Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf, an Analysis

Chapter 3 – Part I

by Richard E. Noble

In chapter four of Mein Kampf, Adolf continues with his theories of correct population control. Controlling the birth rate of your nation is unnatural, as he has just pointed out, and if you try, nature will have her revenge, by eventually destroying your race. If you do as the French - using birth control methods - you will limit the natural growth of your nation, and consequently confine it to a limited territory, which will eventually lead to its conquest by an overpopulating nation of lesser culture. So controlling the size of your nation by birth control methods is out. This method also leads to other ‘unnatural’ hazards.
“...Because once propagation as such has been limited and the number of births reduced, the natural struggle for existence, that allows only the very strongest and healthiest to survive, is replaced by the natural urge to ‘save’ at any price also even the weakest and even sickest, thus planting the germ for a succession that is bound to become more and more miserable the longer this derision of Nature and of her will is continued...”
Again, Adolf has this misconception with the term ‘fittest’. If the fittest meant the physically strongest, then certainly the Dinosaurs, or the gorillas, or the lions, or bears would be ruling the planet earth. But the strongest creatures do not rule the planet, the cleverest, or brightest, or most intelligent in an organizing way has so far been the conqueror. Man, not “A” man, but Mankind dominates the planet at the moment and he seems to owe it not to brute strength but to his ability to organize and form political units. How it all began, I really don’t know, but if we follow Adolf s theory to its root source, we come back to a Rambo type cave man who controls the cave man world in some mysterious individual way. This, of course, is impossible, at least, it seems impossible to me. How would we then account for the development of societies, and nations, or communities?
A one man Rambo, and his ‘woman’ and offspring, might account for a family, or clan, but how does he evolve from there? If brute force and power are the only qualities at Adam Rambo’s reach, I don’t even see how he could propagate the earth. From what I know of woman, they don’t work that way. My guess is that Adam Rambo would have been Bobbitized very early on in his career.
On a second note, if Darwin coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, I am sure that he regrets the remark. He would much rather have said, ‘the survival of the most adaptable’, I have no doubt.
I was reading a History of Civilization book a while back and the author made this statement or something to this effect. He said that the family unit of the human species developed because of the year-round sexual availability of the female. I was never able to get past that statement to continue reading the book. What does the year-round sexual availability of a woman have to do with the establishment of a family? We had lots of year-round sexually available woman in my neighborhood when I was growing up but this did not lead me to start a family. I can’t even extrapolate a scenario from the statement. What has the year-round sexual availability of the female got to do with anything? Now you say in some areas of the animal kingdom, females go into ‘heat’ periodically. And so? Some form family units and some don’t.
My explanation of the evolution of the family unit would be explained by the bond of love that exists between a man and a woman. If there were no such thing as love and only lust, for example, the woman would make lustful contact with a male, then retire to a cave and breed her young, and exactly how she would do that - without help from other creatures - I can’t really say. But for some reason the physically weaker female, especially in her reproducing condition, brings on the supportive, compassionate, protective, loving qualities of the male (some males). And through these qualities of love, engendered within the male, a family results. Without these feelings of compassion and love primarily on the part of the male, there would be no family. And this fact of life in the evolution of the human species is as true today as it ever was historically. Love is the basic root quality that establishes the family, and the community, and the society. Love is the glue that binds us one to the other, and when we lose it, we crumble as a family, as a group, as a society, as a nation. The notion that the strong should not take care of the weak is a denial of the basic human condition.
The mother takes care of her weakling, incapable child. The Dad takes care of his temporarily incapacitated wife. The whole human condition is involved in the strong taking care of the less strong. The self-sufficient providing for the insufficient. Even War is not a battle of the survival of the fittest, entirely, as any soldier will tell you. It is one man backing up another at the risk of his own life. It is the strong protecting the weak, and often the strong dying on behalf of the weak. For the strong to deny their obligation to the weaker among them is truly an act of cowardice, and ingratitude.
The Adolf philosophy is not only a cruel philosophy, but one also filled with ingratitude, cowardice, selfishness and a basic denial of the human instinct.
Adolf also seems to down play his own mental capacities. His ability to organize, manipulate, propaganda-ize and utilize others in his cause. A weak, handicapped man in a wheelchair with superior mental abilities of the above type could out-survive even Adolf at his own game of ‘the survival of the fittest’. In fact, just such a man did, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had the help of another old codger walking with a cane, Winston Churchill. Not to mention, that a simple minded half-wit, with a mail order rifle could have blown his head off and ended the whole damn thing. One of the very types that Adolf would have deemed unfit and on the roster to be put to sleep in one of his death factories of the future.
The whole problem of the human condition, according to Adolf stems from Malthus. Malthus said that food production increases arithmetically, while people population increase geometrically. Adolf, like many, many others is very much occupied with this foolish proposition. (See entry on Malthus on this blog)
