Hitler’s earth-shattering bigotry his rationale for the Holocaust and the death of millions of others was laid out in 1923 in his book, Mein Kampf. It was banned in Germany after WW II, but its copyright has now expired and it has been reprinted in an annotated edition.
Should we read it?
Should we make it mandatory reading in schools?
Should we try to ban it again?
I firmly believe it is critical to read it. It should not be banned. Quite the contrary. It should be duly examined as widely as possible.
My stance may be the opposite of the emotional reaction against the rantings of this most heinous person in human history. However, precisely that emotional reaction was responsible, in part, for Hitlers rise to power.
Ignoring him helped him.
Ignoring this book will help the current and future world class haters. That they are repulsive is precisely the reason to pay them more attention, not less.
This isn’t just an assertion. Its based on evidence. Consider: In 1982 a book was published, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History, 1930-1939.
The findings in this book are chilling and damning. Among them:
Item: There was no unabridged English translation of Hitlers Mein Kampf in either Britain or America until 1939, the eve of WW II, six years after Hitler had come to power.
Item: The abridged translation omitted much of Hitlers ranting against the Jews and even more of his plans for world domination.
In 1933, the Times of London published a few excerpts from the translation — an abridgement of the abridgement to which the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann responded:
A number of fairly plausible passages have been arranged to give the impression to the English reader of The Times — who will not touch the book — that Hitler is perhaps rather radical, but on the whole by no means an unreasonable political thinker and agitator.
Weizmann sent 28 pages of translated extracts from the original edition of Mein Kampf to The Times, none of which were used (though the British Foreign Office read them well).
Item: American Jewish organizations successfully fought the wide distribution of the American translation of Mein Kampf rather than encouraged it. The result was deeper ignorance of Hitlers intentions.
Item: All the way to 1939, Hitler regularly received royalties from his British and American publishers on the sales of his book. The American publisher, Houghton and Mifflin, was terribly upset in the aftermath of a protest by the German government in 1937 that on the book jacket of Houghton-Mifflins popular edition it had included one negative blurb on Hitler without a balancing positive blurb.
Item: The inappropriate lengths to which the law can go are amply demonstrated by the suit which embroiled two American publishers in 1939. Both wished to bring out an unabridged edition of Mein Kampf, the one publisher claiming that the others claimed copyright to the translation rights was invalid since Hitler was a stateless citizen when he assigned the copyright and thus merited no protection under American copyright law.
In summary, as late as 1939, much of the publishing industry, the courts, the reading public, and the Western diplomatic corps still took Hitler to be a leader to whom the normal processes of law applied.
No doubt, had someone assassinated Hitler in 1939, many in America and Britain would have advocated that the assassin be brought to trial and punished.
Hindsight makes one shudder at so much that this publishing history of Mein Kampf reveals. We must learn not only from history, but from the history of history — from the way a leader who acted on the basis of sheer hatred was alternatively ignored, revised, papered over, disbelieved, worked with, respected.
Ditto. Iran’s leaders today.
Ditto. Leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Ditto. Bashar Assad of Syria.
Ditto. ISIS.
One thinks of the scurrilous attempts today to whitewash, downplay, debate, negotiate with or praise these enemies of humanity and of Israel.
I only wish that today, not 50 years from now, we would have a definitive history of the abridgements of the genocidal Palestinian and Iranian ideologies in their transmission to Western diplomats and Western media, as meticulously researched and clearly written as this volume.
Such a volume might well reveal a parallel Western abridgement of the thinking of men who, too, would kill the Jews and dominate the world if they could.
Yes, by all means, read Mein Kampf. Teach it in schools. Disseminate it. Discern its echoes in a lot of what emanates from the Middle East today.
This would be a valuable, nay, indispensable exercise for all of us, but especially for those whose response to terrorists who say they act in the name of Islam is: They don’t really mean it. Or: They’re not numerically significant. Or: They’re not representative of Islam.
As if Hitler was representative of the cultured German people when he started out.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
