Slashdot Mirror
'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.'"
Heil Erstegepostungmittlestoff!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The current English edition is actually peppered with footnotes calling out every time Hitler lies or exaggerates. It's like a side by side refutation.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They should have started demystifying it 67 years ago.....
a slashdot story that godwin's itself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Then they should bring it out into the open and make it as readily available as possible. Have it available in paperback. Make it freely available in .epub and .mobi formats.
If the country has done its job properly, most German people already know what (truthfully) happened in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. They already have the context - so what's the big deal about letting them see that evil man's writings?
#DeleteChrome
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous... The only reason there is any interest in this book at all is because it was written by possibly the most well known and infamous man in history.
How many other works were written during the same time period, which have become completely lost to history due to excessively long copyrights?
Also by keeping a work like mein kampf under wraps for so long, they have created a taboo subject around it, which will actually result in more people wanting to read it. In many other countries where talk of hitler and nazis is not restricted, hitler is considered a joke and is openly mocked, hardly an image that's going to generate any support for his ideas.
And as someone else pointed out, suppressing books containing ideas they didn't agree with was something the nazis did.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Anyone from Germany on at this hour? I went to a friend's house in Germany about 10 years ago and his Uncle had the book sitting in his bathroom. He said it was required reading for anyone in Germany in grade-school. To teach the errors in it, or something along those lines.
I'm not sure if I was in Bavaria though - perhaps it varies by state?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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
I'm guessing the invocation of Godwin's law is inevitable for this article...
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
... it was first published in 1925/6.
The 70 year restriction is based on when he died... presuming, of course, that it was actually *his* body in the bunker and he didn't escape to South America as some of his henchmen did.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
The State of Bavaria holds the copyright? Can someone explain how the single state of Bavaria, to the exclusion of the other states that together formed the republic of Germany, came to hold the copyright in this work. Hitler's last will allocated his possessions:
What I possess belongs — in so far as it has any value — to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State, should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Private_Will_and_Testament
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Would anybody care to comment on the Ford translation? I've been curious about this book and have read different things about the accuracy of existing translations. The Ford translation claims to be the most accurate, but some reviews on amazon claim otherwise. However none of those making these claims for or against seem to be native German speakers. Any native German speakers care to chime in?
I want to read this book one day, but I don't want to read one that sugar coats what he says, or one that makes it look more bigoted than it is (which the Mannheim translation supposedly does.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The ideology of regimes like North Korea has more to do with what you're suggesting than with Marx's ideas.
Everyone's going to interpret things in their own way. That's why this is both dangerous and enlightening, the latter weighing in most, I believe. Neo-Nazi types will celebrate and revel in its publication and read-away--perhaps some of them thinking, 'Okay, huh?' in getting the real-deal and the fucked-up psychosis that comes with it--and others simply interested in history (and not repeating it)... well, will get the real-deal and the fucked-up psychosis that comes with it. 'Guess we'll see.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
I was fully expecting a push for copyright extension. Just so this book wouldn't be freely available. Anything else would have been "collateral damage".
(+1, Disagree)
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.
A slashdot thread that Godwins itself?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If the book had been readily available, there would be fewer neo-nazis in Germany.
I've read it (my parents own a copy, from their grandparents, as Mein Kampf was regularily given as presents at weddings, etc.). It's interesting in parts and revolting in most. It's also pretty badly written. As an author, Hitler was much worse than as a speaker.
There was a comedian here in Germany, of turkish origin, who read from Mein Kampf for school classes and other audiences. He got attacked pretty badly, but in every discussion, he leaves his critics in the dust with his wit and intelligence. In one, he told a former MinisterprÃsident (our equivalent of american governors) that her anti-nazi initiatives had pretty much no effect whatsoever on the youth, because the young people distrust authoritarian stuff that's being forced down their throats. But his readings had a profound effect. Oh and also, the neo-nazis hated him for it, up to death threats.
