hand (the 12th member of the Supreme Court) wrote many years ago that control over the great newspapers and magazines constitutes the real government of the United States. Today TV and motion pictures would be in first place as influence. The anti-European programming on TV has become standard. An interesting directly political case showing this control is the now dead "Fairness Doctrin" of the FCC about 30 years ago. The doctrin was that TV stations having ads for political candidates had to accept ads of all political candidates. The controllers of TV at the time went to the federal courts, where the Supreme Court ruled the doctrin constitutional. So the controllers had the heart of the doctrin cut out by the FCC itself. The objection was, of course, that it partially created a free press in the US. Now the term "right wing" means harmless radio and TV opinion programs where serious discussion is never found. The European population of the US (and of much of Western Europe) has with exceptions of course been induced to give up their self-respect. The US government has been influenced by this same mentality of low self-respect. It should be obvious that a people who lack self-respect will find themselves attacked externally. Judaism to some degree defines itself in terms of enemies. This seems obvious- to be Chosen necessitates that the "other" is non-chosen and inferior, "the evil ones" as RAMBAM calls them. The introduction of Kantian ethics into modern commentaries on TANACH appears to be a conscious attempt to reduce the notion that the non-chosen are valueless to God. This is a moving away from Rabbi Akiba's argument that God cared only for Jews, because Jews are circumcised, which is to God as a uniform is to the king, and as the king loves his own soldiers and recognizes them by their uniforms, so God knows and loves his chosen and not the non-chosen.

When you read Mein Kampf remember that it is a political argument trying to attract and maintain support, not a scientific analysis. We are today fully familiar with half truths and statements quoted out of context and similar devices
used by American political figures to attract support for themselves or this or that program. Hitler did much the same thing. In one almost universal practice of national governments
Hitler's book is a bit stupid; it is a stupidity widely shared. In addition to being a statement of his views, Mein Kampf is also a policy statement, though it was written long before he had governmental authority. National governments have a great bias for establishing and then following policy without due re-examination. Hitler did just that. He established policy and he followed it somewhat blindly with little regard to the flux of circumstance. In many ways it may be said that he had little understanding of the impacts policy, once established, carried out would have upon Germany. He was making policy beyond his understanding; a common fault at the national government level, where policy makers seldom really understand the varient effects of policy carried out. He put what he perceived as the national good above the welfare or even survival of the individual. That is a common mindset of political and other leaders. Maimonides in M-Torah says that
a person should let himself die rather than be treated by an apostate physician, clearly a bias for the long-term good of the people over the survival of the individual. It seems pretty clear that Hitler judged the accomplishment of his aims
to be limited by personal leadership with institutionalized continuation rather than by a rule-following institution, thus he saw the realization of the principal aims as having to be accomplished by him individually. This limitation was his great weakness.

As far as reading is concerned, Mein Kampf is of interest only because it is by Hitler. Obviously, a student of the period should read it.

There was an overwhelming change in World history produced by the destruction of Germany by the US, UK and Russia that is far greater than any historical event in thousands of years. It does not mean a change of colors on a map; it means fundamental, permanent change in the nature of man at the biological level. Most past European wars had meant little more than which prince peasants would pay taxes to or perhaps whether they would have some sort of representation at most. Hitler's book should be read with the understanding of what he saw at stake: The fundamental nature of European man for all time. He was willing to do anything to protect it.

It is of some interest that Hitler does not mean by the word "race" the classifications used by physical anthropologists such as Carlton Coon, who put man into five biologic divisions, with mixed persons not fitting into any of the five. (Caucazoid, Mongoloid, Congoid, Capoid and Australioid) Hitler uses the term to mean any of very many groups, thus he says that the only surviving pure race will be the "Jewish race". The translation given a German newspaper of the Hitler period is "Racial Observer". The German is "Volklisher Beobacer" which does not mean racial observer, but something more akin to "Popular Observer" or more loosly "National Observer".





Rating:
Summary: Mein Bitterness
Review: O how does one rate this book? On one hand, the writing is poor and Hitler offers no insights into his anti-Semitism. On the other hand, it is somewhat important propaganda for understanding this guy's warped mind. Obviously, I disagree with his opinions on things, save for the occasional reference regarding the importance of public transportation. Okay, I agree with that, but the rest is silly and pathetic. He refers to the Jews as 'parasites' that 'smell' and look 'unhuman'- and just as the maggot one pulls from a dead corpse- alas, a Kike! (his paraphrased words, not mine). So, other than Jews being smelly and ugly and icky, according to AH, he really offers no reason for why he hates these people. (Those qualities can fit any race one doesn't like, depending on the bias). I was hoping for a little insight into his warped mind, but all I found was a bunch of recycled hogwash. Hitler is a big, big, loser, and I'm glad he's dead. Overall, though, I found slugging through this book a chore, it is repetitious, and his sentences are poorly constructed, and he is flat out dull, and even admits it. I guess at least he's honest about his hate and leaves all exposed to see, hear, and smell. Two big thumbs down for Hitler!

Rating:
Summary: Holocaust - the blueprint
Review: Mein Kampf is interesting to read, not because Hitler is a great writer but because it gives us a glimpse of what went on in the mind of the man. He has some surprisingly shrewd insights but his plans and ambition are pure dementia. It's very political but his plans for the supremacy of the race and destruction of the inferior ones are clearly outlined and the "philosophy" behind it simply put: basically, the way of Nature is survival of the fittest and Germans will be the fittest and ANY means will be acceptable to that end.
I simply CANNOT believe any reviewer who actually read the book could write, as one did: "he never suggested the harming of the handicapped, Gypsies or Jews in Mein Kampf, or in any of his writings."
You have to be incredibly blind, incredibly obtuse or incredibly hypocritical to not see the writing on the wall in Mein Kampf. But before 1933, I don't think any one could have CONCEIVED of such ideas actually being carried out in practice.