when one thinks of an evil book, one naturally springs to mind before all others Mein Kampf, the literary magnum opus of none other than Adolf Hitler, a man who needs no introduction on a channel that's dedicated to all things wicked and foul. It's a monograph of malevolence in quite a literal sense, as its words were directly responsible for persuading an entire population into embracing a set of putrid principles. And so, therefore, when you hold a copy of Mein Kampf, you're holding one of the many tools that the Nazi regime used to kill 80 million people, both directly through genocide and repression, and indirectly through the vast cataclysmic war that it started. And yet, while our initial impulses might compel us to want to destroy such a terrible tome, it is actually vitally important that it is not only read but also understood, because as a wise man once said, those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So with that in mind, we read it cover to cover, and now we'll share with you what we found. What

mankind is ultimately a Manifesto and ideological Treatise that outlines the core ideas of national socialism. It consists of two volumes, with the first being a reckoning and the second being the National Socialist movement. Ostensively, a reckoning is meant to be an autobiographical section that outlines Hitler's early life and the experiences therein that led him to embrace national socialism, particularly during the years that he spent in Vienna prior to World War I and the National Socialist movements, which as you probably guess from the title, is intended to be a full expansion and explanation of National Socialist ideology. In reality, while Hitler largely sticks to that structure, both autobiographical and Manifesto elements are found in both volumes. But what of that ideology? What exactly did Hitler outline as its key tenants in mind Camp? Well, his writing style was pretty rambling, to say the least, and as a reader, you are left to filter out his key recurring ideas from an all-over-the-place roller coaster of well, dire tribe. One aspect that will probably come as a

surprise to absolutely nobody watching was his racial ideology which for Hitler manifested as a belief in the superiority of the German, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples, but mostly Germans, which he lumped together under the collective term of Aryan. Beyond them, Hitler presents an extended scale of the various, as he deems them lesser races, and their place on his genetic pecking order, with a particular hatred being reserved for slaves and Jews. He also explains how, in his belief, Aryans as the supposed superior race not only could, but should, lord over the lesser races. To quote, the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, for he, after all, is only a weak and limited man. For if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness, idealism.

denigration of Jews. He wrote the following rather blunt synopsis of his position, again quoting: The Jew stops at nothing, and in his vices he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew. And just to really drive this point home, an extract that lays iter's racial ideology be like no other is the following quote: Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of the innumerable forms of expression of a vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. Any crossing of the two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parents but not as high as the higher one; consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of nature for a higher.

breeding of all life now separate from but closely tied to the racial ideology that Hitler presented in mine Camp was also this idea of leanr or living space. The notion that a revitalized and strong Germany would need extra land to support its growing Aryan population. According to Hitler lean's Ram would come in two phases, the first being a Reclamation of German territory lost following World War I, such as the city of Danzig in Poland, and the absorbing of German-dominated foreign territories, such as the sudaan land in Czechoslovakia, and the entirety of Austria. From there lands would be demanded in the east, and if it wasn't given, it would be taken by force on the want to eventually take fresh Land from the East. Hitler wrote The Following quote, and so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-war period. We take up where we broke off 600 years ago. We stop the endless German movement of the South and West and turn our gaze toward the land.

in the east, at long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil policy of the future. Now beyond that, Hitler also introduced the idea of Führerprinzip or leader principle, the idea that German politics should be dominated by a single all-powerful executive figure. This was a complete rejection of democratic governance and a blatant endorsement of a totalitarian state. To explain this idea, he wrote the following: They never understood that the strength of a political party lies by no means in the greatest possible independent intellect of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow the intellectual leadership. The decisive factor is the leadership itself. He then went on to explain why this would supposedly produce a better leader than a democratically elected one: To quote, the leadership principle may be imposed on an organized political community in a dictatorial way, but this principle can become a living reality only by passing through the stages that are necessary for its own evolution. These stages lead from the smallest cell of the state.

organism upwards. As its bearers and representatives, the leadership principle must have a body of men who have passed through a process of selection lasting over several years, who have been tempered by the hard realities of life, and thus rendered capable of carrying the principle into practical effect. Hitler's writings in Mein Kampf are also rabidly anti-Marxist, as to him, Marxism was nothing but an instrument of Jewish subversion and a weapon they used to wage war on traditional culture. To explain this idea, he wrote the following, quoting again: The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the Eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus, it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from Humanity the premise of its existence and its culture as a foundation of the universe. This Doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. Now, another huge aspect of Hitler's