You can not resolve history by hiding it, only by discussing it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
hilter and the nazi germany is the 'legitimate,legal whatever you wanna call" of the western culture and their hardcore philosophies of modern and post-modern ages ! stop lying to yourselves ! the only difference between hitler and chrchil or bush junior for example is that hilter did it "here to us not there to the "others" " !!
signed,
Wayne Kerr
FTFY
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
to show the Star Trek episode Patterns of Force simply because it had Nazis in it.
http://www.airlockalpha.com/node/8755/germany-gets-patterns-of-force-43-years-later.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Force_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'll wait for the 'Mein Kampf' for dummies.
That may be true if that person has no connection with the Third Reich. But many of the post-war German academics, judges, secret service members, and police used to support the Nazis. Those people made laws, taught the next generation of students, and wrote history textbooks. Several of the (conservative) political parties in Germany that supported the Nazis simply reconstituted themselves after WWII, adopted similar programs to their pre-war programs, and pretended like they had nothing to do with the Nazi regime. And Neo Nazis and right-wing extremism are widespread in Germany.
Pointing out analogies and connections between Nazis and modern German political and social institutions and figures is justified and not an ad hoc comparison.
In my local bookshop, for less than a pound, I can read books written directly by any number of serial killers, gang-leaders, rapists, you name it, about their murder and torture of others.
Next to them, I can read many more written by others ABOUT the same thing, usually with some sort of endorsement. Next to that, I can read stories, true or fiction, about child abuse, neglect and a myriad other things. One that I did see was from someone who became a US politician after growing up in the ghetto and basically being used as a child prostitute (It was a while ago - something about her name being Cookie, I think).
So, in that climate, I don't see exactly what the release of such a book would do that couldn't already be found elsewhere. Sure, Hitler actually managed to bring a whole country down using his ideology, but that was AFTER it was written.
I've always held that the German/French stance of stopping people talking about, reading about, selling "memorabilia" of these things only makes things WORSE.
What they should have done is renamed all toilets "Nazi's". And then use the Nazi symbol as that to denote a toilet. The world would see the change in opinion of the country that did so, the Naziists would immediately stop "worshipping" the name/symbol (and hopefully the ideology), and you solve the problem of what to do with the car park that's believed to be the modern location of Hitler's "grave". Turn it into a giant public toilet.
Do you really think that children (or adults) would "get the wrong message" or want to be associated with the word Nazi or its symbology after that?
It already is! Once again the Net sneaks up on our old school habits! "(Blah blah blah copyright runs out in 2015 blah blah blah)". Remember that thing called countries, and how they have different laws? (Up until the US "fixes" that anyway!) Well, for now Australia's copyright laws are a lot shorter than the US, so Gutenberg Australia has some editions of texts that are still locked in copyright elsewhere. Here is Gutenberg Australia's copy of Mein Kampf, so have at it!
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt
Oh wait, there is this eerie clause:
http://gutenberg.net.au/submissions.html
"Of course, works may remain copyrighted in other countries. One cannot legally download or read books posted at Project Gutenbrg of Australia if one is in a country where copyright protections extend more than 50 years past an author's death. The author's estate and publishers still retain their legal and moral rights to oversee the work in those countries."
So, I guess you'd better not follow that link. Isn't copyright wonderful.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Marx came up with a theory of human nature and economics, and communist states tried to put that into practice. Because Marx's theory was wrong, those states failed, consistently and repeatedly. The fault is with Marx's theory.
When scientific theories are correct, their application usually leads to positive results. The theory of vaccination leads to vaccination programs and that leads to more health. The theory of the effect of air pollution on lungs leads to clean air laws and improvements in public health.
Semitic people include Arabs. The kosher propaganda has going far too long.
"or that's precisely the response they hope for."
And sometimes its precisely the response you have to give or become a victim yourself. If all the sociopaths and psychopaths in the world could be defeated just by pointing and laughing then the world would be a lot more peaceful place. But they can't.
...shooting his mouth off without bothering to read the summary:
"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."
No need to make money off something so abhorrent. Shame on anybody, who tries to.
