Hitler's Alternate Universe

Great Debates
61

I don’t think Hitler was necessarily a genius, but he was perceptive. First, he didn’t start by hating the Jews, he describes in some detail how he came to hate them in Mien Kampf. It all had to do with the political and social situation in Germany, and this was before WW I when the Jews/communists led an internal ‘revolution’ against the government while the troops were in the field. Hitler describes his initial thoughts about Jews …

“There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion.* The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror*.”

Then he goes to Vienna … and after becoming involved in politics and street debate he becomes aware of the importance of Jews in the political life of the city. He relates in detail how he his opinions toward Jews changed … it is interesting reading, see it here …

http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch02.html

This amusing paragraph was my introduction to MK,

"The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn’t help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn’t help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn’t remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.

Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck.

**I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

Gradually I began to hate them.**"

Anyhow, that was just a prelude to the point I want to make and that is that Hitler was perceptive with regard to economics, as this extraordinary passage from a later chapter indicates …

"As I listened to Gottfried Feder’s first lecture about the ‘breaking of interest slavery,’ I knew at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the future of the German people. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital. In Feder’s lecture I sensed a powerful slogan for this coming struggle.

And here again later developments proved how correct our sentiment of those days was. Today the know-it-alls among our bourgeois politicians no longer laugh at us: today even they, in so far as they are not conscious liars, see that international stock exchange capital was not only the greatest agitator for the War, but that especially, now that the fight is over, it spares no effort to turn the peace into a hell.

The fight against international finance and loan capital became the most important point in the program of the German nation’s struggle for its economic independence and freedom."

Some things don’t change.

62

Every bigot has tells a story like that. The story explains how the bigot is a reasonable person who adopted his prejudices reluctantly and only after careful thought and observation. Nobody with any sense should believe that kind of garbage; it’s either self-deception or a lie intended to make their beliefs more palatable to the extremely credulous.

63

This paragraph confuses me. True Russians are Slavic - there haven’t been any Viking Rus for many centuries. If he considered the Slavs as cannon fodder and used “ethnics” ( presumably all non-Slavs ) similarly, there really isn’t anyone else left :). Unless you are just exempting Uncle Joe’s native Georgians.

64

Seriously?

65

Pretty scary that some folks still believe and buy into that bullshit, isn’t it? :eek:

66

Why is it so incredible that bigots are not born with their bigotry? Clearly, they learn it, mostly from their parents, it’s true, but they learn it. I’m not sure I buy Hitler’s claim that he learned his distaste for Jews from tendentious Jewish political types … his description of them seems to apply to ALL tendentious political arguers, in fact, I was thinking about a lot of Dopers when I read that quote … but I do believe Hitler LEARNED his bigotry.

67

Horseshit. Racist horseshit. Germany was not stabbed in the back by the Jews/communists in WWI; the country was falling apart from the blockade, and following the failure of Ludendorff Offensive in 1918 it faced a situation that was militarily hopeless. Jewish Bolshevism is as much of a propaganda invention as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which by the way was spread internationally by the Whites in the Russian Revolution to blame the Jews for the communist revolution there, heavily reprinted in the 1920s and became required reading in German classrooms after the Nazis took power in 1933, despite being a known forgery.

Umm… excuse me? Some things don’t change? You think cabals of Jews are conspiring to keep Germany and other nations down? You might want to go back to Stormfront with this steaming pile of shit. Your ill-informed thread on the 3 decade US war on the Middle East with its ally Israel takes on a whole new dimension.

68

[QUOTE=Dissonance]
Umm… excuse me? Some things don’t change? You think cabals of Jews are conspiring to keep Germany and other nations down? You might want to go back to Stormfront with this steaming pile of shit. Your ill-informed thread on the 3 decade US war on the Middle East with its ally Israel takes on a whole new dimension.
[/QUOTE]

Exactly.

It’s hard to believe that folks still buy into this stuff and the meme that Hitler was some sort of genius.

