Book Review: Mein Kampf.

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Following someone else’s lead, I decided to spend this week reading my (barely touched) copy of Adolf Hitler’s bestselling autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’.

Firstly, I can tell you that reading this book in Starbucks attracts a lot of unwanted attention. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more poorly written book in my life.

I expected nothing else, of course, and in the introduction (I was reading the Picarus edition), the translator even forewarns the reader that the book is quite laborious and difficult to finish. Hitler’s sentences ‘lack rhythm and poetry’. He stresses the wrong words, leads with the wrong phrases and finishes without conclusions.

The attempts at scientific comment in particular, amount to ranting ignorance.

Here is a representative paragraph:

“Whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture. In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants – who mainly belonged to the Latin races – mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.”

This kind of rambling pub philosophy takes up a good third of the book. The other two thirds are tedious (and often phoney) recollections of childhood and youth.

Still, as with any book of this length, there are occasional flashes of truth, and occasionally, insight. One such moment of clarity is when the Austrian talks about the transient convictions of the general public. About halfway through, the budding despot complains that after a rally in which the audience seemingly accepted his arguments, it would take only a few days for that same crowd to applaud an opposing thesis.

This is (sadly) all too accurate and the process can be observed in any democratic society. Just watch an episode of Question Time to see how fickle the modern crowd can be.

As regards this volume in general, it’s an agonising shame that Europe was once in such a low mood that it accepted this drivel as profound.

D, LDN.

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Thomas Carlyle, Goethe and the Prophet Muhammad.

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Very few writers either merit or can withstand comparison with William Shakespeare. The only two I would dare to suggest are Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.

The first, in his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, demonstrated a perfection in writing that has never been (and may never be) surpassed. The second, in his history of the French Revolution and his essays on Heroism, exposed the wilder possibilities of language, blurring the boundaries of thought and emotion, poetry and prose.

So in the past few months of frantic intra-national diplomacy, it’s been saddening to hear so little about Scotland’s greatest writer. Andrew Marr’s ‘Great Scots’ BBC series surveyed in detail the likes of Hugh Mcdiarmand and James Boswell, but had nothing to say of a man who influenced history in a greater and more dynamic way than either of them.

War leaders and men of power are particularly drawn to Carlyle’s thrilling voice. When the meth-addicted dictator Adolf Hitler lived out his last few days in the Fuhrerbunker, the book at his bedside (which – I’m pleased to say – he never got the chance to finish) was Carlyle’s history of Frederick the Great. On the other side, Sartor Resartus (Carlyle’s satirical novel) was referenced approvingly by the allied commander in the Pacific.

Carlyle’s writing is in some ways alike Wagnerian music. It makes the reader want to become something better than himself. Through its chaotic poetry, it breeds an orderly ambition.

Consider the beauty of the following paragraph:

“Behold therefore, the England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.”

Alongside the connection with Hitler, you may have also heard Carlyle’s name associated with that of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are known to bring him up because of the author’s portrait of the prophet in ‘Heroes, Heroism and the Heroic in History’ – a book advancing the Great Man Theory of history.

The following quote is taken from that work:

“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.”

Other positive comments are forthcoming from the same work. This use (or rather misuse) of Carlyle is typical of Muslim dishonesty. Carlyle, though he admired the impact of any great figure of world-history, retained a more exact part of his intellect for comparative judgement.

“Only a sense of duty could carry a European through the Qur’an.” he wrote in a section of the same book quoted less often by Muslim observers. In that same paragraph, he pronounces the book in general to be a “wearisome confused jumble” and Islam to be greatly lacking relative to his own (fiercely held) Protestant faith.

The same dishonesty that allows Muslims to make use of Carlyle also permits mistreatment of the reputation of Goethe. Regarded by Germans to be the equal of Shakespeare, the polymath Goethe was a notably cosmopolitan figure, run through with a very optimistic kind of xenophilia. His poems took elements from numerous foreign traditions, including in his ‘West-Eastern Divan’ volume, the traditions of the Middle East. That book contains poems which glorify the Prophet of Islam, sometimes comparing him to the giants of Greek and Roman mythologies and more or less (unlike Carlyle) maintaining a positive tone throughout.

However, the truth of the matter is that Goethe (writing in a less-informed age than Carlyle) had very little knowledge of the Middle East and Islam as they actually were (and still are). Indeed, his kindly impressions of the culture of Islam were drawn almost exclusively from the poetry of the Persian (pantheist) Hafiz. This is hardly valid.

More generally, the Muslim longing to find in Western thought a validation for their own historical glories is really quite revealing. Do they concede (even if just inwardly) that the West has the clearer mind and the intellectual upper-hand?

D, LDN

Why is Britain Being Disarmed?

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British army cuts, D-Day, Defence Budget, Defence spending, Defend the modern world, EU Army, EU conspiracy?, European Union, Liberal, Liberal Elite, Liberalism, Lies, UK army, US Army, Weakness, WW11, WWII

It is fairly uncontroversial to remark that continental Europe owes a considerable debt to the British Armed Forces. Despite the tendency of patriotic historians to construct myths about the Second World War, the material which exalts the conduct of soldiers in the D-Day landings or the pilots of the Battle of Britain is rooted in palpable truth. Britain held out after others had long given up, standing bold and alone against the cruellest experiment in political history.

At the close of the war, Germany lay in well-deserved ruins, the territory itself divided in two – one half enslaved to the Communism it had vainly sought to destroy, and the other half humbled to the democracy of which it had vainly sought to take advantage. The French and the Scandinavians, though liberated, were still dulled from the heavy sleep of German bondage. In the fading smoke of the post-war years, Britain’s army was the most highly developed and capable in Europe.

As the cold war took shape and America’s primacy became undeniable, Britain quickly and successfully shifted into its new role as ‘Lieutenant’ to the US ‘General’. In less than a decade, London moved its foreign policy orientation away from the pursuit of colonialism and towards the cooperative defence of Western freedom.

And for many years, we excelled at this role. Britain was among the first Western countries to successfully test a nuclear warhead; the RAF was a leading edge in technical research and radar development, and British bases (the only positive legacy of empire) gave the UK a reach other European states could only dream of.

This splendored history only makes what has happened since it all the more tragic.

Over the past two decades, the British military has been dismantled. The RAF and ground army has declined or been held in stasis even as the world outside has become a far more dangerous place. Our leaders (from Thatcher onward) have felt secure enough to roll back the acquisition of tanks, ground personnel and fighter planes, preferring to direct the military budget into costly electronic, reconnaissance, and guidance systems, as well as monumentally expensive aircraft carriers. While the justifications used for this ‘modernisation’ have been convincing to some, they seem shakier with me every passing year.

As Conservative MP John Baron put it: “(We are) developing expensive bits of kit whilst reducing our manpower and thus ability to deploy force overseas. The old adage of there being no substitute to boots on the ground needs remembering.”

Indeed, what good are aircraft carriers – machines designed for preparatory warfare against a country – if there is no military to impose a lasting decision on that country afterward? There is much more to warfare than bombing, and for illustration, one need only return to the Second World War.

When Dresden was levelled by the RAF and USAF in 1945, nobody – not even the most starry-eyed optimist – would have called the Nazi problem dealt with. Troops are necessary to create a new order and construct a favourable peace. By cutting its numbers so deeply and so quickly, Britain may eventually relax into a state of Luxembourgian irrelevance.

Since it is widely regarded that the death-knell to Britain’s Empire came at Suez in 1956 (by the inability to either suppress Egypt or acquire American backing for doing so), it might be illustrative to speculate what might become of such an adventure today. Have the gaps been plugged? Has Britain got stronger? Have the billions of pounds spent on its military in the intervening period served to redress the problems encountered? On the contrary. Britain’s military today is weaker than that of Egypt by quite some distance.

Would it surprise you to learn that the British army currently possesses less than 500 tanks, and that the army of Egypt boasts more than 3000? How about the fact that the RAF currently operates around 120 4th Generation warplanes, whereas Egypt possesses 240 F-16s? What about the fact that the UK has a combined active and reserve manpower of 300,000 and Egypt over 1 million?

Put simply (and starkly), whereas we were once capable of sustaining the largest Empire in history, we cannot now defeat a mid-sized third-world state.

So who is responsible for this? The most obvious target for the finger of blame is the EU, and the false sense of security a seemingly quiescent Europe provides for our military planners. It is true of course that another war with Germany is a near-impossible prospect and that French animosity has more to do with language-envy and cuisine than a hatred translatable into war.

But the EU security delusion is otherwise extremely naïve. The Brussels experiment is heading for a potentially stormy break-up, the outcomes of which are nearly impossible to predict. Enemies abroad from the continent are not thin on the ground either. In our confrontation with Islamism, we currently face a human resource potential of over one billion.

There are people (usually on the Libertarian right) who perceive a more shadowy reason for Britain’s disarmament, often involving a future ‘New World Order’ in which nation states are levelled to a peaceable parity and a one-world government reigns unchallenged over them all. But if this is a conspiracy, it is very unevenly applied. Germany isn’t getting weaker. France isn’t either. India, China, Turkey, America, Russia – none of these are disarming themselves. In reality no conspiracy. Other countries merely perceive a more dangerous and unstable world than we do.

That might well be of no import were it not for the fact that these countries inhabit the same world as ourselves.

D, LDN.