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Notes -
Unironically? Mein Kampf. Specifically the new critical edition. Which is interesting, but not what I expected. It was recommended to me a few months back by a friend of mine (who’s actually black and is obsessed with Hitler… Uh, thank you Tristan…) I read Mein Kampf once several years ago when I was diving into World War 2 stuff. Got my fill of everything and then became fatigued by it. I rarely read anything WW2 related anymore because it’s a topic that’s been done to death by so many authors, and it ends up being mostly all the same.
Anyway this critical edition isn’t critical in the sense you might think, which takes pains to situate and explain the content within its broader context and where he got his views from and why they’re mistaken or incorrect. Instead it narrates the autobiography like some jackass playing logical fallacy football, “… and here is where he is about to demonize the Jews…,” etc. Not ‘that’ bad but that is the emotional vibe I feel with it so far.
This translation feels different from what I remember, reading the original English translation years ago, and not in a bad way. It feels more directly comprehensible. Not a lot of people know there was a lot of ideological depth and intellection committed to the kinds of beliefs Hitler espoused at that time. People sometimes get surprised when they find out Hitler didn’t just oppose communism but also opposed capitalism. So what gives?
At the time these ideas were floating around, many of the progenitors of these racial ideas weren’t so much against singling out particular competing notions that ran contrary to their views. They were against all kinds of systems they saw as “exploitative.” To them (and this includes Hitler as well), certain races had no inner creative capacities and didn’t have the physiological or psychological constitution to create and bear civilizations, rather they lived off the destruction and consumption of existing civilizations. “Jews,” were only one particular race they saw as guilty of this behavior. “Nomadic,” peoples in general they associated exploitative behavior with. Capitalism (or rather “interest” on loan taking) was exploitative as international pressures forced Germany more onto the export market to give away its economy to privateers and speculators and attempts to pry apart Germany’s resources from its native population.
On the racial point more generally. There’s a… basic sense in which he was technically correct, in the sense that an individual and population’s genetic constituents and propensities drive the outgrowth of its national accomplishments and behavior, but it’s not as crude as he makes it out to be. In this regard, Hitler’s a great and terrible oversimplifier of history. That’s what makes his ideas so dangerous because like all propaganda and ideology no matter how vulgar, there’s always some element of truth to it. But human beings are more culturally driven than biologically driven in a base-nature sense. Although we’re herd animals, we’re not as closely rooted to our instincts as a pack of coyotes are. If a population sits higher at the tail end of the latter half of the bell curve, the genetic propensities that drive those behaviors cause people to structure and engineer their environments in conditions and ways favorable to how they are as a population; and so there is this positive self-reinforcing feedback loop that happens as a result.
Interestingly, Nazi views in their own literature never categorically denied the possibility of the value of other races. Their view was that the Nordic race was the preeminent representation of high cultural, technological, economic and social achievement on the European continent that was diluting itself and becoming degraded. They spoke about what they called “selective” and “counter-selective” forces acting on the race, and how it was necessary in their view to reverse these trends that were acting on Germany. This view had popular support in the country at the time incidentally. Physicians joined the program of the Nazi party in greater proportion to any other profession in Germany at that time. Unsurprising if you think it’s your job to steward the future health of the nation as a whole. Different genetic “selection models,” could be required and even said intellectuals of race weren’t all committed to the idea that Germans or Nordics were a “pure,” race but rather an admixture or amalgam. If you take a genetically rooted personality trait like conscientiousness for instance, one correlation you’ll find is that individually this trait is highly associated with long-term life success and income. However the flipside of this isn’t true. Data’s actually shown that the more conscientious a ‘nation’ is as a whole, the poorer it tends to be… One explanation of this is that conscientiousness isn’t generally associated with creativity (and consequently, innovation). This necessitates another selection model with aims to multiply people with the features of creative individuals. Many leading figures at this time realized all of this.
Germany at that time, along with the Nazi’s, wanted an entirely new and wholly different international order. They didn’t want to merely be top dog in the existing paradigm. As a microcosm, if you look at the Miracle of Worgl in Austria and the experiments with Silvio Gesell's idea of free money (or money that decays over time, so as to encourage spending), it achieved remarkable success, leaving the place with a clean slate of 0% unemployment amid the pangs of the Great Depression, among other things; the Nazis took a great liking to. They were also massive pioneers in self-sufficiency and environmentalism. You can keep going down the list, but one thing that’s clear if you dive into the history is that these guys were not hashtag intellectuals. They had a very solid and scholarly worked out foundation for that time that they were fanatically committed to.
The author answered some questions to journalists here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/italy-publishes-first-critical-edition-of-mein-kampf/
This reminds me of Stephen Kotkin's answer to someone's question about what they will find if the archives of the Chinese Communist Party ever becomes open to historians, he said (I paraphrased): "The same thing we found when the Russian archives were opened, they all thought they were Communists".
Huh. Thanks for the article.
I’ve read Kotkin’s volumes on Stalin and enjoy his writing style. I saw his interviews at the Hoover Institution at Stanford years ago (the YouTube videos), and I remember him making the same statements you are. Stalin definitely did believe in his program of “Socialism in One Country.” I found the discussion over the question of Trotsky between Hitchens and Service about the impact he would’ve had on the Revolution had things fallen his way to be interesting. I’ve read a decent amount on Trotsky. Not many people knew he was as good of an orator to the Russians as Hitler was to the Germans.
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