Sick said:
"Know your enemy." -- derived from Sun Tzu.
Almost no one read Mein Kampf when it was written. One could argue that if more people had, it might have shed some light onto the motivations and intentions of Hitler and the Third Reich, and possibly have prevented a great deal of suffering.
Funny....you could say the same thing about the Patriot Act. Off topic, I know...but interesteing.
Banning books is self-defeating. The so-called index of books banned by the Catholic church has always provided good and free advertising for the authors.
I have a copy of Mein Kampf. Its a ranting grab bag of hysterical nonsense and incitations to murder with perhaps a handful of sensible ideas scattered here and there. But it was mandatory reading under the Third Reich. Incidentally it did not deter the german people. And the protocols are a dead horse that was beaten for decades. Its fraud was exposed so often that nothing should remain, yet there are always people ready to exhume it. Certainly there will be people that will exult at the reedition of Adolf's bible.
So what. What do we expect. Just look at how people continue to gesticulate and killl around the bible and the koran, which are full of similar nonsense. We still live in a very primitive world.
i don't think any books should be banned. it doesn't matter how racist it is, it doesn't matter if 99% of the population disagrees with it... well, at least it shouldn't. if it was put out there in the first place, why can't we have it now?
and like a bunch of people said, even if they do ban it, there's always the black market... it's common knowledge that if someone tells you not to do something, you are going to feel like 5 times more obligated to do it.
"Serious discussion rather than demonisation." Interesting. So, what's the deal? Is Professor Moeller an honest academic, or an antisemite in disguise?
Who cares? Whether or not his stated arguments conceal shitty motives, they're right.
Banning books, ideas, plants, liquids and powders only makes those more appealing to uninformed idiots trying to "be cool and rebelious". If someone wants to read mein kampf and chooses to believe its nonsense, so be it. The book did not murder 6 million people, nor would Hitler have been able to pull it off either, if the people of Europe had not made their mind up on whom to blame for their own bloody failure as a nation. Banning it does not solve the issue of hatred against the jews.
Saying, "Sure, you can buy Jewish Peril: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on Amazon, but just so you know, it's a total pack of lies," has got to be more effective than turning the title into contraband. No matter what, these books are going to remain in circulation, so the more that we can expose them as lies, fabrications, and angry rants, the greater chance we'll have of diffusing their power.
I'm confused, do you want to diffuse their power or defuse it?
40
erleichda
Germany
May 2003
JUL 31, 2007 02:05 AM
Interesting. Until today I was under the impression that "Mein Kampf" is actually banned in Germany under that law which sanctions hatespeech. Turns out it's not. It's neither illegal to own it nor to buy or sell it, providing it's an old issue, not one published in germany after '45. The bavarian state holds the publishing right and simply refuses to have it published and goes after everyone who illegaly publishes it.
In 2015 it will enter the public domain, and can legally be published by anybody.
Some comments here do give the impression that this is about suppressing or mystifying the content of "Mein Kampf". That's not the case. Going through school in germany there is one subject the will come up again and again and again. And that's nationalsocialism, WWII, the holocaust, the rise of the nazis, their ideology and so on. I remember reading excerpts from "Mein Kampf" in school more than once. You can buy commented excerpts and that's really all anyone needs, because as mentioned by a few people, the whole thing is barely readable.
I guess what will happen is this. In 2015 someone will go ahead and publish the thing, unabridged, uncommented. Thereby they will clearly break the aforementioned law against hatespeech and within a very short while that newly published version of the book will actually be banned. And whoever thought it was a good idea to give neonazis a book to wank over will lose a lot of money.
That's not to say the contained information will be banned. It never was. As I said, history classes will still be going over this again and again.
brooklynhero
Brooklyn, NY
October 2006
JUL 29, 2007 08:19 AM