“Here’s the thing,” Robinson said. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”
This is the Lieutenant Governor of a state (North Carolina) saying we can get gems from the quotes of genocidal maniacs. This is where we are now.
The new right wing astroturf group funded by the wealthy to control the news cycle. Just tiresome.
We should be reading them though
I thought we were the party of “banning books is bad”?
Read them with historical context.
You go ahead and read Mein Kampf. I don’t need to read Hitler’s own words to know how evil he was or what he did.
Those who refuse to learn history are doomed to repeat it.
Especially the bad parts.
You can learn history without reading Mein Kampf yourself.
You can learn names and dates of battles etc., but you won’t understand the driving forces if all you have is “Nazis are bad.”
Nazis were humans, not some kind of mythological monsters. If they could do what they did, you can too. You need to understand why they did what they did, how the ideology motivated them, or compelled them, because those same forces can work on you as well, and sometimes in ways you don’t realize.
Primo Levi survived the death camps, and wrote about his experience extensively. Despite being a prisoner, he felt complicit in the Nazi project, just through trying to survive. At one point he recalls being on a work detail, during which he discovered a water pipe that had some water in it. He drank the water, and although he saw another prisoner lusting after the water, he didn’t share, because he wanted to survive.
That other man also survived the camps and later found Levi, and asked why he wouldn’t share the water. Levi had no answer at that time, but when writing his memoir he said the structure of the camp system was such that it employed even the inmates as agents of their own extermination.
He ended up committing suicide in the 80s.
If you don’t understand the psychological and social pressures working on you - which come from everywhere, btw, not just Nazis - you can’t fight against them. You will go along to get along.
Why do you need to read Mein Kampf to understand that?
So you know what Hitler actually said? So you don’t fall for something like “the Germans didn’t really know what was happening”? Yes, they did. It was published, and you can cite chapter and verse.
Same reason to read anything.
No, I don’t fall for that because I read history books. So I don’t have to read Mein Kampf. What’s next, making it required reading in schools?
Are you really under the bizarre impression that no one who hasn’t read Mein Kampf has any idea of what Nazism was about?
You don’t actually need to read Mein Kampf to understand the driving forces of Nazism back then and the fascism we face today. Actually the underlying forces nowadays are too different for Mein Kampf to even be relevant. History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.
The most relevant quote I could think of:
“Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.” - Hitler
It’s just a shame that those who need to hear it are too busy calling us bigots for “calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi” while actual literal Nazis are getting organised in the background…
It’s almost like living in a satire, not sure if it’s more absurd or scary.
This is a feature of fascism, the gaslighting, I mean.
Has this guy ever tried reading Mein Kampf? My grandma had a copy when I was a kid (I don’t think she was a nazi…) and I looked at it once out of curiosity. It read like incoherent nonsense to me at the time. I always figured it would have been more useful as fire kindling or compost for a garden.
Fact is, it’s an important work for historical reasons. If you want to understand how Nazism works, and how it differs from Italian fascism, and be able to draw the lines that connect Nazis to historical German (and other nationalities) anti-Semitism, you need to read it.
If I had a copy, I wouldn’t put it on display, but it is the kind of thing I can totally see being assigned in a college course on WW2 or some similar topic.
NB: I’ve only read a few excerpts for a class similar to the one I described above.
Also, I am against book burning in any circumstance. A book is never worth more as kindling, unless you’re actually freezing and then it would be a hard choice.
I agree with everything except not burning a book to keep warm when freezing. Unless the book was “How to start a fire with other books when you are freezing”.
Yeah that bit was weird. Like, I’m gonna die to spare a copy of Mein Kampf? I’m sure there are others.
Now, maybe there’s an argument to be had that I don’t own a copy of that book and must have taken it from someone else, possibly intending to use it as kindling… But like, was I gonna burn something of more interest and possible use, or the damn Hitler book only the edgiest “history” fans and a few weird history nerds seem to actually like.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah. LegalAction wants us all to die to save copies of Mein Kampf, which will then be destroyed anyway without anyone to protect them. Kinda goofy opinion, that.
It’s nice to hear them saying the quiet part out loud - and then doubling down on it.
To me it’s terrifying that it’s escalated to the point where they are openly espouseing genocidal maniacs
