As an author Adolf Hitler was a great painter and as a painter Adolf was a great author but because of human nature being what it is, there is still a strange fascination with the man who dominated the 20th Century.
That is exactly why his book, Mein Kampf, is riding high in the Kindle store chart, we may hate the man and what he did but we don't ignore him.
The privacy of downloading also helps, much easier than borrowing it from a library or taking it to the counter in Waterstones.
It's the same morbid attraction that draws us to the head lopping nasty piece of work that was Henry VIII rather than almost any other British monarch or Billy The Kid, Vlad the Impaler or Bonnie & Clyde.
What makes Mein Kampf most interesting is that it is an insight into the thinking and his political ideology of a man who would go on to become labelled the most evil of the last century.
When you read his thoughts on the 'glorious Aryan race' and 'the satanic Jew', the words hit that bit harder because you know how he later acted upon these chilling thoughts.
I have seen and heard calls for the book to be banned, even castigating people for reading it and while it isn't a comfortable book to read, it is incredibly important.
It should not be a surprise so many people want to read it and learn what drove an artist from Austria to do what he did and should serve as a warning from history what could quite easily happen again in the 21st Century.
3 comments:
I thought it was a reasonably dull rant back when I read it (admittedly that was when I was about 14 or 15).
There's only so many times someone can say that they hate jews/bolsheviks/socialists/trade unions/'the mud races'/ gypsies/etc. before it all starts to lose it's initial sting and become a bit silly.
On the plus side, maybe we should make it compulsory reading for anyone flirting with fascism? It might cure them!
saying hitler "dominated" the 20the century is reasonable. Still, i think an argument of domination can be made with equal merit for:
stalin - led russia 30 years, established the USSR, kept eastern europe under his boot for 10 years, executed 700,000 people, put over 14 million through Gulags
mao - led china for 30 years, established the platform for the success china is having today, is credited with starving a minimum of 15 million people to death, imprisoning another 6 million
hirohito - jacked more of asia than europe and africa combined, approved the use of chemical weapons almost 400 times, killed at least 20 million chinese
q
Because you know what his views led to, it makes it a bit more chilling for me but i agree, it's not a page turner.
Good point q, maybe we have a Westcentric view of him, Stalin especially played a huge role in defining and dominating the 20th Century.
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