[SecretSquirrel]

In my college days I had a freshman english class teacher who was from Germany, born in the immediate postwar 1940s.

I was the only jew in the whole class. Somehow this woman found out I was jewish early in the semester.

This lady spent the entire semester hysterically tripping over herself to go out of her way to profusely apologise to me whenever some subject matter or analyis we were discussing could be in any way perceived as even remotely approaching some kind of sensitive territory to a jewish person.

It happened a lot, because apparently the whole theme of her book selections was oppression and discrimination

She even constantly offered to excuse me from class and assignments.

In stark contrast to how I was treated, she was an extremely hardass discipinarian to everybody else, including blacks and women.

I had never before seen such a pathetic, wretched display of self abasement with my own two eyes, nor have I since. If all postwar Germans are like she was, they are truly a broken people.


this was 15 years ago, long before the current re-emergence of the SJW/PC scum plaguing the university system again. This experience of mine during my formative years must have inoculated me against this sort of thinking and resulted in my absolute disdain and hatred for political correctness, SJW, and "victim" culture in general

[Heinie]

...
I had never before seen such a pathetic, wretched display of self abasement with my own two eyes, nor have I since. If all postwar Germans are like she was, they are truly a broken people. ...

Certain people mistake kindness and consideration as a sign of weakness. I know the type well.

[Frollein]

What squirrel described was neither kindness nor consideration. It was whimpering guilt for something the teacher had been no part of and not responsible for, to a person who hadn't suffered nor felt entitled to receive such a belly-crawling. It was a degrading, embarrassing experience for both parties. In one word: pathetic.

[Rich]

I watched "the reader" recently. God, Kate Winslet's so sexy. I could overlook a few war crimes to bed her. The film certainly has shock value, it left me gasping in disbelief -No- no no I just can't believe the SS would have done that. Maybe I'm nieve and have an idealised picture of the SS, but I just can't believe they'd let in someone who couldn't read and write. You do wonder if they just made it up to make the Nazis look bad. Making stuff up to make the Nazis look bad is a bit of happy in today's world.

The BBC's "Conspiracy", their take on the Waansee conference is interesting and amusing for its extremely negative attitude towards fat people. I'm a bit anti fat myself but nothing like as extreme as the BBC. You've got Colin Firth playing the (relative) good guy (Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones diary was essentially a reprise of William Stuckel, another wooden Lawyer who couldn't express his feelings. I don't think Hugh Grant was in Conspiracy, but I might be wrong on that.) and Gerhard Klopfer as the extremely bad Nazi, with the other characters playing fifty shades of grey in between. Gerhard klopfer wasn't overweight at all, but the BBC felt that an extremely evil man should have been a hideously fat overeating pig, even if he wasn't. I'm sure the BBC felt they were portraying the essential truth if not quite the literal truth. It made me feel quite politically correct, I wanted to say hey teacher, not all fat people are evil, genocide has nothing to do with obesity.

[SecretSquirrel]

What squirrel described was neither kindness nor consideration. It was whimpering guilt for something the teacher had been no part of and not responsible for, to a person who hadn't suffered nor felt entitled to receive such a belly-crawling. It was a degrading, embarrassing experience for both parties. In one word: pathetic.

Exactly. It was insulting, frankly, to be treated like a fragile little flower who could not withstand adversity, however slight. But now, apparently, all the undergrads are clamoring to be treated in such a fashion

[Heinie]

"Germany's main Jewish group, the Central Council of Jews, said it has no objections to the critical edition but strongly supports ongoing efforts to prevent any new Mein Kampf without annotations."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mein-kampf-annotated-1.3395100
This group's opinion will be heeded by the German authorities.

[SecretSquirrel]

Let's be serious here: Anybody that wanted to read Mein Kampf badly enough to want an unabridged and non-annotated version copy could easily get it at any time in the last 20 years, even in Germany. There's no censorship on the internet. Furthermore, it's easy enough to get one of the tens of millions of copies printed and distributed by the Third Reich in a secondhand store or to purchase a copy outside of Germany. The Nazi government was literally giving the book away by the millions every year.

[Rich]

No one can deny the terrible barbarism of the thirties Germany.

It would be announced that a Jew was to be killed, or a non Jew who was considered to friendly to Jews, in a public place. There was nothing secret or hidden about this, nothing shameful. On occasion even in front of the court house. People would gather to watch the spectacle sometimes the whole community including the women and children, hundreds even thousands might attend. The Jew would be tortured and mutilated for hours. There would be a carnival atmosphere, at the end the ordinary German people would take away body parts as little mementos to keep as trophies.

