Mein Kampf

There were a couple things I found very interesting in this week's Mein Kampf reading.

Hitler's rhetoric throughout the whole book, it seems, is very unique. Much of the passages read like streams of consciousness and the connections that he makes between his different ideas barely hold up. He jumps around between the war, politics, and his hatred for the Jews constantly. He loosely attempts to connect the Jews with Marxism and vice versa. He finds silly evidence that enables him to blame just about everything wrong with Germany on these two things. Somehow, though Mein Kampf was regarded as a novel work and an impressive text, for me, Hitler's lack of education shines through. He is unable to make clear connections between his ideas, and he rambles. He may come across as influential purely because of the grandiose words that he uses, but in reality Mein Kampf, to me, seems like a lot of fluff.

Another thing that I found very interesting was Hitler's criticism of the German press. He writes, "But what food did the German press of the pre-War period dish out to the people? Was it not the worst poison that can even be imagined?...(242)" He continues to criticize the "so-called liberal" press and essentially refers to the German government as putting out propaganda and poisoning the nation. I found this interesting because of the way in which Hitler used propaganda later in his career to implant his Nazi theology into the minds of the German people. Propaganda was an enormous part of how Hitler gained so much power, in his words and also in the pamphlets he distributed. Ultimately, when Hitler had essentially achieved control of Germany as a whole, he had complete say over everything that went out to the public. I wonder if Hitler learned these tactics from the way that he saw the German government distribute their own war propaganda.