“… finally the time comes when it will no longer be possible to satisfy the needs, and famine will have become the eternal companion of such people. Now Nature has to help again and to choose among those she has selected to live, or man will again help himself, that means that he turns to artificial restriction with all the grave consequences for race and species alluded to. [Race will become corrupted by the preservation of the weak. Its territory will become limited and conquerable.] Certainly the time will come, in consequence of the impossibility of adapting the fertility of the soil to the number of the increasing population, when the whole of mankind will be forced to stop the increase of the human race … nature did not reserve this soil in itself for a certain nation or race as reserved territory for the future, but it is land and soil for that people which has the energy to take it and the industry to cultivate it ... He who is the strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favorite child, the right to be the master of existence ... The culturally superior, but less ruthless, races would have to limit, in consequence of their limited soil, their increase even at a time when the culturally inferior, but more brutal and more natural, people, in consequence of their greater living areas, would be able to increase themselves without limit. In other words: the world will therefore, someday come into the hands of a mankind that is inferior in culture but superior in energy and activity. .
Adolf missed the boat again. This is not what will happen, it is what has already happened, and he is one of the distressful parts of it. His whole point here seems to be that the nation with the greatest land area to expand within will be the dominant nation or nations of the future.
“...The greater the amount of room a people has at its disposal, the greater is also its natural protection; because military victories over nations crowded in small territories have always been reached more quickly and more easily, especially more effectively and more completely, than in the cases of states which are terrestrially greater in size .
Obvious exceptions to this idea would have to be both Great Britain and Japan.
Next Adolf goes into the British method of expanding its nation ... colonization. He is pointing out what his country, Germany, has done wrong in the past.
“… Thus there remained but two ways to assure work and bread to the increasing number of people.
3) one could either acquire new soil in order annually to send off the superfluous millions, and thus conserve the nation further on the basis of a self-sustainment, or one could set about,
4) through industry and trade, to produce for foreign consumption and to live on the proceeds.
That means: either territorial policy, or colonial and trade policy.
Both ways were examined, investigated, recommended, and fought, till finally the second one was carried out.
The healthier of the two, of course, was the first.
The acquisition of new land and soil for the settling of the superfluous population has no end of advantages ... Obviously, such a territorial policy, however, cannot find its fulfillment in the Cameroons, for example, but almost exclusively only in Europe. One must coolly and soberly accept the point of view that it certainly cannot be Heaven’s intention to give fifty times as much land and soil of this earth to one nation as compared with another. In this case political frontiers must not keep us away from the frontiers of eternal right. If this earth really has room enough for all to live in, then one should give us the space that we need for living.
One will certainly not like to do this. Then, however, the right of self-preservation comes into effect; and what has been denied to kindness will have to be taken with the fist ...“
Basically Adolf’s conclusion is that of a criminal mentality. If we substitute the concept of money as opposed to soil and land, and interpret his words as a defense of his individual actions rather than as a representative of a group, it becomes more obvious. Adolf is basically saying; If it is true that there is enough money in the world to sustain everybody, then where is my share? If through circumstances beyond what I consider a decent effort, you deny me my share, then I must resort to the basic principle of life, and simply take from those around me what I need for my survival.
If one man thinks like this he is considered a criminal, if ten thousand think like this, we have a revolution, if entire nations think like this, we have war.
But Adolf has here hit upon a truth of the human condition. If the land and the means of sustaining ones existence runs out, or if nature provides insufficient land for its burgeoning population then something has got to give. [A qualification in this scenario would be “sustainable land” – land capable for providing food; not simply space.] Colonization had been the main outlet for the surplus population of Europe, now it was running out and becoming competitive, and this land was not free and empty of human population and cost in lives. So if we look at artificially controlling our population as suicidal, as Adolf does, and colonization as basically the slaughtering of indigent populations, and re-settlement of your own kind, why should one bother building ships to go across oceans, when it would make much more sense to simply seize the contiguous land surrounding one’s nation. This is a difficult argument to deal with, other than to say; if you and your friends try to take my house, I will kill you. And to this attitude, Adolf is in complete agreement.
What has happened in this regard since the time of Adolf is that food production techniques have surpassed anyone’s expectations, and nations have incorporated artificial population control methods and policies. But, in truth, I don’t think that there is any sense in trying to deny the truth of Adolf’s scenario in this regard. It is a problem today, just as it was then. Today we allow peoples of less powerful nations to die in mass numbers, so that we may proliferate those of our ‘own kind’. And even worse than this, backhand annihilation goes on not only for the propagation of ‘our kind’ but for the propagation of an indulgent lifestyle. This is very disconcerting to anyone with a proper conscience. I have no answer at the moment. We all seem to be the captives of our very own systems for survival and national and international economic theories and policies, and no one seems to be able to come up with any realistic, practical alternatives. So at this moment, the prosperous of the world simply turn their heads, or simply deny the responsibility entirely. In this regard, this particular argument of Adolf’s could still be used to rally the unfortunate, and promote hatred towards the better off in our world of today.
Many disagree with even what I have just stated. They contend that Malthus’s theory has never really been the case or the problem. Food production and technology, along with Man’s ingenuity, have out raced the suggested problem. The real problems are economic and social. The world continues to have adequate food supply, they contend, but the problems of distribution, land reclamation, ignorance, economic dogmatism and political rivalry are the true causes of poverty and starvation today. We are not well fed here in America, at the expense of those living in Bangladesh or Afghanistan. They are the cause of their own problems. We and other more successful nations could possibly do more to help them, but they must also be willing to help themselves. This may be truth, but difficult to prove to the starving.