Just for moment there I had a thought, "I'm not confusing Nazi Germany with somewhere else am I?" But no I'm sure that's right.

[Frollein]

Be careful with the sarcasm here, Rich, there are enough left-liberals here who'd believe every word of this.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

I was given a copy of Mein Kampf by my father on my birthday when I was much younger. I remember being unsure what to do with it exactly... This was around the same time I began realizing that maybe something was amiss with him talking so much about how Hitler could've won the war, and the mistakes he made in misjudging his enemies, and his various "excesses" with government policy, and how it was interesting, to say the least, to be treated to private home viewings of Triumph of the Will.

The point is that while I'm not German and it's not really my business what they do with their books, requiring Mein Kampf to be heavily annotated seems pretty fine as is. I've browsed through Mein Kampf many times but it's too fucking boring to actually sit down and read it. I can't imagine actually finishing it before waking up from a nap and realizing I failed to finish it because I fell asleep. The kind of people in Germany who will want to read it will be academics in some form and neo-Nazis: assuming not all of them have their own copies without annotations, I like the idea of annoying them. As for science bitches who cares, it's more reading for nerds.

[noemon]

It would be announced that a Jew was to be killed, or a non Jew who was considered to friendly to Jews, in a public place. There was nothing secret or hidden about this, nothing shameful. On occasion even in front of the court house. People would gather to watch the spectacle sometimes the whole community including the women and children, hundreds even thousands might attend. The Jew would be tortured and mutilated for hours. There would be a carnival atmosphere, at the end the ordinary German people would take away body parts as little mementos to keep as trophies.

This is what the Ottoman Jews did to famous Greeks in the 1820's, the Jewish Rabbi of Istanbul went to the Sultan and requested the body of the Greek Patriarch, it was then given to the Jewish community who skinned his body, mutilated it and then paraded it all over Istanbul, Greek sailors fished his body from the sea and took it to Odessa to be buried, when the sailors told the Greeks of Odessa what the Jews did, the Greek community of Odessa went on a bloody rampage against the Jews and that was the first pogrom in Russia.

[Frollein]

Heresy! Only Nazis do bad things as everyone knows!

[noir]

The point is that while I'm not German and it's not really my business what they do with their books, requiring Mein Kampf to be heavily annotated seems pretty fine as is. I've browsed through Mein Kampf many times but it's too fucking boring to actually sit down and read it. I can't imagine actually finishing it before waking up from a nap and realizing I failed to finish it because I fell asleep. The kind of people in Germany who will want to read it will be academics in some form and neo-Nazis: assuming not all of them have their own copies without annotations, I like the idea of annoying them. As for science bitches who cares, it's more reading for nerds.

Joachim Fest called Mein Kampf pornographic work. Maybe there lays the attraction to the book

'The Face Of The Third Reich' (1999)

On the other hand, Hitler's anti-Semitism has been attributed to the sexual envy of the unsatisfied, lonely, shut-in inmate of the men's hostel, and there is convincing evidence of this. There is his nervously clumsy, repressed attitude towards women from an early age. This is seen in the story of the relationship, which never went further than looks, with 'Stefanie', the romantic idol of his youth, and also in the alternating moods of revulsion and hysterical adoration that later marked his approach to women. There is even stronger evidence in the very style and content of Hitler's writings. (26) The pages of Mein Kampf devoted to anti-Semitism give off a stench of naked obscenity, half concealed by that affectation of 'erudite moral philosophy in which pornographic works are accustomed to wrap themselves'. (27)
This Judaizing of our spiritual life and mammonizing of our natural instinct for procreation will sooner or later work havoc with our whole posterity.
The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned thereby are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations; for it is never by wars that nations are ruined, but by the loss of their powers of resistance, which are exclusively a characteristic of pure racial blood.

The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspecting girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people. In his systematic efforts to ruin girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of discrimination between him and other people. The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate.
With the anguished monotony of the insane, he returns again and again to these obscene fantasies, patently tormented for pages on end by the forbidden images of his overheated and unaired imagination. For him,
woman and sex have remained within the domain of sinful feverish fantasies. His central political concept is a hackneyed rationalization of this obsessional idea: an insane world in which history, politics and the 'life struggle of the peoples' are pictured solely in terms of coupling, fornication, pollution of the blood, selective breeding, hybridisation, generation in the primeval slime which will improve or mar the race, violation, rape, and harassment of the woman — world history as an orgy of rut, in which dissolute and devilish sub-men lie in wait for the golden-haired female. (28)

[SecretSquirrel]

this thread is going to a strange place...