ideas in mind. Camp is that of social Darwinism, i.e., the application of Darwinian principles to human societies. To explain this, he wrote the following: He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. That last bit, has not the right to exist, was where Hitler's social Darwinist ideas in mind Camp really go off the deep end. Because he was not being hyperbolic, no, he really believed that those who were weak, those who didn't wish to fight as he put it, not only ought to be exterminated but should be exterminated. Not to worry, however, because if you happen to think such a position is just a tad extreme, and we're going to go out on a limb here and guess that's basically all of you watching, hopefully anyway, Hitler put a rebuttal of your concerns in the next paragraph, quoting again: Such a saying may sound hard, but after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is a

lot of him who believes that he can overcome nature and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease are her rejoinders. Now, obviously, we have only been able to scratch the surface of Mein Kampf's contents here to give you an idea. The copy of Mein Kampf we were referencing is 636 pages long, but still, it's enough to give you a foundational idea of what it's all about. In a nutshell, Germans were the best, Northern Europeans were a close second, basically everyone else was judged with some variation of evil, with Jews and slaves being the worst. And to give Germany its rightful place at the top of this racial totem pole, it needed a strong nationalistic dictator not afraid of using violence to impose his will on foreign Nations. So with that done, let's now move on to look at some of the wider context around the book. Mein Kampf was primarily written within the confines of Landsberg, a fortress-like prison located in the state of Bavaria in Germany. When we say prison though, we really do mean

it like this because while Hitler was banged up, while writing, conditions were far from the squalled hell hole you might initially imagine. And actually, it was quite nice. The reason for this was that Landsberg had political prisoners, ones that tended to not be terribly violent, and above all else, were very well connected and usually wealthy. Hitler, for his part, wasn't very wealthy at all in that period and was, in fact, basically destitute. But he was very well connected and thus he found himself in a nice cushy political prison. For his part, he soon got to enjoy conditions as luxurious as any other inmates because you see, Hitler was a sex symbol to Nazi-leaning women, and they duly made sure that their booie bear got all the luxuries they thought he deserved while he was banged up. And we're not joking or being hyperbolic here. Hitler was a sex symbol. That was an actual thing. And if you feel nauseous upon hearing that, don't worry, it's entirely normal. The writing itself took place almost

exclusively in cell 7 Hitler cell. We say writing like that because actually very little of Mein Kampf script was actually penned by Hitler's hand. Instead, it was largely penned by Rudolph Hess, Hitler's long-term friend and future Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, and EML Maurice, Hitler's driver and friends, both of whom had been incarcerated alongside him. The manuscript was produced this way because Hitler preferred to let his ideas flow naturally, which in real terms meant him pacing up and down his cell as he ranted and raved, with one of his two friends scribbling down the that came out of his mouth. This also makes the book a very difficult read, but also due to its absolutely God-awful, bordering on nonsensical at times, literary structure. It's not easy, but why was Hitler arrested in the first place? Well, let's go on to discuss that a bit more. Now Hitler found himself in prison because on the 8th of November 1923, he launched

a coup against the Bavarian government. It all began in the Burgerbrau in Munich, where Hitler burst into fired a pistol into the air and announced the national Revolution is broken out. The hall is surrounded by 600 men. Nobody is allowed to leave. After a rousing speech, Hitler turns the crowd in the beer hall onto his side, and from then it was on. The next day, after Nazi paramilitaries have been allowed the time to arm and assemble, they would march on the government, and that was exactly what they did. On the morning of November the 9th, Hitler set out with 2,000 of his most fanatical supporters to march on the Bavarian Defense Ministry. He made it as far as down the road until he was blocked by 130 armed officers who promptly gunned down 15 Nazis and ended the coup. Hitler fled the scene and was arrested 2 days later and sentenced to 5 years imprison for his part in the coup, thus bringing him to Landsberg. This gave Hitler a lot of time to think his coup.

had been a sloppy disaster, and actually, the more he thought about it, he realized his entire party was a sloppy disaster, being little more than a vaguely coordinated ensemble of differing nationalist splinter factions, unified only by anti-Semitism and a certainty that they really love Germany. That had to change, he thought, and so he put his mind to penning Mein Kampf, a tone that would help both the party and him in a number of ways. Its first role was to serve as a political blueprint, a comprehensive guide, and ideological manifesto for the National Socialist movement. His reasoning for this was simple enough; he wanted all Nazis to be singing from the same song sheet upon his release so that rather than bickering among themselves on the final points of anti-Semitism and nationalism, they could instead stand shoulder-to-shoulder as a unified and therefore stronger political force. But in addition to being an ideological manifesto, Mein Kampf was also intended to be a practical one, one that plainly laid out what Hitler would actually do in terms to fix Germany should he ever come.

