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'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany
Hugh Pickens writes "Jacob Heilbrunn reports in The Atlantic that Germany is taking a new step toward what is often called 'normalization' as the state of Bavaria has announced that in 2015 it will publish Hitler's Mein Kampf, banned in Germany since World War II. In announcing the publication of the book, Bavarian finance minister Markus Soeder says that he wants to contribute to the 'demystification' of it. In 2015, the Bavarian state's copyright to the book will expire and the idea is to publish a scholarly version that will help stem its appeal for commercial publishers. The book is not banned by law in Germany, but Bavaria has used ownership of the copyright to prevent publication of German editions since 1945. Copyright restrictions stop at the end of 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death. By publishing in 2015 before the expiry of the copyright, Bavaria hopes to make future German editions as 'commercially unattractive' as possible. 'We want to make clear what nonsense is in there,' says Soeder and to show 'what a worldwide catastrophe this dangerous body of thought led to.'"
They should have started demystifying it 67 years ago.....
You know who else liked to suppress books they considered dangerous or "un-German?" The Nazis.
Seriously, you don't even need annotations. Everyone with enough brain cells to rub together will start rolling their eyes in the first chapter already.
Hitler reinterpreted his whole life to match his ideology to such a degree it just becomes hilariously stupid to read... and boring, by the way.
And frankly, those who lack the necessary brain power to recognize the inherent worth (or lack thereof) of the book will not be dissuaded by annotations, true as they may be.
the point of godwin's law is to point out the essential wrongness of comparing someone's opinion to something hitler or a nazi would do. it's just derails an argument into hysteria and absurdity
however if someone were to get really upset here and yell and scream that what the bavarian government is doing here is something hitler or a nazi would do... well, yeah
and i just learned a great phrase: "Reductio ad Hitlerum"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
which sounds like a spell voldemort would cast
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're not going to get away with a fatuous statement like that. The communist idea that all should work for the good of the state and put the good of the state above their own wellbeing is indelibly part of the way places such as North Korea work.
At this point in history, it is bound to be more enlightening than dangerous.
My high school education in the subject of Nazi Germany was likely more intellectual than most because I had a teacher who was brave enough to stand up and claim that the holocaust wasn't the most important feature of the 20th century. Instead, that teacher claimed, the genocides that came afterwards should play a stronger role in history courses because they are both more contemporary (thus more relevant) and demonstrate how society needs to make a much more concerted effort to learn from the mistakes of our past.
The publication of Mein Kampf in Germany at this stage of history is important for a couple of reasons. One is that access to primary sources will allow the general population to more directly learn what the mistakesh of Nazi Germany were. But this will only work out because we have had a handful of generations to sort out why such policies represent an unforgivable evil. Both reasons are essential, because we need both information and a temporal/emotional distance to evaluate things rationally.
Publishing this work in this day in age isn't an apology to the Nazis. It does not represent a forgiveness due to social relativism, nor any other extremist ideology. It simply acknowledges that the only way to learn from the past is to understand the past from their perspective.
It's a shame that a big part of the reason for it being banned in Germany was the statement that Nazi germany was a very efficient system of government. That's something that really needs repeating, every time someone proposes a law aimed at increasing the efficiency of their government...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Definitely not required reading in school. Would be no point in doing that anyway, since the whole book is just crap, nothing to learn there except that Hitler was not good at writing :-) Maybe some excerpts are used in history class somewhere to show how delusional Hitler was.
The book could not be bought anywhere because of the mentioned copyright, but it never was any problem getting your hands on an old version of it - basically every household back then in Germany had one, and many of those books survived to this day on some grandma's / grandpa's bookshelf. I know that my grandmother had one (she said that most people threw theirs away after the war, but she kept hers because it had an autograph in it), I think my uncle has it now.
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous
Count on Slashdot to turn a story about naziism into an anti-copyright rant.
The story is a copyright story. The book hasn't been banned. The book has simply not been published, because the people sitting on the copyright refused to publish it. The reason it is now about to be published is because the copyright is finally expiring.
