Today in our FSEM discussion we analyzed the text of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Our professor composed some questions for us to answer for our next discussion.
The first question: What did you see in this text that surprised you? I think there were a lot of surprising factors in this book. Like how he wasn’t even German, he was actually born in Austria-Hungary. Then this proposes the question of why was he such an extreme German Nationalist. My theory is that because he isn’t actually German, he feels almost left out in a way. I think he’s overcompensating and wants to belong to the German culture so badly, that it eventually affected him mentally and drove him to push the German nationalism outlook.
Question two: What reminded you of today? A lot of the German Nationalism or Nazism reminded me of White supremacism. What Hitler wanted was to basically sterilize the population of Germany. He thought the Aryan race was the elite race, so he wanted to eliminate anyone else who threatened that. We see very similar instances like that here in America with white supremacist groups. They attempt to eliminate anyone who in their eyes isn’t the elite race. We see this all the time with constant mass shootings, where they go after a specific group/race of people. Although there isn’t a specific “leader” of this group, the actions are very similar. To go along with that, I especially see a parallel with many different politically-right attacks. Just for example, the Unite the Right rally that happened in August of 2017. Their mission was to promote suppression against any race that isn’t white and to practically intimidate anyone around them that didn’t agree with them. We keep seeing this throughout today’s politics, like with the January 6th attack. Although their ‘mission’ wasn’t to promote white supremacism, there were a lot of people there with flags and more things to promote that themselves and again, to intimidate anyone else who didn’t agree with their views.
Question three: What are the major elements of Hitler’s thoughts? I think there are a lot of elements that went into Hitler’s thought process. He has a lot of narcissistic tendencies, thinking very highly of himself and very low of anyone who doesn’t seem elite to him. He also blames all societal problems on the Jews, with no actual explanation. I feel like a lot of his thought was very straightforward to him with absolutely no context behind them for us. I myself could not understand a lot of what the man was explaining so I’m going to say he wasn’t good at explaining his thoughts.
