A Most Disturbing Reincarnation

It was a news story that might have been easily missed, but a news story, all the same. For the first time since World War II, an all-new edition of “Mein Kampf,” the despicable and diabolical autobiography/manifesto of Adolf Hitler, and printed in German, was placed on sale in Germany, and was sold out (4,000 copies) in less than a week.

For more than seventy years, the publication and distribution of this book was banned by the German government, but on the expiration of the copyright which had heretofore placed this ban into effect, it became public property, which essentially allowed its republication. Worse, the German public has seized upon its availability, and it has become an instant best-seller in that country.

Nothing could prove to be more incendiary, nor have a greater potential for misuse, than the republication and distribution of Adolf Hitler’s political and social commentary as contained in this book, which includes his twisted vision of anti-Semitism, lebensraum, and militant Aryanism. Written during his imprisonment in Landsberg, following the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich, on 8-9 November 1923, and dictated to Rudolf Hess, it sold more than ten million copies in Germany, prior to the end of the Second World War. In effect, it became the pro-forma bible and textbook of National Socialism, and poisoned the minds of Germans who came to regard their Fuhrer as something short of a deity, blindly following him and his henchmen into a holocaustic abyss, which resulted in the systematic slaughter of eleven million, including six million Jews.

Even more horrific than the Holocaust itself, is the fact that this nightmare took place a little more than seventy years ago- barely a second ago, on the proverbial clock that is the grand scheme of world history. Indeed, if it can happen as it did so relatively recently, it can easily happen again in the not-so-distant future, which is why the book’s republication has so much potential danger.

In a present-day Germany, where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have been permitted entry, and where hordes of Muslim men have been engaging in mass rapes and other forms of sexual assault on German women in Cologne and other regions of that country, it is easy to see that such an environment can cause enough panic to lead otherwise thinking people to places that they should not venture- specifically, into ideologies that are as sick and twisted as those espoused in Nazism. History has shown that time and time, again, a void in the political power structure can lead to its replacement, by dangerous policies and ideologies that can lead to cataclysm.

All it takes is for a U.S. President to ignore his own “line-in-the-sand,” by effectively standing back and permitting a Bashar Assad regime to use chemical weapons to commit genocide on his own people, and a German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to open the door to a quarter million of these refugees- many of whom are young men whose twisted ideology, and radical interpretation of Islamic ideology, permits and sanctions the rape of “improperly dressed infidels”, to create a potential powder-keg in a European continent whose culture and Christianity is under constant assault from without, and within, as well.

Now, into that void has entered a book that should never have been published, a book which should have never been sold, a book whose most disturbing reincarnation, and regrettable re-distribution, is flying off the shelves of German booksellers- laying the groundwork for a reactionary response that will only serve to inflame and inspire an ideology that was once thought to be extinguished and rendered asunder.

-Drew Nickell, 18 January 2016

©2016, by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.