Volume One - "A Reckoning"
Annotated but unabridged.
Mein Kampf is in two volumes, the first was written when Hitler was in prison in Bavaria in 1923-1924.
This chapter and its annotations in today's context are not a comfortable read. We deeply regret that certain procedures used by Hitler are once again evident. But history does indeed repeat itself.
At one point in this chapter, Hitler defined Authoritarianism in a Jewish context. This was a psychological projection on his part. Psychological projection is a common hang-up many people have.
It works like this:
- "I see the world as a paranoid would, therefor, other people are paranoid or see it that way too." Or: "I am a 'happy face,' and the world laughs with me." And so on. Therefor in our writing we tend to interpret others as being much like we are. Look for it; Hitler provided numerous instances throughout Mien Kampf, but especially in this chapter. He worked hard to make his case against the Jews. Along the way he revealed numerous aspect of his personality that today is classed as Authoritarian. Authoritarians are rigid in their thinking. They see the world as a highly structured, "black-and-white", "either-or" system. They are often bigoted, racist and Fundamentalist. There is plenty of that here also.
Hitler's incisive quotes in Red
Editorial Notes in [enclosed]
There are some truths which are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people. They sometimes pass by such truisms as though blind and are most astonished when someone suddenly discovers what everyone really ought to know. Columbus's eggs lie around by the hundreds of thousands, but Columbuses are met with less frequently.
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.
[Speciation and diversity are scientific and observational facts. However, diversity falls well short of speciation; the many breeds of dogs, cats, cows, and horses are prime examples of species. The various races of humanity arose naturally through isolation (amounting to selective breeding), leading to differences in appearance, like the animals mentioned, and basically with a genetic diversity similar to those within other species. Hitler made much more out of race than that.]
Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance to disease or hostile attacks.
This is only too natural.
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. [Other things equal, offspring are equal on AVERAGE to their parents in all significant measures with ranges of any measurement equal to their parents. In fact, offspring can vary significantly from their parents and benefit in the long view from genetic diversity which Hitler did not countenance. Diversity limits the negative expressions of recessive genes. Inbreeding, as Hitler's idiology wold have it, usually has the opposite effect.] Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. [Hitler is saying that he wanted to breed a master race, which in fact he tried to do. Even if he had won the war such that his experiment contiuned, it could not work as he envisioned. The laws of nature are immutable.]
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice. [Foxes, geese and tigers are species, not races. Races are subsets of species, but all races still belong to the human species (Homo sapiens) in that they can mate and reproduce normally. Interracial mating broadens the mixtures of traits such as stature, hair, skin color and limb to trunk ratio, and often leads to superior individuals--Tiger Woods may be just such an example. Hitler's aim was to get the working classes to buy into his ideas and believe his promises. He knew that, in their humiliation, they too needed someone to look down upon.]
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.
If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health. [Nature does select the fittest in a random process; It is not an absolute given.]
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow. [Hitler might be excused for not knowing abut Mendel's works which clearly illustrated genetic features of inheritance. Nature cares not a whit in Hitler's sense; mutation, genetic diversity, diverse population isolation, and random events lead to new species. Speciation occurs not at all as Hitler supposed.]
Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale.
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
- Lowering of the level of the higher race;
- Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
[Here is an error in fact. He may have heard of regression toward the mean, which was an error in interpreting the math involved in curve-fitting by least squares technique. In fact, expanded gene pools lead to superior individuals. Inbreeding, while enhancing specific inherited traits, also tends to accumulate regressive genes that are detrimental in many ways to inbred individuals. This was known in Hitler's day and generally accepted by academia, the open minded students and teachers of biology, evolution, and archeology. Himmler, a favorite of Hitler's, was also a master at "rewriting science." Similarly, Stalin had his Lysenko. In each case, we see exemplary rigid thinking to the exclusion of factual observations. Such thinking persists in our day--in the Authoritarian style described as such only after WWII by Adorno who was curious why the German people followed Hitler so fanatically. Hitler himself essentially defined the personality type. For its modern reincarnations (there are more than one), see Bob Altemeyer and John Dean.]
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator. And as a sin this act is rewarded.
[Hitler was, of course the consummate racist. He had six million people gassed simply because they were Jews, not at all different from himself genetically.]
When man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man.
And this attack must lead to his own doom. [He must be talking about the Jews here.]
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!' [Hitler really meant HIS role and his method was not to understand, but to issue edicts.]
Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature; though in this they dispose of no other weapon than an idea, and at that such a miserable one, that if it were true no world at all would be conceivable. [Pure projection on Hitler's part.]
But quite aside from the fact that man has never yet conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift one or another corner of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that he does not dominate Nature, but has only risen on the basis of his knowledge of various laws and secrets of Nature to be lord over those other living creatures who lack this knowledge-quite aside from all this, an idea cannot overcome the preconditions for the development and being of humanity, since the idea itself depends only on man. Without human beings there is no human idea in this world, therefore the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of human beings and hence of all the laws which created the precondition for their existence.
[Man has not, and probably will never, be able to change or create a law of nature. In this sense he was right. But humankind is very good at invention and innovation using the known, and sometimes not-yet-known, laws of nature. Damascus steel came long before metallurgists discovered the natural laws for hardening and toughening steel. Pig iron came before smelting and chemistry were understood. In the same mode alchemists knew of a great number of beneficial medicines, but not the reasons for their efficacy. The rest of Hitler's comments are gibberish.]
And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied up with certain men. This applies most of all to those ideas whose content originates, not in an exact scientific truth, but in the world of emotion, or, as it is so beautifully and clearly expressed today, reflects an 'inner experience.' All these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe their existence. Precisely in this case the preservation of these definite races and men is the precondition for the existence of these ideas. Anyone, for example, who really desired the victory of the pacifistic idea in this world with all his heart would have to fight with all the means at his disposal for the conquest of the world by the Germans; for, if the opposite should occur, the last pacifist would die out with the last German, since the rest of the world has never fallen so deeply as our own people, unfortunately, has for this nonsense so contrary to Nature and reason. Then, if we were serious, whether we liked it or not, we would have to wage wars in order to arrive at pacifism. This and nothing else was what Wilson, the American world savior, intended, or so at least our German visionaries believed-and thereby his purpose was fulfilled.
In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth. Then this idea lacks the power of producing evil effects in exact proportion as its practical application becomes rare and finally impossible. Therefore, first struggle and then we shall see what can be dine. Otherwise mankind has passed the high point of its development and the end is not the domination of any ethical idea but barbarism and consequently chaos. At this point someone or other may laugh, but this planet once moved through the ether for millions of years without human beings and it can do so again some day if men forget that they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid laws.
Everything we admire on this earth today-science and art, technology and inventions-is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race. On them depends the existence of this whole culture. If they perish, the beauty of this earth will sink into the grave with them.
[This anticipated (perhaps inspired) similar thinking by the Neocons who state their objectives as follows:
- "The number one objective of US post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.
- "Another major US objective should be to safeguard US interests and promote American values.
- "If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action."]
However much the soil, for example, can influence men, the result of the influence will always be different depending on the races in question. The low fertility of a living space may spur the one race to the highest achievements; in others it will only be the cause of bitterest poverty and final undernourishment with all its consequences. The inner nature of peoples is always determining for the manner in which outward influences will be effective. What leads the one to starvation trains the other to hard work.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning. [Sounds creative, but wrong historically.] The ultimate cause of such a decline was their forgetting that all culture depends on men and not conversely; hence that to preserve a certain culture the man who creates it must be preserved. This preservation is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and stronger in this world. [This is rigid thinking again in the Authoritarian mode.]
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live. [Ben Franklin said it rather differently: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither."]
Even if this were hard--that is how it is! Assuredly, however by far the harder fate is that which strikes the man who thinks he can overcome Nature, but in the last analysis only mocks her. Distress, misfortune, and diseases are her answer.
The man who misjudges and disregards the racial laws actually forfeits the happiness that seems destined to be his. He thwarts the triumphal march of the best race and hence also the precondition for all human progress, and remains, in consequence burdened with all the sensibility of man, in the animal realm of helpless misery. [The racism feature of the Authoritarian Personality is on full display here.]
It is idle to argue which race or races were the original representative of human culture and hence the real founders of all that we sum up under the word 'humanity.' It is simpler to raise this question with regard to the present, and here an easy, clear answer results. All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word 'man.' He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude him-and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert. [This is racist-propaganda of the first order. For centuries, Chinese astronomers, ceramicists, and metallurgists were more skilled than their Aryan counterparts. Hitler was caught in the enamor-trap of his own ideas and could not contenence being wrong in his black-and-white view of the universe. This is a classic authoritarian failing. And he was not alone in his fantasies.]
If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group. [This is anti-history, as all races are capable of all three. He wrote what he knew Germans on the street wanted to hear. They were in the same Authoritarian mode he was. So here, his dogmatic projection stood in for what his subjects might might otherwise have considered genius.] From him originate the foundations and walls of all human creation, and only the outward form and color are determined by the changing traits of character of the various peoples. He provides the mightiest building stones and plans for all human progress and only the execution corresponds to the nature of the varying men and races. In a few decades, for example, the entire east of Asia will possess a culture whose ultimate foundation will be Hellenic spirit and Germanic technology, just as much as in Europe. Only the outward form--in part at least--will bear the features of Asiatic character. It is not true, as some people think, that Japan adds European technology to its culture; no, European science and technology are trimmed with Japanese characteristics. [And often improved upon! Japan is earning Nobel prizes in a democratic society. Toyota and Sony are exemplary world leaders in their industries, where Europe no lags.] The foundation of actual life is no longer the special Japanese culture, although it determines the color of life--because outwardly, in consequence of its inner difference, it is more conspicuous to the European--but the gigantic scientific-technical achievements of Europe and America; that is, of Aryan peoples. Only on the basis of these achievements can the Orient follow general human progress. They furnish the basis of the struggle for daily bread, create weapons and implements for it, and only the outward form is gradually adapted to Japanese character.
If beginning today all further Aryan influence on Japan should stop, assuming that Europe and America should perish, Japan's present rise in science and technology might continue for a short time; but even in a few years the well would dry up, the Japanese special character would gain, but the present culture would freeze and sink back into the slumber from which it was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan culture. Therefore, just as the present Japanese development owes its life to Aryan origin, long ago in the gray past foreign influence and foreign spirit awakened the Japanese culture of that time. The best proof of this is furnished by the fact of its subsequent sclerosis and total petrifaction. This can occur in a people only when the original creative racial nucleus has been lost, or if the external influence which furnished the impetus and the material for the first development in the cultural field was later lacking. But if it is established that a people receives the most essential basic materials of its culture from foreign races, that it assimilates and adapts them, and that then, if further external influence is lacking, it rigidifies again and again, such a race may be designated as culture-bearing,' but never as 'culture-creating.' An examination of the various peoples from this standpoint points to the fact that practically none of them were originally culture-founding, but almost always culture-bearing.
Approximately the following picture of their development always results:
Aryan races--often absurdly small numerically--subject foreign peoples, and then, stimulated by the special living conditions of the new territory (fertility, climatic conditions, etc.) and assisted by the multitude of lower-type beings standing at their disposal as helpers, develop the intellectual and organizational capacities dormant within them. Often in a few millenniums or even centuries they create cultures which originally bear all the inner characteristics of their nature, adapted to the above-indicated special qualities of the soil and subjected beings. In the end, however, the conquerors transgress against the principle of blood purity, to which they had first adhered; they begin to mix with the subjugated inhabitants and thus end their own existence; for the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion [Here we see "religious-like dogma," typical of the Authoritarian mentality, in his arguments.]
After a thousand years and more, the last visible trace of the former master people is often seen in the lighter skin color which its blood left behind in the subjugated race, and in a petrified culture which it had originally created. For, once the actual and spiritual conqueror lost himself in the blood of the subjected people, the fuel for the torch of human progress was lost! Just as, through the blood of the former masters, the color preserved a feeble gleam in their memory, likewise the night of cultural life is gently illumined by the remaining creations of the former light-bringers. They shine through all the returned barbarism and too often inspire the thoughtless observer of the moment with the opinion that he beholds the picture of the present people before him, whereas he is only gazing into the mirror of the past.
[There is no natural basis for Hitler's racism. He was completely out of touch with nature and Natural History.]
T0:
Mein Kampf Catalog
Vol 1, Ch 1
Posted by RoadToPeace on Sunday, July 31, 2005.
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