How much more deserving can a story be of triggering anti-copyright rants than when copyright is explicitly and directly used to enforce censorship?
May we live long and die out
I came here to say the same thing. Banning publication is a service to anyone who, like me, might have the misguided belief that they'd learn something by reading it. Other than that Hitler was a semi-literate drooling moron with a god complex, I mean, which can be learned from other far less painful sources.
Why do people insist on calling him a moron? Hitler was a homicidal sociopath, a racist and a right wing fanatic but he was also an astute politician, quite intelligent and strangely enough, judging from statements by people who met him, he was also very charming. Just because somebody is a Nazi doesn't make them stupid. The French and the British made assumptions about Hitler and it turned out to be an expensive mistake. If this publication helps to dispel myths about Nazism I'm all for it. Strangely enough there is now an effort being made to pronounce the Nazis a left wing movement which is pretty funny if you know anything about the Freikorps, Anton Drexler and the rest of that ilk. Nazism was an attempt to create a right wing counterpart to communism.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It's interesting that you mention left wing, because already when you said right wing, I wondered what you meant by it. I'm often fuzzy regarding what should be called one or the other (if the terms are at all relevant outside the French revolution), so I'm collecting samples of how other people use the words. Today, I'm sampling you. :-) What do you have in mind when you call Hitler the movement right wing? (Amusingly, we're talking about the National Socialist German Workers' Party, but what's in a name?) Supporting the crown and the estates? Dismantling the state ("taxation is theft")? Encouraging capitalism? Belief in Christian ideals? Those are traits that I see as characterising the Right in one context or another. (Though I don't see them as particularly representative of the Nazis.)
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I'd like to read it in the original Deutsche though. There is no perfect Bible. Even the bible must be researched from the original languages and translations, compared to Archeological facts and Socialogical history before it can be defined into a version that seems to meet someones dogma. That is why there are so many translations and editions. Politics and Church Politics play a great role in all this. That is why it is terribly important that there be a scholars neutral edition( which doesn't exist,guess why?). We would find that the "resilient" inherit the earth.( Early church wanted meek parishioners as they are easier to control than resilient ones)
The temple priests used cannabis rather than "calmus" as an unguent. Scattered throughout are warnings for man to follow Gods governance rather than mans, even that bit about "rendering unto Caesar" gets misconstrued as instruction to obey mans governance rather than highlight the unimportance of earthly joys compared to the everlasting glory, which is what it was meant to do until "politically modified".
So, my longwinded point is, Get your hands on the original and ignore annotations of the politically motivated.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Why do people insist on calling him a moron?
Judging by his writing style, which is incoherent, rambling, and in a lot of places just plain wrong. He was charismatic, but from what I've read about the Nazis most of the successes (e.g. the invasion of most of Europe and the militarisation of Germany) were either orchestrated by other people, were blind luck (and failed miserably when he tried to repeat them), but most of the disasters for them (e.g. the invasion of Russia) happened when Hitler overrode the opinions of the people he'd previously let get on with running the empire.
The allies didn't underestimate Hitler so much as underestimate the ability of competent people to ride the coat tails of a charismatic leader. If he'd been assassinated in the late '30s, most of Europe would probably be speaking German now...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'll get hate for saying this but WTF,lets be honest, if you wanna go by sheer numbers Hitler hated Ruskies even more than Jews but if you look at the man's record pretty much anyone not Aryan that didn't think EXACTLY like him got put on his shit list. Lets see...Poles, Jews, Russian, Gypsy, gay, communists...did I leave anybody out? lets face it the guy really wasn't THAT picky when it came to killing and if you look at those throughout history that racked up huge body counts that's something they all had in common. While its true he didn't like Jews once WWII started not liking someone wasn't really a prerequisite, he slaughtered for pretty much any old reason.
Personally I'm for printing it,not because I thought the man had any great insight, far from it and one could argue that WWII was pretty much a war with all the planning of throwing darts at a dartboard without any real thought involved on Germany's part (attacking Russia without ANY winter gear? batshit much?) but because i'm a strong believer on freedom of thought, be it the little red book or Mein Kampf or the supposed "pro pedo" book. To be frightened of words on a page is to be frightened of thought and I personally find that even more scary. If you truly fear words on a page because you think they are gonna suddenly affect large numbers of your populace? then maybe, just throwing this out there, you should teach your people to think for themselves and instead of trying to hide the words make a decent counterargument instead?
