Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 252 posts

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#221

Post by DCKing »

waps wrote: post #199
DCKing wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fascism" and "Catholic right-wing" were synonymous at the time. Hitler had signed a treaty with the Holy See to basically allow them to control schools in Germany in exchange for a thumbs up for the regime, and this meant the Vatican was backtracking. Hitler thought they were allies; and the Vatican was important for Nazi power, so yeah, that move pissed him off.

Given that they clearly did not have the church on their side, isn't that a massive conflict ? Also the wikipedia page states that because of the German (pre-nazi) agreement with the vatican that was seen as lending legitimacy to the nazi government, this rebuke by the pope was seen as a great step forward for German catholics, lending legitimacy to an already existing opposition amonst catholics which was then publi…

The timespan between the original Reichskonkordat and this letter was six years. It appeared the Nazi regime did not respect the Vatican, and it became apparent soon that their agreement wasn't going to be upheld as expected by the Nazis. In addition, the differences between Nazism and contemporary fascism (which the Church was mostly supportive of) became more apparent over time and drew some criticism as well.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#222

Post by vacri »

reitanqild wrote: post #150
lisper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conservatism doesn't send people to concentration camps Doesn't it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...

Last I checked Gaza were nothing like a concentration camp, and calling it that is an offense to anyone who experienced any real one. When did foreign journalists have access to ccs? When did ccs have markets in broad daylight? Where is forced labour? (I didn't mention starvation etc because those ones are contested but still.) I literally don't like to bring this up as it isually brings downvotes but letting people…

Gaza is a bit like a concentration camp - an area where a group of people are contained and kept from moving freely. Generally concentration camps aren't big enough to support markets, but other concentration camps have allowed journalists, and forced labour is not a prerequisite for one either.

It is better associated with the Warsaw ghetto, but your requirements for a concentration camp are not actually definitive of one.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#223

Post by mtdewcmu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #187
mtdewcmu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't foresee another Hitler rising, because the first Hitler ruined it for all future Hitlers. I think what was most damning was the manner in which Germany lost the war. If I thought it was mainly Hitler's values and racism, I would not feel as safe. Hitler bet big on war and he lost in spectacular fashion. I think he forever associated that style of leadership with catastrophe.

> I actually don't foresee another Hitler rising, because the first Hitler ruined it for all future Hitlers. He only "ruined it" for all future Hitlers in the next ~100 years. A lot of peace and prosperity we have enjoyed in the last 60 years can be attributed to people remembering and recovering from death and destruction of the II World War. There are only few people alive today who lived during WWII, soon there wi…

The name Hitler is still virtually a curseword. People may not know much about history, but they know one thing: don't be Hitler.

A lot is made of the fact that people are ignorant of history, but Hitler wasn't: he loved history, perhaps a little too much. He inserted himself into historical events and imagined that he could right historical wrongs and slights suffered by Germans. That is the underlying theme of Mein Kampf. You can say that he distorted history, and I won't dispute that point -- however, his ideas were based on real events, with added sentimentality and sensationalism, the way Hollywood movies are.

Nazism was crushed as thoroughly and decisively as probably any movement ever has been. Hitler is despised by people that don't even know history. Historical events may become dormant, but they are remembered when they become pertinent again, and there has rarely been a historical event as clear and one-sided as WWII: whether Hitler was wrong is a matter of opinion and can be debated (not a good idea in public), but that Germany suffered total military defeat under Hitler's leadership is indisputable fact.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#224

Post by mtdewcmu »

tga_d wrote: post #56
mtdewcmu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't foresee another Hitler rising, because the first Hitler ruined it for all future Hitlers. I think what was most damning was the manner in which Germany lost the war. If I thought it was mainly Hitler's values and racism, I would not feel as safe. Hitler bet big on war and he lost in spectacular fashion. I think he forever associated that style of leadership with catastrophe.

Just like every other empire that ever failed stopped all other empires from ever forming again? As Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the like fall further into historical curiosities, things like Putinism and whatever you call what goes on in North Korea seem like viable answers distinct from those that came before it. And indeed, in many ways they are different, but especially in the case of the former, I think they…

There are and have been plenty of small Hitlers. It depends on where you set the bar for "a Hitler" as far as significance. Hitler was significant because he was leader of one of the world's most powerful countries at the time.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#225

Post by mtdewcmu »

rangibaby wrote: post #184
gaius wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Hitler had managed to fight England and Russia separately, he could easily have won. That's the true lesson here.