[Zamuel]

Didn't the copyright recently expire? Or is it about to expire?

Yes, the copyright has just expired but it remains against the law to publish Mein Kampf in the Bundesrepublik. The situation is an embarrassment in a free country.

Before you get your panties all twisted up, take a moment to realize the rational behind the law. The book is not banned because the government FEARS interested parties reading it ... It's not that hard to get a copy in Germany if you want one, and there aren't any "Book Police" who will be knocking on your door if a neighbor reports you. The book is banned to prevent it being exploited by hate groups using it as a promotion. That threat has evidently faded enough that the government feels secure in allowing an annotated version, that corrects Hitler's mistakes, exaggerations, and outright lies from being accepted as facts. In no way do these annotations detract from the original text or alter it in any way.

I do get a kick out of how the ninnies complain when repression is lifted ... They do blather, but all they're really saying is ME, ME. ME, somebody look at ME !

Zam

[Heinie]

Before you get your panties all twisted up, take a moment to realize the rational behind the law. The book is not banned because the government FEARS interested parties reading it ... It's not that hard to get a copy in Germany if you want one, and there aren't any "Book Police" who will be knocking on your door if a neighbor reports you. The book is banned to prevent it being exploited by hate groups using it as a promotion. That threat has evidently faded enough that the government feels secure in allowing an annotated version, that corrects Hitler's mistakes, exaggerations, and outright lies from being accepted as facts. In no way do these annotations detract from the original text or alter it in any way.

I do get a kick out of how the ninnies complain when repression is lifted ... They do blather, but all they're really saying is ME, ME. ME, somebody look at ME !

Zam

Stop the name-calling and misrepresentation of what people write here. No one said it was impossible to get a copy of Mein Kampf in the Bundesrepublik or that it was a crime to own one. But it is a crime still to publish the book in Germany. Banning books is the action of a state that seeks to control freedom of thought. Justifying it is a disgrace. If historians and interest groups who desire to control thought want to comment on the book, they can write their own.

What next; Fahrenheit 451.

[Zamuel]

Stop the name-calling and misrepresentation of what people write here.

Ah the old "thread Nazi" routine ... !

No one said it was impossible to get a copy of Mein Kampf in the Bundesrepublik or that it was a crime to own one.

Did every one get that ... ? actually you can check it out from most German Libraries. Just don't tell the ninnies ...

But it is a crime still to publish the book in Germany.

NO ... It's NOT, and that has NEVER been an issue. The Copyright is owned by the state of Bavaria and they have simply chosen NOT to publish it. (in the intrest of preventing it's use to promote HATE groups.) It isn't and never has been illegal ... if it were, adding annotations to it wouldn't change a damn thing ... Your premise is simply FOS !

Germany DOES have laws on the book forbidding traffic in Nazi memorabilia, but these have been relaxed, at least as far as private individuals are concerned. You won't find any "Nazi Museums" pandering to the tourists (that I know of).

Zam

[Rei Murasame]

But it is a crime still to publish the book in Germany. Banning books is the action of a state that seeks to control freedom of thought.

Well, they certainly chose a ridiculous target to do it with. While they are wasting their time adding annotations to a physical book that no one is reading, the internet is still being filled every day with ethno-nationalist and ethno-regionalist writing.

Maybe they should have published it online for free, but then how would they make money that way?

There's also the fact that women are culture-bearers, and we are living in a post-1968 world. Given that Mein Kampf is written with male readers as the target audience in a pre-1968 world, it's pretty clear that Mein Kampf is not the primary vehicle of antisemitic thought in today's world, nor does it have the potential to be.

Mein Kampf contains long - and actually useless - sections of prose which are designed to encourage male readers to protect women from the apparent pernicious influence of Jews (as though women are not entirely self-aware). If you remove those sections it decreases the size of the book and improves the directness of its message.

But still, no one is reading that book to find out how to be antisemitic now, so even redacting those sections would probably not increase its viewership.

[noir]

^Do you still believe that he's liberal and progressive? In fact he covers his true colors with progressive themes and liberal spin. It's nothing new. There is wide literature about this tactic in Germany. Read him carefully.

[Rei Murasame]

^Do you still believe that he's liberal and progressive?

Yes. Heinie is definitely an enemy to me. He is so obviously a liberal.