Orwell's review of Mein Kampf

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Nation sates? Definitely. Ethnic identities? Probably not so much.

Jews have been a go-to scapegoat for quite a while. They made an easy target, and the Nazis concentrated (poor word choice here) almost exclusively on the easy targets. The truly nightmarish thing about the Holocaust is that it was the first time Jews were systematically murdered on such a large scale. It was a merger of the industrial and the the traditional. Applying modern methods to old prejudices yielded the most horrific tragedy of the twentieth century . Of course, it helped that nobody really tried to do anything about it.

To put it another way, I don’t really see the Holocaust as directly “progressive” or retrograde, so much as an unfortunate series of events that showed the dark side of human nature. Ideally, human society should be structured so that these things do not happen or, at least, do not happen to that extent. It’s basically why democratic rule is better than the other kind.

There’s a variety of reasons, I would imagine. Some converted. A decent number of people probably had strong religious reasons for not doing so. Largely, I would imagine that it was very difficult to change one’s identity. If you live in a Jewish community, with limited means of transportation, it’s kind of hard to stop being a Jew.

Right, I wasn’t trying to equivocate. I was referring to attitudes expressed by protesters in various European countries.

It’s the human condition. Being part of an oppressed minority group doesn’t make people more empathetic when they actually acquire power. I am, ethnically, a Ukrainian Jew, but listening to Israelis, even immigrants from former Soviet republics, talk about Gaza is generally depressing and alienating.

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Some of Israel’s biggest nut cases were raised in New York City. They actually had a terrorist network and training camps in New York state back in the 1970s.

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I guess I expected Jews who had suffered from Soviet antisemitism to know better. I’m not really sure why.

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Well a lot of German Jews had converted. They were the most cosmopolitan Jewish population, and they were patriotic Germans. Germany was making progressive reforms There were secular schools, intellectual debate, Protestantism and Catholicism, and they were well on their way to getting rid of the monarchy.

On a side note, keep in mind that Hitler was a monarchist who loved the idea of all-powerful kings of Germany and all the Wagnerian romanticism of monarchy. The Weimar Republic had united Germany after WW1 and the uprisings of 1918, and resisted a series of coup attempts, including Hitler’s own Beerhall Putsch. The main reason the Nazis hated the Weimar Republic so much was that it was a constitutional parliamentary government with actual elections. And the Nazis never even came close to winning elections, despite modern conservative mythology. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said that elections would never select a real leader. He said that an elected government would always be corrupt, and he was the agent of purification. Compare this to modern GOP themes of the Obama administration being “the most corrupt administration in history” despite the lack of people actually being indicted and sent to prison or getting pardoned ( like Reagan or Bush).

Thousands of German Jews served heroically in WW1, but Hitler used them as the scapegoat for Germany’s losses. The “stabbed in the back” story continues to be a popular conservative story through Vietnam and Iraq.

Anyway, many Jews had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism (and having both religions probably made them much more eager to accept converts). The Nuremberg Laws made this illegal and stripped the converts of their German citizenship. This was only possible because Hitler had gained power riding a wave of rural Christian anti-Semitism. As Wilhelm Reich said, the rural population was very religious, conservative, patriarchal, and sexually repressed in a way that led them to demand civil rights be curtailed in order to save the Fatherland from the sexual anarchy of Jew/Gentile marriage or sex. Reich described Nazism as a combination of rural religious hysteria and sexual hysteria, and there seems to be a lot of truth in that.

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New bbs badge idea…subject matter expert.

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Well, the academic question around that is whether or not it was the same… some see a singular thread of pre-20th century anti-semitism, others don’t. Nirenberg’s study of jews and Muslims in Europe is an example of the former. My point was that before the rise of nation-states and eugenics, people could and did convert out of Judaism. But they weren’t just targeted because they were Jews and that was seen as an ethnicity, but because they were religious outsiders, and even at times because of their times to whatever ruling regime (This was Niremberg’s argument).

And the whole notion that “no one did anything about it” is not entirely true. There were uprisings (Warsaw Ghetto), the Zionists were very active in getting people out during the whole of the final solution, Sweden and Denmark actively protected their Jews (and Denmark sent them to Sweden, when the Nazis tried to put their foot down, Italy even took in Jews and protected them, there are lots of individual cases where states, even nazi allies participated, to one degree or another, in saving jewish lives. Now, did they do enough, no. But given the history of jews in Europe, no one really expected what happened, and I think many were caught off-guard by the extent of the final solution. Read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or the work of Primo levi, especially the Drowned and the Saved (and there is a biography about him too that is interesting) for some of these details. Browning’s ordinary men is great, but is a bit tough to get through, as it was all about the Einsatzgruppen that were basically going behind the army and massacreing Jews (in fact most Jews died in this manner, not in the camps, I think).

