Notes on Ball & Dagger reader
Adolph Hitler (1924)
"Nation and Race" — Selections from Mein Kampf

Adolph Hitler (1889-1945)

Family history:  Three older siblings died in infancy before A. H.'s birth.   Younger brother died when A. H. was 11.

[Source:  xx]

Hitler's thesis

Hitler's thesis is pretty easily stated as a series of simple propositions:

• Domination is the way of Nature and thus the way of God.  [Natural law theory.  Note that this is not how Rocco justified Fascism.]
• The unit of historical action ("the subject of history", to use what I believe is originally a Marxist term) is the race.  (Not the nation;  not the individual;  not the State.)
• Superior races have the right to dominate, use, and if necessary exterminate inferior races.
• Race mixing weakens dominant races.
• The Aryan race was the origin of everything worthwhile in human history.  "Culture-creating".
• The Jews are bad, bad, bad.
• So is Social Democracy (by which he meant socialists, Marxists, and what we would term modern reform liberals) bad, bad, bad.

The themes I want to emphasize:

• Historical background of Germany:
  • Germany not unified as a State until around 1870, so Germany was an idea rooted in language, culture, and birth, not in citizenship within a nation-state.  This remains true today, though immigrants are receiving some rights.
  • Germany humiliated after WWI.  Hyperinflation.
  • Germany surrendered without having been invaded — in fact, with German troops still on French soil.
  • The myth of the liberal Dolchstoss [stab in the back].  Paranoia;  conspiracies.  Protocols of the Elders of Zion;  proven true, according to Hitler [329B], by the fact that the Frankfurter Zeitung [Frankfurt Times] says that it's a forgery.  [!]  [See 327 for the same logic.  Also 326A/4.  Once you start down the road, it's hard to turn back.]
• Historical background of the Jews.
  • Jews forbidden to own land.
  • Christians forbidden by their religion to lend money at interest ("usury"), while Jews were not.
  • Jews as middlemen and managers.  "Parasites".
  • Pogroms.
  • However, acculturated in Germany, land of Goethe, Beethoven etc.
• Ethnocentrism.  The original draft of the Sermon on the Mount — in French.
• Hitler's anti-Semitic ravings [There doesn't seem to be any other way to put it].  Anti-Semitism and the "shadow self".
• "Argument by results" and the circularity of "survival of the fittest" arguments [323]
• The Jews' double bind in Hitler's theory:  if they survive, then they are wily survivors and all the more to be distrusted and feared;  and of course if they don't survive, then we don't have to worry about them anyway.  The double bind of assimilation:  if Jews assimilate, then they are stealing from a superior culture;  if they don't assimilate, then they are suspect aliens.  [Thomas Szasz's theory of schizophrenia as arising from the double bind.]

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

• Compare & contrast Hitler's justification for Nazism with Rocco's justification for Fascism.

OTHER, MISCELLANEOUS LECTURE NOTES

Quiz question:  What is Hitler trying to prove in his essay, overall?

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