[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Why is it so incredible that bigots are not born with their bigotry? Clearly, they learn it, mostly from their parents, it’s true, but they learn it. I’m not sure I buy Hitler’s claim that he learned his distaste for Jews from tendentious Jewish political types … his description of them seems to apply to ALL tendentious political arguers, in fact, I was thinking about a lot of Dopers when I read that quote … but I do believe Hitler LEARNED his bigotry.
[/QUOTE]

Of course he learned it. Much of it he learned at home or picked up in the general anti-Jewish atmosphere of Germany when he was a kid growing up, but a lot of it he picked up during the war and certainly in the post war period when he first started to become politically active. He was always an odd duck in the military, and after Germany lost he became a bitter and deranged odd duck as he delved deeper and deeper into the darker aspects of post war Germany’s political weirdness. His bigotry, however, was that of most Europeans of his time and just got stronger as he became more bitter, twisted and migrated towards darker and more twisted political groups that reinforced his stupid and idiotic world view.

69

Yeah. Mein Kampf needs to be taken with a lot of salt. Hitler wrote this book (while in prison in 1924) just as he was coming to believe in his own growing role & “importance” in national level politics.

From 1919 to 1922 he considered himself just a messenger, or “drummer”, whose job it was to inspire and mobilise the masses for the nationalist movement, and get them ready for when a great leader takes the reins. By 1923/1924, he began to see himself as as indispensible to the Nazi Party, and after all the fawning and adulation he received in prison, he began to see himself as that leader.

His book contains errors, both deliberate, as well as others more mundane, and overall, the book was written to inspire his followers, as well as paint himself in the as good light as practical.

I fully admit that I hold this opinion based on reading Ian Kershaw’s Hitler: A Biography. I have never read Mein Kampf itself.

70

Sounds like you missed the point. I didn’t say people are born bigoted. I said the idea that people acquire their bigotry through rational thought and scrupulous observation is a pile of bullshit. I don’t know how far back we can trace Hitler’s hatred of Jews (although he grew up in a time and place where anti-Semitism ran deep), but his views on Germany and racial purity certainly appeared earlier in life, and they were not unrelated.

71

Psst… he grew up in Austria.

72

Yeah, I knew that. :smack: Same different though wrt general anti-Jewish sentiment.

73

Yeah, the first time I read that post I failed to notice that Gack repeated that crap as actual history. That confirms a few things.

74

A couple or 3 points - Hitler writes at length about how he came to hate Jews, and I am inclined to take him at his word in the absence of any contrary information.

Now, this one is important, Hitler unquestionably associated the Jews with communism, the subject can be debated but it is by no means nonsense, as this article by Winston Churchill attests …

http://www.patriot.dk/churchill.html

Third, the Occupy Wall St movement was a reaction to what international finance is doing to the US. You can read ‘I Was an Economic Hitman’ to see how IF has been exploiting the 3rd world for the last 30 years, and with the economic collapse and subsequent bailout in the US, the target has become the US, with the middle class in decline and in ever increasing debt bondage collected through taxation.

75

Yep–and of course we have the Jews behind international communism, and the Jews behind international capitalism. It all begins to add up, doesn’t it?

76

[QUOTE=Gack]
A couple or 3 points - Hitler writes at length about how he came to hate Jews, and I am inclined to take him at his word in the absence of any contrary information.
[/QUOTE]

Well yeah. Not like Hitler was known for exaggeration or spin or anything like that, right? I mean, if you can’t take Hitler’s word for something, who can you trust, amIright??

77

Yes, the idea of a Jewish-communist conspiracy is utter nonsense.

78

If the subject is how he came to hate Jews I don’t see why not. What purpose would he have to lie. It’s not like he was aiming for political correctness.

79

As far as I can tell, this link appears to be to a white-supremacist website.

80

All Hitler’s word is good for is providing proof that Hitler was delusional. He did not have a reason for hating the Jews. Saying he hated the Jews for stabbing Germany in the back during WWI and causing the Bolshevik Revolution is as delusional as saying he hated the Jews for causing the Black Death with their magic. It’s delusional to hate somebody for something that didn’t happen.