I don’t know about that… I think the Catholic Church always welcomed converts for example. One reason for the inability to convert might be the role the Jews play within a given community. If they are important for economic reasons, there might be pressure NOT to convert and to not allow Christians to convert them. This was the case in the ottoman empire, where the empire would actually side with those who were forced to convert against their will against Muslims, because the empire didn’t like the instability it caused and would miss out on a large tax base.

You know - and I understand what you mean and empathize with it - but the older I get, the more I think that is a lame excuse for treating people horribly. These are choices people are making, the Israeli government is making. It seems like the only reason we can’t stop this sort of violence is because too many of us can’t imagine another way. We have to start doing that, or things will stay the same or get worse. Not just in the case of Israel and the occupied territories, but everywhere.

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I agree on that and am aware. my point was to make a distinction to the modern period, where identity was increasingly race based and the previous period, where people had other ways of identifying. I guess I’m arguing for the deciding factor here being race theories and ultra-nationalism based on race.

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A friend of mine is a Russian jew (married to a Palestinian, actually!). She has gone to Israel to visit her cousins there, and she told me that she found them to be the most jingoistic and the most nationalistic… she also said that they won’t learn the state languages and are constantly harrassing their Arab neighbors. She was disgusted. From what I understand Lieberman (is that his name, the foreign affairs minister) and his party are made up of ultra-right wing Russian immigrants (not entirely).

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Admittedly, it’s not really my subject, but it’s all been a bit shit since Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, hasn’t it?

Netenyahu scares the crap out of me.

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In a lot of places, the Germans just needed to give permission for the local Christians to massacre their Jewish neighbors. In Germany, most people would have been horrified by the reality of the Holocaust (although nearly everyone was clear it was happening in an abstract sort of way). But it was in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe that the local population made a holiday of personally killing their neighbors.

I was confronted by the following scene: in the left corner of the yard there was a group of men aged between thirty and fifty. There must have been forty to fifty of them. They were herded together and kept under guard by some civilians. The civilians were armed with rifles and wore armbands, as can be seen in the pictures I took. A young man – he must have been a Lithuanian – with rolled-up sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar.

He dragged out one man at a time from the group and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head. Within three quarters of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people in this way. I took a series of photographs of the victims.

After the entire group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem. I recognised the tune and was informed by bystanders that this was the national anthem.

Also the Germans needed an additional 20 years of sophisticated anti-Semitic indoctrination before the Holocaust. There was literally a generation of prep work, which included childrens books like “The Poisonous Mushroom”

Here, kids, I have some candy for you. But you both have to come with me.
Else begins to have plenty of sweets.
Hans asks from where they are coming.
I have got them from a strange man. But don’t tell mother! The man strictly forbade me to do so!
Hans is curious. They arrange to go together. The man wants them to go with him.
Hans hesitates – Hans thought:
What does the man want of us? Why should we go with him?
Suddenly a great fear comes over him.
You are a Jew! he cries, and, seizing his sister, runs off as fast as his legs will carry him. At the corner of the street he meets a policeman. Quickly Hans tells his story. The policeman gets on his motorbike and soon overtakes the strange man. He handcuffs him and takes him to prison.

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I just wanted to say that there are plenty of people like this in America right now, and that the movie “The Purge” seems to recognize this.

If you spend much time on conservative blogs reading the comments, you will see many reference to “when the day comes” and “when it happens” and such. They anticipate some event which will give them the excuse to pour into the streets with all those AR-15s they’ve been stockpiling for a bloody apocalyptic national showdown that will leave America knee-deep in gore from coast to coast. I’m not sure there is a single narrative about what “it” will be, but some sort of national race war has always been a popular choice, a theory that was even advanced by the Koch brothers father. And certainly the election and reelection of Obama has traumatized them more than any event in their lives.

I think part of the idea of “it” is the idea of “Do it to them before they do it to you!” And that’s what Hitler told the Germans that they were defending themselves against the genocidal Jews who would enslave them. He gave them the excuse that they were acting preemptively. Think about that the next time you hear a full-time nazi apologist like Glenn Beck telling his audience that Christians will be dragged from their homes and executed on their front lawns, and think about they have been told this year after year after year, and their friends all agree that this is coming. And they have embraced the idea of a Christian “Just War” against this phantom army that is coming to kill them. But they support Israel, so they aren’t Nazis. Anders Breivik shot and killed about 80 children in Norway in 2011 because their parents were liberals, but he supports Israel unconditionally (as he stated about 50 times in his manifesto). and only wants to kill all the liberal Jews.