I have to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the German approach to presenting the horrors of WWII. Last Christmas I visited the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. All the material presented there went extremely over the top to paint the Nazis as inhuman monsters that were far distanced from any sane person. But what this totally missed is that the horror of the Holocaust was that it was completely human. The vast majority of the Nazis were everyday people like you an me, and that's what makes it mindbogglingly terrible.
In contrast you have the Holocaust exhibit at the British Imperial War Museum. The whole first section is very clearly focused on the on the economic and political conditions that led to the rise of the Nazis. Through the propoganda and information presented in that exhibit you come to understand how otherwise normal people came to participate in, sanction, or at least turn a blind eye to, one of the worst attrocities in modern history. I believe that only by dissecting this information and understanding this "flaw" of human nature can we really prevent such terrible things from happening again. Mein Kampf should have been repuplished years ago for exactly this reason.
Mein Kraft? brilliant!
sag
Replace every instance of Jew with Oompaloompa
...you really haven't experienced Hitler until you have read him in the original Klingon.
Was Marx's "Das Kapital" ever banned anywhere?
Seastead this.
I have had an essay peculating away in my brain for a while whose subject is the selective reading and quotation of various holy books.
The bible, for example, is full of all sorts of horrible things, but there are passages that contain "just", "lawful", "good", or "moral" stories and instructions - for simplicities' sake, let's call them the "bad" parts and the "good" parts.
Those who hold up any particular religious philosophy as the paragon of human virtue quote the "good" parts and ignore the "bad" parts.
Well, Nazism has this wonderful rhetorical value as being one of the few philosophies that is universally regarded as being wholly "bad". Aside from a few nutcases - who most of the world recognize as abhorrent - nobody has anything good to say about Nazis. They are the go-to bad guys.
Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture. The common view of the book is that it must be evil through and through. I posit, however, that there exist passages in Mein Kampf - much like the bible - that are, if not ethically and morally good, at the very least neutral. If so, this would make it possible to - again, much like the bible - to selectively quote Mein Kampf and use it as an anchor for a moral philosophy.
Not that I'm in any way interested in rehabilitating National Socialism! The point here being that if you can find good in Mein Kampf, well, what does that say about the practice of selective quoting in the bible?
I think you can see where I'm headed with this.
Anyway, I have never read the book, so the postulation that it contains good/neutral passages remains (to me) unproven. Are they in there?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Beautiful irony in that. I suppose then the answer to the question "Has there ever been a Holodomor movie made anywhere?" would be, "Yes, Nazi Germany..."
Seastead this.
Lieben est verboten, a es scriben uts, ka liederhosen, lieben est verboten god dammit!
This also brought to you from the trite department of false equivalencies...
Funny, I was stumbling through some Private Snafu shorts last night, and watched this gem. I find it very interesting to look back at the films from the WWII era and see how much (or how little) society has changed.
As for the Bavarians camping on Mein Kampf, you'd think that they would have figured out that most parents have - the more you demonize something (alcohol, MJ, sex et al), the more the teenagers will find it appealing. If they want to destroy the financial incentive associated with the work, release it GPL-style. Make sure derivative works have to be GPL'd as well. Just stuffing the master copy under a mattress is ineffective.
Too bad they can't follow up by changing the law about swastikas. This has caused censorship of American media because the companies want to sell them in Germany--there's a reason that the only swastika in the Captain America movie is a one second scene that could be easily cut for foreign distribution.
Is MineKampf the next game Notch is making?
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be illegal to read?
Just publish an annotated version. Explain where he was wrong.
To be fair honor killings are more common/likely than nazi terrorists.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Copyright restrictions stop at the end of 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death.
Since when did it become vogue to think Hitler died almost 70 years ago? Oh.. I see - the Bunker-Believers are finally swaying the public opinion that the oh-so pat closure to the war was done with Hitler taking a cyanide pill. Pffsst... yeah that's a little too neat.. too gift wrapped for the historical shelves if you asked me. It is pretty clear he escaped on a u-boat and went to South America where he spent the rest of his live puttering around small villages searching for clues on various modern mysteries: the Fountain of Youth, amassing crystal skulls, and finding the lost outpost of Gorilla City. Come on people - this is common knowledge!
