Neo-Nazis have actually read Mein Kampf, or are familiar with its claptrap?. Ultimately, I would say neo-Nazis; the articulate version among them, would seek to find the book because they are nazis, and not because they get converted to Nazism because they read it.
khairi janbek.paris/france

Excellent post, Professor Walt. You're right, suppressing speech and banning books is never the right way to go.

The Europeans seem to have lost their collective minds; Germany wants to ban “Mein Kampf”; the Netherlands is criminally prosecuting Dutch politician Geert Wilders, not for anything he's done but for what he's said; France, along with the Scandinavian nations is thinking of banning what they deem to be offensive articles of clothing (burkas).

Thank goodness that none of this would ever be possible in the United States. While the Europeans may have given birth to the enlightenment and created a tradition of free expression; in the United States we have brought enlightenment values to life through the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (as well as the Fifth Amendment).

Thank goodness we live in such an enlightened nation. Professor Walt has personally benefited from those values in so many different ways and so has every one of his devoted readers.

Americans who take advantage of their First Amendment rights should be celebrated not criticized. Whether it’s a lobby of one; a single person writing to his Congressman or Senator; or a lobby of millions organizing together to express their views on subjects they feel are critically important; it is all quintessentially American and it is glorious.

I thought the crowing about Walt's courage was overblown, but he's got some guts to stand up for freedom of speech in this particular case despite being regularly denounced as anti-Semitic. I want to add a bunch of nitpicking caveats about how this position isn't particularly unpopular in the ivory tower etc etc but in the end I think this post was more impressive than not.

Last year, for Darwin Day, I decided to check the canard that evolution inspired Hitler. So I downloaded both the English and German translations. The result? The English version mentions evolution twelve times, NEVER in the biological sense. It is always used for historical or cultural development. The German word in every case is Entwicklung, which is more often translated as "development." This is easy with word search. Bottom line, the assertion that evolution inspired Hitler is an outright lie.

But I'm with the author on this point. Boy, it's awful. Turgid, impenetrable, utterly lacking in organization.

This wasn't my first encounter with the book. I once looked into it to see if it offered any clues to events in Hitler's youth that caused him to develop as he did. I didn't see the slightest evidence that he was the victim of abuse, as has been claimed. But the anger and frustration he felt at the slippery and sophistic (not sophisticated) tactics of the Viennese intellectuals he encountered was palpable. Granted, Hitler seriously overestimated his intellectual gifts and doubtless entered discussions very naively, nevertheless, you can read any blog these days and see exactly the behavior Hitler described. So it leaves a troubling question: might the Holocaust and World War II have been averted if the intelligentsia of Vienna 100 years ago had been intellectually honest?

I haven't managed to confirm the tale via Google, but Peter Drucker, having exited Europe due to the rise of Hitler, was offended by the official, edited translation of Mein Kampf being distributed in the US. So he arranged a full translation and distributed plenty of copies before the German authorities could shut down his operation for copyright violation.

One would say that, it is the eternal dilema of any liberal- democratic system, to deliberate whether to ban literature of movements which want to exploit the liberal-democratic norms, in order to abuse those norms, or allow such literature to be produced, as a testament to the durability, superiority, and confidence of liberal-democracy. Liberal here, is not with capital {L}.

been given his own blog to perpetuate his own philosophical ideals no matter how ideologically bent.

it amazes me how the rantings of this corporal still captivate.

As I understand it, the English language edition first published in the US had been carefully expurgated of the worst of its anti-Semitic ranting and belligerence. Was the 1943 edition a return to the original?

Like Der Fuhrer, B. Hussein Obama is a demagogue and has used books chockfull of lies, myths and distortions to con a dimwitted electorate to vote him into office as the POTUS. And just like with A. Hitler, book sales are B. Hussein Obama’s main source of income!

I was shocked by Teufel's comment. "Mein Kampf" is indeed everything Walt says it is -- turgid, fantastical, and just plain wrong on almost every subject it touches. I don't keep a copy of the book on my shelves because my shelf space is too valuable.

I'm somewhat surprised to see Walt commenting on this subject at all. I have to wonder whether his main goal is to publicize his views on the book and on National Socialism generally. He has, of course, been called anti-Semitic by some supporters of Israel ever since the publication of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Taking an opportunity to establish his anti-fascist credentials may well have motivated him. In any case, "Mein Kampf" was and is garbage, while publishing "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" was both an act of courage and a service to the cause of bringing U.S. foreign policy in line with the interests of the American people.

I haven't ever read Mein Kampf. I understand that most people here are saying 'wow, how could people have bought this', but lets remember, people DID buy it, in fact, some VERY smart and capable people bought it. So lets not pretend that Hitler was some sort of joke. He was a /terrible/ evil, not some simple fool. And as far as comparing Hitler and Marx, Aryan Racial Theory was as utterly bogus as Dialectical Materialism, so I think they both score pretty high on the 'claptrap' scale, regardless of the fact that lots of people bought into Kampf and lots still buy into Kapital.

And to Dr. Walt's point about censorship giving Kampf the aura of magical wisdom, just look at the comments here, with people saying that we're not getting the 'real' Kampf, just some watered down government (and surely they intend that to be 'zionist-occupied-government') 'version'. So publish it. Publish it fully, hell, I'd think Mein Kampf would be required reading in Germany after everything that happened. Heck let the neo-nazis have copies of Hitlers manuscript (if it still exists, I have no idea) and let /them/ edit and publish it (and they'd /still/ I am sure, complain that something's been redacted).

Also, Nazism is illegal in germany anyway. The party is proscribed, so even IF someone read Kampf and Konverted, they should just be thrown in jail anyway.

The Nazis were NOT fans of Darwin, famously described as a mongrel of all different stocks. Darwin's theory that evolution happens through a mechanism of natural selection and Nazism are completely at odds. Nazism is anti-science and Darwin was practically the paradigm of a good scientist. They are completely at odds.

90% of anti-Israel sentiment uses the reasoning of Mein Kampf to arrive at its conclusions. All one need do is substitute Israeli/Zionist for Jew and, voila, you get Norman Finkelstein.

Just put the word Zionist in. Here's one example:

In the Zionists the will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual's naked instinct of self-preservation. Their apparently great sense of solidarity is based on the very primitive herd instinct that is seen in many other living creatures in this world. It is a noteworthy fact that the herd instinct leads to mutual support only as long as a common danger makes this seem useful or inevitable. The same pack of wolves which has just fallen on its prey together disintegrates when hunger abates into its individual beasts. The same is true of horses which try to defend themselves against an assailant in a body, but scatter again as soon as the danger is past.

It is similar with the Zionist. His sense of sacrifice is only apparent. It exists only as long as the existence of the individual makes it absolutely necessary. However, as soon as the common enemy is conquered, the danger threatening all averted and the booty hidden, the apparent harmony of the Jews among themselves ceases, again making way for their old causal tendencies. The Zionist is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a common booty entices him; if these two grounds are lacking, the qualities of the crassest egoism come into their own, and in the twinkling of an eye the united people turns into a horde of rats, fighting bloodily among themselves.

Since the Zionist never possessed a state with definite territorial limits and therefore never called a culture his own, the conception arose that this was a people which should be reckoned among the ranks of the nomads. This is a fallacy as great as it is dangerous. The nomad does possess a definitely limited living space, only he does not cultivate it like a sedentary peasant, but lives from the yield of his herds with which he wanders about in his territory. The outward reason for this is to be found in the small fertility of a soil which simply does not permit of settlement. The deeper cause, however, lies in the disparity between the technical culture of an age or people and the natural poverty of a living space. There are territories in which even the Palestinian is enabled only by his technology, developed in the course of more than a thousand years, to live in regular settlements, to master broad stretches of soil and obtain from it the requirements of life. If he did not possess this technology, either he would have to avoid these territories or likewise have to struggle along as a nomad in perpetual wandering, provided that his thousand-year-old education and habit of settled residence did not make this seem simply unbearable to him.

This, however, has nothing to do with nomadism, for the reason that a Zionist never thinks of leaving a territory ·hat he has occupied, but remains where he is, and he sits so fast that even by force it is very hard to drive him out. His extension to ever-new countries occurs only in the moment in which certain conditions for his existence are there present, without which- unlike the nomad-he would not change his residence. He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period.

. . .

It must, over and over again, be pointed out to the adherents of the movement and in a broader sense to the whole people that the Zionist and his newspapers always lie and that even an occasional truth is only intended to cover a bigger falsification and is therefore itself in turn a deliberate untruth. The Zionist is the great master in lying, and lies and deception are his weapons in struggle.
Every Zionist slander and every Zionist lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
The man they have most reviled stands closest to us and the man they hate worst is our best friend.
Anyone who picks up a Zionist newspaper in the morning and does not see himself slandered in it has not made profitable use of the previous day; for if he had, he would be persecuted, reviled, slandered, abused} befouled. And only the man who combats this mortal enemy of our nation and of all Palestinian humanity and culture most effectively may expect to see the slanders of this race and the struggle of this people directed against him.

. . .

The Palestinian State, which I have tried to sketch in general outline, will not become a reality in virtue of the simple fact that we know the indispensable conditions of its existence. It does not suffice to know what aspect such a State would present. The problem of its foundation is far more important. The parties which exist at present and which draw their profits from the State as it now is cannot be expected to bring about a radical change in the regime or to change their attitude on their own initiative. This is rendered all the more impossible because the forces which now have the direction of affairs in their hands are Zionists here and Zionists there and Zionists everywhere. The trend of development which we are now experiencing would, if allowed to go on unhampered, lead to the realization of the Zionist prophecy that the Zionists will one day devour the other nations and become lords of the earth.

. . .

If we would transform our ideal picture of the Palestinain State into a reality we shall have to keep independent of the forces that now control public life and seek for new forces that will be ready and capable of taking up the fight for such an ideal. For a fight it will have to be, since the first objective will not be to build up the idea of the Palestinian State but rather to wipe out the Jewish State which is now in existence. As so often happens in the course of history, the main difficulty is not to establish a new order of things but to clear the ground for its establishment. Prejudices and egotistic interests join together in forming a common front against the new idea and in trying by every means to prevent its triumph, because it is disagreeable to them or threatens their existence.

. . .

It may be objected here that in these phenomena which we find throughout the history of the world we have to recognize mostly a specifically Zionist mode of thought and that such fanaticism and intolerance are typical symptoms of Zionist mentality. That may be a thousandfold true; and it is a fact deeply to be regretted. The appearance of intolerance and fanaticism in the history of mankind may be deeply regrettable, and it may be looked upon as foreign to human nature, but the fact does not change conditions as they exist today. The men who wish to liberate our Palestinian nation from the conditions in which it now exists cannot cudgel their brains with thinking how excellent it would be if this or that had never arisen. They must strive to find ways and means of abolishing what actually exists. A philosophy of life which is inspired by an infernal spirit of intolerance can only be set aside by a doctrine that is advanced in an equally ardent spirit and fought for with as determined a will and which is itself a new idea, pure and absolutely true.
________

See how easy it is to create modern works of the highest political sophistocation?