Anyway, when people grow up saturated in these stories about how they are going to be dragged from their beds and executed on their lawn for being a Christian, it’s easy for them to rationalize and fantasize and discuss how they’d be justified in doing it to their neighbors because that’s just “doing it to them before they do it to us.”. They even all know the script for doing “it” because they have all been rehearsing it in their head for decades.

And when you see cops in places like Ferguson who somehow manage to convince themselves they are the real victims, think how easily these people could morph into death squads. All they need is permission.

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(National Socialism) is basically distinguished from the Marxist philosophy by the fact that it not only recognizes the value of race…
Mein Kampf, p448

Actually there’s a whole lot of differences, but the Nazis thought race determined a person’s destiny and Identity, while Marxism was not racist. And Nazis were religious while the Marxists tended towards atheism. Marxists were pseudo-scientific philosophical Materialists while Nazism was explicitly a “spiritual” movement which rejected Marxist class struggle.

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One could encapsulate this difference within German and South Eur. fascisms as the relative naivete of German Nazis compared to Italian fascists. In Italy, the fascists tended to lead along with the oligarchy. Mussolini’s propaganda played up the staged violence of their anti-republican revolution, but German Nazis tended to value the sincerity of their violence. The Nazis kept space between themselves and the oligarchy to allow for the totalitarian repression of everyone who didn’t present their fingernails for inspection. The German National People’s Party was more on the S. Eur. model, but without an effective popular demagogue they were left behind by the Nazis… but not before helping the Nazis gain power in 1933.

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I think there’s generally been a problem with classes and populations transitioning from peasant/serf classes to theoretical equality—see my reply elsewhere of tendencies needing a couple generations to do their work—which tends to mean a transition from a strong in-group culture needed to survive as a slave/underclass to a more individualistic, generalized culture. The American heartland, central and eastern European heartland, Chinese heartland, all these areas have produced huge numbers of clan-minded people who are unable to stand as individuals, but who still classify in an ingroup-outgroup way even though it’s a terrible way to live in the modern context. So you end up with Jews who ended the 20th century with some strong elements of both. Jews have historical international contacts, a global culture, a long-remembered history. They also had a few hundred years of being chased by pogroms in imperial Russia, then just as it seemed like culture was opening up, the ability of the pogrom to find them became mass-media driven and effectively worldwide.

I still think the focus on “solutions” is problematic. Short term legal remedies to clan-motivated abuses are necessary along with a unidirectional movement to reward tendencies that aren’t acutely harmful and stop rewarding other tendencies which are.

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I would say that the were ethnic, cultural, and religious outsiders, without a strong external power to back them up. I would draw a parallel with the Roma people, whom the Nazis also pursued. I didn’t mean to imply that Jews were persecuted exclusively for ethnic reasons. Rather, I wanted to note that mobility (both physical and social) was severely limited, so becoming “not a Jew” would have been difficult to accomplish.

I agree that religious identity was a more dominant characteristic than national identity, but I’d argue that made it more difficult to change. Defining yourself as “Christian” (rather than, say, “French”) means that conversion amounts to changing who you are, rather than just what you believe.

I’d also say that the advent of eugenics was just terribly bad luck. There was that period when physical sciences and social sciences were not as closely scrutinized on ethical grounds. It made science the mouthpiece for the prejudice that already existed.

It’s an exaggeration, but not a significant one. The major powers involved (e.g. the US), the ones that could have made a difference, didn’t do nearly enough. I think a lot of countries on the Allied side like to remember WWII as a “just war” fought for noble reasons, but that really wasn’t the case.

I wouldn’t call it so much an excuse as an explanation. History is cyclical in that mass behavior is a repeating pattern. Human beings are generally horrible in the same ways and for the same reasons. It is on each person’s individual conscience to step up and try to do better.

Yep. It’s a constant struggle to remind myself that repressed minorities and dissidents don’t magically become good people, just because current regime is shitting on them. Look at some of the stuff Solzhenitsyn actually believed. Or, for a more current example, consider Eduard Limonov.

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Nazi apologists like to lean on Mussolini as the only true “Fascist” when Mussolini actually seemed to lack a consistent philosophy and was more the opportunistic jack-booted thug. Also it’s easier to make up phony Mussolini “quotes.”