If Hitler had just left Stalin alone the latter would have been happy to let the capitalists destroy each other, and Germany could have conquered all of western Europe. The USSR was initially part of an anti-fascist pact but made amends with Germany after the western allies' betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

It's interesting to speculate on what would have happened if Hitler hadn't betrayed Stalin. Hitler had reasons for doing so (I can't remember what they were), and they probably had some validity -- but the Soviets were certainly uneasy allies with the US and Britain, so perhaps the Soviets could have been kept out of the war, at least for a while. If Germany was weakened, though, Stalin might have seen an opportunity and attacked Germany on his own.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#226

Post by ArkyBeagle »

yk wrote: post #159
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to forget how profound the power vacuum was in Weimar Germany. The roughly Christian Socialists ( congruent with the Fabians in England, although that's not the term of art ) were a relatively stable influence in Germany. Von Hindenburg was roughly of that skein. The Communists were deadly violent and Stalin was a significant external threat.

Hindenburg was certainly not a socialist. He was a conservative nationalist, for 1920th values of conservative. That is, he wanted to reestablish monarchy and had the interests of the Prussian Junkers at his heart. In addition he got his job because he was a WWI war hero.

I'd never seen that he wanted to reestablish the monarchy - presumably the Kaiser Wilhelm line? Some of the leftovers from (Queen Victoria's) Prince Albert's line? Interesting. Yeah, that's by-$DEITY about as conservative as it gets.

I dunno then - what do you call post-Bismarck welfare-state Germany? It was certainly cradle-to-grave, something we now identify with socialism. And yes - Bismarck was generally considered a conservative as well.

But the entire idea of Germany was basically... uh... racial. So it's a racial-ist socialism. Don't look at me like that, it's was their doing :) 19th century, phrenology, all that.

The Wikipedia page refers to Bismarck as a "revolutionary conservative". Ooh, my head hurts now :)

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#227

Post by mtdewcmu »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #91
mtdewcmu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't foresee another Hitler rising, because the first Hitler ruined it for all future Hitlers. I think what was most damning was the manner in which Germany lost the war. If I thought it was mainly Hitler's values and racism, I would not feel as safe. Hitler bet big on war and he lost in spectacular fashion. I think he forever associated that style of leadership with catastrophe.

How do you know, how the next "Hitler" will look like? Do you think a "Hitler" has to have a funny mustache and behave like in the caricatures? Has a totalitarian state always to come with a crazy person? How about a group of people, how about a system, where you don't see "one big dictator"? The people in the 30s also did not foresee another big dictator rising. Other parties in Germany for example thought, they cou…

>> Do you think a "Hitler" has to have a funny mustache and behave like in the caricatures?

I don't think that mustache will come back into style. Ever.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#228

Post by mtdewcmu »

notahacker wrote: post #172
_up wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is covered by the law or at least their secret interpretation.

This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they…

Anomalies like that can be important, I think. Clearly it made sense to the actors, but to us it seems incomprehensibly bizarre; that means our mental model is wrong, or, at least, has a gap.

I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime.

Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority.

This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#229

Post by shitgoose »

hbbio wrote: post #138
waps wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they pretty much got Crimea, don't they ?

Crimea also has been historically part of Russia/USSR until 1954. (I'm French, just stating)

So was Ukraine:) Part of Russia/USSR until 1991. Crimea is a special case - it was always assumed to be "Russian" even under Ukrainian rule. Ukrainians themselves never fully considered Crimea as their own. That is why it fell off so quickly and easily. Historically it has been part of Russia, true, but more importantly is never stopped being "Russian" in terms of self identity (unlike Lwow or Volyn for example, that were Ukrainianized in a rather brutal way).

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#230

Post by ekianjo »

Zuider wrote: post #178
sexmonad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the parallel as intended to put Napoleon down, but instead to attribute the same force of personality to Hitler. As someone who never met either man (perhaps that's obvious :), I'm not sure the connection works with me.

The German philosopher, Hegel had quite the man-crush on Bonaparte. "I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it." Similarly, Hitler saw himself as being the concrete expression of the soul of the German people. He may…

Do you have a source for that quote from Hegel ? I'd like to check the actual german version of it :)
Post reply on HN