Virgin and Waterstone’s say Hitler’s Mein Kampf is ‘recommended reading’ at Christmas
MEIN Kampf, the book by one-hit wonder Adolf Hitler, is said by Waterstone’s to be the “perfect present” for Christmas. Is Waterstone’s just in tune with its readers in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, giving them the “essential read” that appeals to their prejudices and likes? Is this a reaction to customer feedback or just Waterstone’s attempt to spread the word? The Virgin Megastore has a similar policy in Bahrain, where Mein Kampf is recommended reading to the country’s many unenlightened bigots. Does Richard Branson need the money? Is consumerism so cynical?
Says a Waterstone’s spokesman:
“A customer spotted that one shop had used a seasonal point-of-sale wraparound promoting the book as the ‘perfect present’. Obviously this was not an appropriate thing to say about Mein Kampf. We apologise for the offence caused and will communicate with all our branches at the earliest possible opportunity to remind them of the sensitivities surrounding our stocking of Mein Kampf.”
Of course, it might have been a joke by a Waterstone’s employee with a dry wit. However a look at a few passages from the book and a quote from Hitler (not a Pagan but a Christian) suggests that linking Mein Kampf to Christmas is rooted in something more sinister:
* “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
* Thus, Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germans as such, as long as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being; but it combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.
* Certainly we don’t have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image.
* The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties– and this against their own nation.
* “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
A joke, then?
But in the Middle East, where Hitler is routinely seen a force of God-sent goodness and anti-Semitism of a type seen in 1930s Germany features in mainstream media,Virgin’s reasons are beyond a joke, even a sick one…
Spotter: Edward Brett
Posted: 24th, December 2011 | In: Key Posts, The Consumer Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