I guess if they can make the case that the Nazis weren’t Fascists, it’s easier for them to redefine Fascism as whatever is convenient for their purposes. The “Liberal Fascism” campaign was perking along until Obama was elected, and then it shifted gears into everyone-is-racist-against-whites, which (unfortunately for them) is the Klan’s traditional message.

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I know… Marxism (at least Marx’s views) was very international, while Nazis were specifically nationalistic. Also, I think an argument can be made that Nazis were pretty Anti-Christian, as everything was about the race/nation, which were one and the same. And of course, there is marxist theory vs. practice to account for. Marx was attempting to scientificially quantify historical processes. Stalin was keeping himself in power.

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In the book “The Thought They Were Free” the author interviewed various middle class people who had joined the Nazi Party, and their experience of the growth of the Nazis. Some had been enthusiastic Nazis and others were just looking out for their personal safety. Everyone expressed some regrets about the Jews, including a cop, but he was still proud of killing Gypsies!

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The Nazis were put in power in 1933 by building a Christian coalition in Parliament, and this followed a decade of intense pandering to Christians. The promised a restoration of the power they lost under the secualr Weimar Republic

At the beginning of National Socialism…there was no effort to draw people away from the Church. Just the opposite. The Weimar Republic had separated Church and State, just as it is in America …and the pastors, most of them, supported the Nazis in the hope of reuniting the (Church and State).

  • Miton Mayer (1955) “The Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45”

And Hiter was saying things like this:

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith …we need believing people.
- Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933

Relationships with Christian churches were chilly by 1938 as everything came under the scrutiny of the Gestapo, but Christian churches were never sacked or burned. Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed…

Anyway, this is from Hitler’s remarks before Parliament voted to give him dictatorial powers with the Enabling Acts:

The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society…The national Government will allow and confirm to the Christian denominations the enjoyment of their due influence in schools and education…And it will be concerned for the sincere cooperation between Church and State.

The advantages for the individual which may be derived from compromises with atheistic organizations do not compare in any way with the consequences which are visible in the destruction of our common religious and ethical values…

The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society....

. ......The national Government will allow and confirm to the Christian denominations the enjoyment of their due influence in schools and education........And it will be concerned for the sincere cooperation between Church and State.

The struggle against the materialistic ideology (reference to Marxist dialectics) and for the erection of a true people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) serves as much the interests of the German nation as of our Christian faith. ...

The national Government, seeing in Christianity the unshakable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people, attaches utmost importance to the cultivation and maintenance of the friendliest relations with the Holy See. ...The rights of the churches will not be curtailed; their position in relation to the State will not be changed.

-Hitler, March 23, 1933

This led to the immediate persecution of Jews and trade unions…

In the first year of the Third Reich,1933, (Jews) had been excluded from the public office, the civil service, journalism, radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films…
-Willaim Shirer, The Rise and Fall Of The Third Reich

And I see 1936 as the year relations with the church started getting tense: after passage of Th Nuremberg Laws

On the surface, the Church-State fight began with the “Jewish Question,” but it it important to remember that the fight did not begin for two or three years…the Church did not take a stand against anti-Semitism (which had been legally in effect for a couple years) …Once the fight (about the definition of a “Christian”) began, the Church leaders blamed the party for luring people away. Finally that was actually the case, but that was after the trouble began(M. Mayer p. 220)…After the Church-Party split began to develop, in 1936, the Party service became more ritualistic, more specifically a substitute for the Church.

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I think ethnicity is a modern construction, but I agree that people probably had a hard time converting. But they did.

Understatement of the year, there!

Agreed.

As an historian, I can’t disagree more strongly with this statement and it’s one of the things that I try and get my students out of the mind set of. Specificity of a time frame matters in understanding historical events. While there are certainly historical continuities that we should pay attention to, I’d argue that history is best described as our understanding of the past based on sources that we can read [edited to add: I don’t just mean text, one can “read” objects from material culture as well, and learn something from them] that illustrates change over time. On some level, the past is a foreign country and there is so much we don’t have access to, in regards to the past. The fact that most of our sources, especially from the pre-modern era and even much from the early modern/into the period of high modernity, come from elites should give us pause when trying to reconstruct the lives of those in the past. Things really were different and I feel we should tread lightly when trying to understand the past, especially as it gets more distant. Hell, we [meaning people in general, not just you and me] can’t even agree on things that happened this summer - Ferguson, the shooting down of the plane in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, ISIS, etc - how the hell can we know the truth from 60, 150, 500 years ago with anything approaching accuracy?