Assuming he didn't find the fountain of youth he had another good twenty years on him - which means those patents are pushed back that far as well! Problem solved!
We do the concentrating, they do the camping.
Marx came up with a theory of human nature and economics, and communist states tried to put that into practice.
The first state that tried to put it in practice which weren't prevented from doing so by outside factors (i.e. being crushed) was Soviet Russia. And Soviet ideology was not purely Marxist - it was Marxist-Leninist, which is actually a pretty big difference. According to Marx's own theories, a communist revolution should not have been even possible in Russia in 1917, because it was an agrarian country where the majority were peasants, not factory workers.
From there, all other socialist states in the world directly or indirectly trace their lineage to the USSR, and so their ideologies are also offshoots of Marxism-Leninism. We don't know how well any other Marxist schools of thought would hold up to real life, because Marxism-Leninism (-Stalinism/Maoism/Juche/...) was all that was ever tried.
Indeed. They free them from the ability to do so. They free them to accept whatever they've been given. And they free them from the aspiration to do more. Such a wonderful system.
By definition, shouldn't the comment thread been stopped and locked the moment the summary was posted?
Carol vs. Ghost
It reminded me of that I've read about how Chinese communist party came to power. In that time (before WW II) there were two parties struggling for power: nationalists and communists. But it's easy to mistake one for another, because both were totalitarian, pro-censorhip and anti-individualist (one party to rule them all), both were hunting down and killing their opponents, both had power-crazy sociopathic leaders with enormous egos.
And it continued to be like this in other countries throughout the XXth century. Some countries had nationalist dictators supported by US, other countries had communist dictators supported by USSR, sometimes there was coup d'etat, but one dictator was simply followed by another, and people were fucked once again.
Well, that's nice. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is no empirical support for the implicit social, psychological or economic theories that underlie Marx's work, and every attempt to put them into practice has failed.
The burden of proof that Marxism is anything other than pompous pseudo-scientific claptrap is still on the proponents of his system. Of course, the Neo-Marxists (Habermas and the like) are even further removed from science and reason than Marx was.
Why play games with these people? What does it take for humanity to learn a lesson. Just kill them. No , really. Just kill them. In the US too. just kill them. Fuck your civil liberties and free speech rights . Nazis et. al. don't get civil liberties and free speech rights.
Are you talking about the episode, "Why We Fight", when they first discovered the concentration camp?
I suppose that covers it, but I personally feel that as graphic as it is, it is too sanitized. It's not that I want to see all the gory details. It's just that it is hard to know exactly how bad it was.
testing out my trending skills
And liberals feel the same way about you. The thing is, if conservatives continue to succeed in getting the US to do nothing about global warming , liberals are going to get to do something about it. Conservatives will be desperately trying to hide the fact that they ever watched FoxNews or read RedState or took their science from Rush Limbaugh or were ever one of those "crazy asshole conservatives...."
From abolition to women's suffrage, from food safety to product safety from evolution denialism and the Scopes Trial (haven't learned much since then, have you, Tennesee conservatards) from segregation and intermarriage laws to laws against homosexuality conservatives never pass up a chance to line up on the losing side of history in this country.
But with global warming, it's taken to a whole new level. Now you're literally a clear and present danger to national security of the United States, which is just how the CIA et. al . see you BTW.
But it's not just the national security of the US it's also every nation on earth adn THEIR intelligence agencies.
. Hey, how do you think that's going to work out for ya?
It's like a political suicide pact.... that's one good thing that will come out of all this.. the country will be unified in its wholesale and irreversible rejection of "conservatism" and will come to see it the same way everyone now sees Bull Conners and the Klan.
Thanks for being the suicide bombers of your own "movement" and ensuring that when people watch old FoxNews clips it will be just like watching the Nazis goosestepping under the Arc D'Triumph.
Hey,we could have done it without you, but it wouldn't have been so decisive.. and...spectacular...
Just do us all a favor and keep denying reality.