My grandfather fought in WWII and actually liberated one of the camps in Poland, not one of the big names but it was horrifying none the less, and one of the last things he taught me was not to fear words and ideas as he actually supported the Illinois Nazis right to march, even though he had suffered so much in the war and ended it with a wall dropped on him by a Werwulf squad. He said "that's what made us different, we let people speak, even if we don't agree" and I always took those and his memories he shared of that time to heart. so when i saw some neo Nazis on a street corner in Dallas in the late 80s I didn't join the protesters shouting dirty names at them, I simply bought a large piece of posterboard and made up a sign that said "My grandfather liberated one of the camps, ask me about it" and told his story, of seeing children piled like cordwood, of seeing people so starved one couldn't tell male from female, of being told NOT to feed them because they had been starved so long rich GI rations would throw their frail bodies into shock and of watching in horror because one of the other men did exactly that because he felt pity and the person went into convulsions and died. He said that was the closest he ever got to committing war crimes as he and his men were ready to execute those Nazis on the spot until one of the prisoners told them these were just some flunky recruits brought in while the monsters snuck away and they had actually been treated well by the recruits.
Well needless to say all those nasty names didn't phase those Nazis but what DID phase them was me. They even went so far as to actually complain to a cop standing there who snickered and said "you have the right to speak and so does he" and when they saw I wouldn't go away they packed up and left. It is ALWAYS better not to sweep such things under the rug but to fight it with the truth. By keeping it hidden and banned since the Americans left Germany has simply allowed those groups to grow when a much better solution would have been to simply fight them with the reality of the past IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Lots of people hate the Jews for their work in international banking. But they ended up in banking, a soiled business, because in the 1200s it was forbidden to christians and muslims by their religions.
If you're pissed about the 'dirty Jew bankers' blame your own stupid theologies for cutting you out of the action. Churches like to keep the flock poor; makes them obedient.
Right Wing: Kill Jews because they don't believe in the right God. .
it's the same god as christians and muslims....you know ,that god of Abraham they all revere ~sighs~
The German approach is very sadistic agreed. Their can't be any discussions of the motives, whether some things were right in Nazi politics etc. No it's become a religion to blame themselves for the war to the point of pissing away billions of euros to help out other EU countries that run themselves like idiots because Germany can't be seen as being aggressive or just say "not my problem" about anything now can they?
I quite agree. I don't think there's any inherent flaw in character of the German people. I find it a little queer that the question can even be asked with a straight face, much less answered affirmatively three-to-one.
Let me go way out on an idealistic limb here, though: I'd like to think that reflection on the horrors of the past can help lessen horrors of the present and future. Even if the conclusions reached by those reflecting are often little nonsensical. At any rate, it certainly better than whitewashing atrocities, or sweeping them under the rug.
Germans have been held to task for WWII's military aggression, xenophobia, and genocide. Other nations, even those with atrocities of similar scale (though talking about the "scale" of genocide seems petty), have not. There are still plenty of war-waging bullys in the world, but Germany's not among them. I'm not trying to say that Germany's all rainbows and butterflies, we know better -- plenty of racial problems, etc. But the general disinclination towards war and violence is real, and if it takes a guilt complex, so be it.
(Oh, and I can second the recommendation for Die Welle!)
Right wing: tending toward fascism. Left wing: tending toward socialism. Since both ideologies are dedicated to crushing personal freedom it is easy to confuse the two. It's *how* they want to crush your freedom that distinguishes them.
Except that fascism and socialism are relatives, ideologically speaking. Fascism was spawned from socialism. Benito Mussolini was a socialist as a young man. He didn't leave socialism. He mutated it into another form. He saw Fascism as the next logical step of political evolution, with socialism the previous iteration. It still had collectivist impulses, and deference to the state.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel