THOUGHTS ON ADOLF HITLER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I first read Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, and other works on him during my graduate school. He did not make much impression on me so I did not really think much about him. However, three weeks ago, I had an urge to read him, again. I went to Barnes and Noble’s Bookstore and bought the Houghton-Mifflin 1971 edition of the book (it was originally written in 1925 while Hitler was in Landsberg prison).

This is the kind of book you do not freely choose to read. The language is, to put it mildly, crazy! I have never seen anything quite like it in the English language. The phraseology and sentence pattern is unique to the man; it is not how English speaking folks write.

A few pages into the book and you begin to wonder about the mental health of this man (to satisfy my question, I read Robert Waite’s psychoanalytic perspective on Hitler, see further Reading, below).

I have been told by those who read the work in German that it is also considered an odd and eccentric manner of writing. The man wrote in his own way, not in the standard way educated folks write.

After reading the book, I felt a need to write a review of it, as I write on significant books whose ideas I want to share with friends. But how do you summarize 700 pages in two pages of review? That would not do justice to the book. What I decided to do is choose topics from the book and write on them. I will do so in several essays.

As I alredy said Adolf Hitler dropped out of school at age 14 and roamed the streets of Vienna, Austria reading newspapers, doing odd jobs, doing some paintings which he sold on the streets, and living at flop houses, homeless shelters. He educated his self by reading whatever grabbed his fancy.

For example, when he decided to understand politics, he took to going to the Austrian Parliament (Reichsrat) and did so for a period of two years. Having observed politicians at their Talkfest House he came up with his views on parliamentary democracy, views that I will explore in this essay.

My feeling is that Hitler should not have dropped out of school. If he had stayed at school, say, through a bachelor’s degree and feasted his eyes on studies and was guided by teachers he would have had a different understanding of politics. As it is, he was untutored and formed his opinions by reading pamphlets, newspapers and watching politicians at work.

I tell you what; there is really no alternative to systematic learning unless you want to produce an undisciplined but genius level man like Hitler.

In today’s psychological language, we would say that the teenage Adolf Hitler had what is called oppositional defiant disorder. Such children feel like they know it all and do not feel a need to listen to their parents and teachers at school. They hate those in authority positions and want to defy them. Many of them do what Hitler did, drop out of school and live on the margin of society. Alone they fancy that they are smarter than everyone else.

Since they tend to have high IQ they are not merely deluding themselves but have some truth in what they say.

Opposition defiant kids do not like to take orders from their parents and teachers. Hitler barely could tolerate his father’s (Alois) presence although he liked that he had a good job; he was a Customs officer.

Upon his father’s death, he bamboozled his mother into letting him go to Vienna (they lived at Linz, what today we would call a suburb of Vienna).

At Vienna he applied to get into an arts high school for he fancied that he is an artist, he liked to draw houses and apparently was very good at it. He submitted his art work to an arts high school and for some reason was not admitted.

He believed that his work was very good and did not like it that he was rejected. He felt angry. He then looked into the administration of the school and came to the conclusion that the teachers and administrators were mostly Jews.

Ah, he said, he was rejected by a bunch of Jews who do not know what art is all about. Please do not cavalierly reject students, especially if they are talented; they do get angry and if they really want to get at you will do so.

The boy did not get into the type of secondary school that he wanted to get into and had nothing else to do. At this time his mother, Klara, died and, apparently, left him some money.

He lived off that money for a while, reading newspapers and political pamphlets and educating his self on the city of Vienna’s politics (his observations on the Mayor of the City of Vienna. Dr. Karl Lueger is what you would expect to come from a graduate student not from a mere teenager with no formal education beyond elementary school).

The teenage Adolf did some painting and hawked them on the streets of Vienna; selling one gave him enough money to live on for a while. When he ran out of money he did some laborer job (and observed that type of work and noted the oppression of labor by capital and formulated ideas on what to do about it).

During his free time he went to the Reichsrat, Parliament and sat in the spectators section observing the proceedings. (I did a lot of that during my college days, observing the English House of Commons and the US Congress at work, so I know exactly what the man is talking about. You get the impression that you are watching clowns at work!)

At the time that the boy Adolf was observing the Vienna Parliament (he did not give dates but I assume that since he said that he was under age twenty, and was born in 1889, at Braunau Am Inn, Austria, this would be during the first decade of the twentieth century), Austria and Hungary had what was called the dual monarchy.

The Empire of Austria-Hungary included many Slavic lands, such as what is today called Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo and other south Slav lands.

Representatives from these lands came to the Vienna Parliament to talk about how to govern the dual monarchy. Many of these folks did not speak German so it must have been interesting watching them trying to communicate with each other in the German speaking Austrian Parliament.

The Parliament apparently was designed along the lines of the English Parliament, with a lower house and an upper house. The lower house did most of the decision making. The Prime minister and his cabinet (from the majority party) were in the lower house.

Hitler paid particular attention to the Social Democratic Party of Austria and came to hate them with passion…more on his hatred of Social Democrats in another essay.

The teenage Hitler observed these folks talk, reach decisions and sign off on them and then take the Parliamentary Bill to the Emperor to sign off on it before it becomes law, just as the English Monarch accents Bills approved by the House of Commons and House of Lords before they become law.

Hitler said that he observed this charade and it turned his stomach and made him literally vomit. He came to hate parliamentary democracy with venom. The man had contemptuous attitude towards parliamentary democracy.

Let us now describe what he saw in parliamentary democracy that turned him off. The man may not be entirely wrong. Please remember what Winston Churchill said about democracy: he said that it is the worst type of government except that there is no better form of government.

This is a lesson that Hitler should have learned if he had formal education. For all its problems, there really is no good alternative to democracy unless you prefer dictatorship, as Hitler apparently preferred!

In Westminster type Parliamentary Democracy, or, as Americans like to call it, Jeffersonian Democracy, the country is divided into constituencies. Each Member of Parliament is elected from a constituency.

Political parties form and compete to be elected in the various constituencies. There are periodic elections, say, every five years. Parties and their members compete and the party that garners the majority seats wins the election and is invited by the Monarch to form the next government.

The party leaders of the party with majority in the new Parliament become the cabinet. In the British system the leader of the party becomes the Prime Minister and his second in commands become the various ministers; such as minister of foreign affairs, minister of defense, minister of finance (exchequer, chancellor), interior minister, and minister of education and so on.

A typical Western cabinet has about twenty four ministers (and numerous junior ministers). The prime minister and his minsters are members of Parliament (they are called Front Benchers, whereas the other members of Parliament are called Backbenchers).

Parliament meets weekly (or daily as necessary…they have summer recess). The prime minister weekly gives the members of parliament a report on what is going on in his administration; he highlights what each ministry has done that week. Members of parliament thereafter ask the prime minster questions. The Speaker of the House moderates this questioning and answering session.

In Parliaments, members debate the issues of the day. They flog every issue on the table and try to reach a consensus on what the government should do about it.

Generally, every Member of Parliament has the right to introduce a Bill for legislation. In actual fact what happens is that most Bills are introduced by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.

A Bill is introduced by been given to the speaker. The clerk of the House reads it to the entire house (first reading). It is then sent to the Parliamentary committee that is responsible for issues that the Bill touches.

The committee, usually composed of about twenty members drawn from the two parties in Parliament, their numbers reflecting their standing in parliament, the majority party has more members in each standing or ad hoc committee, sets a date to discuss the Bill. They call for witnesses to provide information on it.

Lobbyists come and testify in favor or against the Bill. After months of wrangling the committee votes on the Bill. Before voting on it they probably had amended it several times to take into consideration what the various interest groups desire. If the majority of the committee votes in favor of the Bill it is sent to the Speaker. (Please see Roberts Rule of Order.)

The Speaker schedules it for another reading. The Bill is read and the members of the House debate it.

Further amendments are made on it. This process may take weeks or months. When finally all members have had their say the Speaker schedules a vote on it.

It is voted on. If it passes, that is, more members vote for it than voted against it, it is sent to the Upper House (in England called the House of Lords) who repeats the process, although their accent is not required. Generally, the upper house votes in favor of any Bill the prime minister and his cabinet desire passed into law. Their only function is really to delay rushing Bills into law to give the lower house more time to think about it and make changes where necessary.

When the upper house has approved the Bill it is then sent to the Monarch to sign it. When she signs it, a formality for in constitutional monarchies she cannot oppose any Bill approved by government, it becomes part of the laws of the land. It is published in appropriate government gazettes and books on statutory laws of the land.

Making laws in this manner is not for the faint hearted, it is an ugly process; it requires fighting by many members of Parliament and allied interest groups interested in passing the proposed law or killing it.

Laws are usually a result of compromises; members of Parliament bargain with each other, making tradeoffs; if you support my bill, I will support your bill or do you some other favor. This logrolling may take too long before a consensus is reached.

Making laws is war by other means (in his famous book, On War, von Clausewitz said that wars are politics by other means).

The alternative to getting most people’s consent in making laws is to alienate many people and if you do so you would quickly realize how fragile the human polity is. A determined group can fight laws and initiate a civil war.

The democratic way of making laws is in contradiction to how dictators make laws. In Joseph Stalin’s USSR, the dictator’s whim becomes the law of the land. Obviously, it is quicker and easier to make laws in totalitarian-authoritarian dictatorships. But here, you need a monolithic bureaucracy to implement your public policies and make sure that they are obeyed; you arrest and punish opposition to your policies and laws.

Adolf Hitler saw the lengthy process of making laws in parliamentary democracies and contrasted it to what he called German Democracy. By German democracy he meant what came to be in post 1848 uprisings in Germany.

In 1871 Otto Von Bismarck united the various German dukedoms into a federation and formed a Parliament that was beholden to the Kaiser, the type that Hitler liked. The iron fisted chancellor simply desired a Bill passed into law and the members of the Reichstag at Berlin rubber stamped it. He had no tolerance for lengthy debates or criticisms.

Hitler liked the efficiency of one man ruling the human polity. He liked the ability of a leader to decide on what he wants done and passed it into law and used the law enforcement apparatus of the state to immediately implement the law and punish dissent.

Dictatorship is efficient; in fact, during times of emergency, such as wars, most Western democracies tend to revert to some form of dictatorship.

During the American civil war Abraham Lincoln sometimes ruled by administrative fiat. It takes a long time to get things done in parliaments. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation in 1863 by his self. If he waited for Congress to do so it probably would not have done so to today! By the same token, President Harry Truman used executive order to end desegregation in the US military. I doubt that Congress would have done so, even to today!

It took the US Supreme Court to end desegregation at Americans schools via the Brown v Topeka, Kansas Board of education ruling in 1954. Even then Congress did not want to fund efforts to desegregate schools, nor did President Dwight Eisenhower vigorously implement it; it waited until President Kennedy to do so.

Hitler wants a situation where the German nation elected a Fuhrer, a leader, and has him take the responsibility of governing the land as he sees fit. He is to be decisive and does what he has to do and if the people do not like what he did they would vote him out of office. That seems nice, isn’t it?

But what did Hitler do when he was elected the German Chancellor in 1933? He immediately found a ruse to dissolve the Reichstag (his agents burned down the Parliamentary building and blamed it on his hated enemies, Marxists) and ruled as a dictator. He was the German dictator for twelve years. His whim was the law.

He engaged in wars that anyone with knowledge of wars would have advised against. For example, why fight two frontal wars at the same time, the western and eastern fronts. If he had concentrated on the Eastern front he probably would have marched all the way to the Bering Sea and taken over the USSR. But he had to also fight France and in doing so brought Britain and the USA into the war.

There was simply no way that only Germany could defeat all the Western powers. Despite his delusion of his Aryan superiority he could not do it; for one thing the French, English and Americans are also Aryans and could do well what Germans did.

The point is that if the man had parliamentary opposition he would not have made some of the blunders he made during the Second World War.

It pays to have opposition parties offering different points of view to what government wants to do. This is a lesson that the uneducated Hitler did not learn. He was like a boy fascinated by the prospect of him wielding absolute power and thus playing god, and not appreciating what human beings are capable of doing to each other.

As Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) observed, people are predatory animals. You have to get their cooperation for you to get anything done. If you ignore people’s opinions you will live to regret it. Some of them would organize and oppose you and do whatever is necessary to bring you down and they will take you down.

In politics, the first rule is recognizing human vanity; people have pride and if you ignore it they could kill you. Do not mess with folk’s sense of personal and group prestige. People go to war when you prick their vanity and prestige.

Dictatorships may be efficient during wars but they generally do not last long. Study them in all past empires and you see that they do not last long.

The Nazis lasted only twelve years before the enraged Russians that he had called sub human beings took him down. Never call your enemies degrading names, Sun Tzu said in the Art of War.

Persia, Rome and the USSR collapsed because they ignored the will of the opposition. Donald Trump’s White Nationalist Party, aka the Republican Party is about to learn the lesson of human nature. If they keep disregarding the views of black and brown people they are going to have a civil war in their hands, a war that may end the USA.

There is simply no alternative to parliamentary democracy. In emergencies some decisive dictatorial measures may be necessary but in peace time democracy is the best form of government in the human polity.

Post Script:

In the coming days and weeks I will write on other ideas from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I will write on his childish views on the race issue and his equally childish foreign policy of killing off all Slavs and taking over their lands, Lebensraum (the fool apparently expected Russians to stay idle and have him come kill them only to learn that Russians are ready to kill him, too), and so on.

To more fully understand Hitler I read the below books. You might want to read them to follow my discourse on Adolf Hitler, the crazy boy genius. The man was developmentally stuck at about age fourteen; he did not attain adulthood emotionally.

By the way, most white racists are stuck at about age fourteen and are not adult human beings! Their racists’ views are the views of children not adults. Would you say that Donald Trump is an adult? Developmentally, he is a nine year old boy, a pathological narcissist and sociopath at that!

Bullock, Alan (1962). Hitler, a Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row.

Speer, Albert (1995). Inside The Third Reich. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.

Shirer, William (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Trevor-Roper, HR (2000). Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944. New York: Enigmas Books.

Waite, Robert (1977). The Psychopathic God, Adolf Hitler. New York: New American Library.