The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Hitler's Mein Kampf is pretty famous, even among people who are not allowed to read it. (Hitler, of course, was the architect of the Holocaust, which murdered most Jewish people in Europe (about 6 million), along with some hundreds of thousands of others.)

I got into trouble when I was 15, because I wanted to read Mein Kampf. It was 1965, and I lived beside the Christie Pits in Toronto, where anti-Semitic riots had occurred in the 1930s.

The local librarian wanted to know why I wanted to read it. I said simply and truthfully that I was the daughter of a World War II veteran and I wanted to understand the history. I had already read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich several times, and had a fairly good grasp of the basic dates and such. I had also listened to many World War II reminiscences from my father and one of his brothers, but none of that got to the root of the war.

The librarian was satisfied that I did not represent some hate organization, and she gave me a copy.

Well, I spent about two hours reading Mein Kampf one summer morning and quickly formed the impression - from the prose style alone - that the author was a boring egotist. I quickly returned the book.

Here is one of Ben Wiker's comments:

... Hitler took himself to be that rarest of things, the union of philosopher and king, political philosopher and practical political leader, program-maker and politician in one. Put this way, Hitler seems almost noble, until we realize that, the philosophy to which he ascribed was an amalgam of Machiavelli, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (as mixed with the racial theories of the Frenchman Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau). We might say that whatever hesitations to action one finds in Darwin, Schopenhauer, or even Nietzsche, Hitler casts aside with the ruthlessness of Machiavelli. (p. 152)

All this said, of course, Wiker quite appropriately reminds us that Hitler was not a person of original ideas. He was always borrowing from more original minds, and seeking power to enact the ideas. As for what he thought about the spiritual heritage of Europe, this must suffice:

Of course, Hitler's moral outlook on life was a quasi-Nietzschean form of spiritualized Darwinism. Christianity was useful as long as it supported Hitler's program. Liberal Christianity, with its flexible doctrine and morality and emphasis on curing social ills, could be particularly useful. But conservative Christianity - with its dogmatic claims and moral commandments, as expressed in such actions - was to be attacked whenever it contradicted the regime. The real religion of the Reich was not Christianity but the Wagnerian mystical Germanism that so entranced Nietzsche. (p. 160)

Mysticism gone wrong can do an appalling amount of evil.

Next: Ten Worst Books 8: Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).