to power beyond that Hitler also WR M Camp to legitimize the Nazi agenda. With the work intended to provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for the policies and atrocities that would no doubt be enacted if an nszi regime did come to power. By framing his ideas around a historical and moral narrative, he was no longer just a Nutter screaming rapidly about the Jews and yearning for the past days of German Glory. No, now he was a Justified and legitimate political thinker, and his radical views were actually totally normal. Some of Hitler's motives for writing mine Camp were much more personal and selfish, however. Remember how we mentioned that Hitler was flat broke around this time? Yeah, well, it turns out Hitler was bitterly aware of that fact himself, and it wasn't something that sparked much joy for him. And so, through mine Camp, he saw an opportunity. Like a professor that sets his own book as essential reading, Hitler would produce the essential text for national socialism and make sure that all the Reich marks at generated in sales went straight into his personal

bank account. This made him a wealthy man almost immediately upon publication, and a very wealthy one after he came to power, and it became mandatory reading for the entire country. We ultimately have no idea how much money he earned from sales of the books, but we do know that it was enough for him to move into one of Munich's most luxurious apartments in 1929, fund a fleet of Mercedes for himself, and never have to draw a salary in the 12 years that he ruled Germany. Now, as for when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, there isn't too much to say here. Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg on the 1st of April 1924, and the book's penning began shortly after that. Volume one was drafted by early 1925 after approximately eight months of work and published in July of that same year. Volume 2 was finished in early 1926 and first published in December 1926. Hitler himself was released from prison on the 20th of December 1924, having only

completed 264 days of his 5-year sentence. This may be thinking that what we told you earlier about the book being penned almost entirely in Landsberg Prison is a load of old Hokum, but worry not. Historians typically agree that the bulk of the manuscript was written while he was incarcerated, with the time after his release being committed mostly to editing, and so Landsberg Prison is generally accepted as where it was written. So where do we begin when it comes to assessing the impact of something like Mein Kampf, a book which wrought so much misery and destruction on the world? We might be inclined to start by measuring it in the same way that we measure the impact of any book, by the number of copies that it sold, but this proved somewhat difficult in the case of Mein Kampf. As would you believe it, it turns out that Nazi Germany was somewhat motivated to overinflate and lie about the number of copies it's holy text hawked off. Despite this, however, historians have managed to filter the

truth from the nonsense largely and now largely agree that around 12 million copies were sold by the time the Nazi Empire came crumbling down in 1945. With the vast majority being German language texts and comparatively limited numbers in other languages, with the early translations typically being in the international languages of the day, i.e., English, and the languages of fascist sympathetic Nations and Allied Nations, such as French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and Japanese. Postwar, the rights to Mein Kampf became the property of the Bavarian State, and they continued to allow it to be printed for scholarly reasons. They also facilitated its translations into many more languages, and so as a result of both of those things, that 12 million number has likely crept up a few more million or so. But we're not sure of the exact numbers. To look at the impact of Mein Kampf through a purely commercial lens as we would many other books would not only be inappropriate, but it would be downright insulting to the memory of the lives that it played a part in.

ending, and the misery it played on a huge part of the world. So let us now take a moment to take note of and remember the great evil that this toome wrought upon the world. The book vement anti-semitic and racial ideology contributed significantly to the climate of hatred and discrimination against those considered non- Aran. It legitimized and laid the groundwork for discriminatory racial laws, such as the nurburg laws, and eventually actualized genocide in the form of the Holocaust, within which up to 20 million slaves, Jews, Poes, Serbs, Romani, and slavin were slaughtered in the most horrendous of circumstances for no other reason than their race. Included in that figure was also Freemasons, the disabled, and homosexuals, all of whose deaths were promoted and legitimized by mcom. The ideas of the book also directly led to the start of World War II, the single most deadly conflict in human history, in which as many as 80 million people died. This isn't an exaggeration either. Mine

Camp wasn't just a token bit of Nazi window dressing. That sat around looking pretty while Hitler did his thing. No, it was a vital player in the sequence of events that led to war. Without mine Camp carrying Hitler's message of expansion to the East and reclaiming lost territory to the masses. He never would have been able to gain Mass popular support of the return of the Danzig to Germany. And when that didn't work politically neither would he had the German populace worked up into such a frenzy stuper. That they would fervently support military action against Poland to see it Returns the very action that plunged the world into war. Ultimately uncomfortable though topics such as this are. And as much as we may quite understandably wish to bury our heads in the sand and forget about them. We cannot allow ourselves to do so. Like we said back at the beginning of today's video. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And only by understanding the horrors of Nazism can we ever hope to stop it from

Mein Kampf: History's Most Evil Book

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