Mein Kampf Chap. 7 Part 2

By Richard E. Noble

Most people go through life half dead, half alive; half constructive, half destructive; half positive, half negative. Adolf is what I would call a positive-negative personality. Adolf actually tried to make positive qualities out of hate, revenge, vindictiveness, prejudice and even brutality. Much as the Marques de Sade attempted to make sexual abuse, torture, and perversity into a positive good.
We can all find symptoms of this duality of positive and negative within ourselves. We smoke and jog at the same time. We read and study to improve our brain, and then drink excessively in attempts to destroy it. We live safely all week long then on weekends we sky dive, drive motorcycles and fast cars, or climb mountains. I sometimes find myself judging people on how positive they are in their own lives. Are they trying to build or destroy? I also think that good therapy for destructive tendencies is to force oneself to be involved in positive pursuits. Part of the challenge of personal relationships is the battle between positive and negative. She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not.
Most of our psychological love stories are based upon this very theme. People attempting to bring love towards them and at the same time trying to chase it away. When I think of the so called love relationship, or of what we call romance, the puppet show of Punch and Judy always comes to mind. “Oh Judy, Judy, Judy, Judy; I love you. Won’t you come over here and play with me, please, oh please?” Then ... bang! bang! bang! right on the head; the classic story of Doctor Jeckel and Mister Hide by Robert Louis Stephenson. A man artificially torn between the positives and negatives of his personal self Most of us are exactly Doctor Jeckels and Mister Hides.
But, in getting back to the text, we find Adolf once again defending the righteousness of the war, and attributing the current post war problems of the German nation, not to its defeat, per se, but to the treason of the revolutionary, backstabbing, Marxist-Jew who quit the cause when victory for the Germans was near at hand. We, the heroic German soldiers did not lose the war. It was the dreaded October criminals who really defeated Germany. He goes on;
“… Thus in reply to the statement that the lost war is guilty of the German collapse, the following is to be said:
“The loss of the War was certainly of terrible importance to the future of our fatherland, but this loss is not a cause, but in turn, again only a consequence of other causes. That an unfortunate end of this fight for life and death was bound to lead to very disastrous consequences was certainly entirely clear to every sensible and not malicious person, but unfortunately there were also those whose intelligence seemed to be lacking at the right time, or who, contrary to their better knowledge, nevertheless first disputed and denied this truth; these were for the greater part those who, after the realization of their secret wish, now suddenly receive the belated realization of the catastrophe which they helped to bring about. They, therefore, are the culprits of the collapse, and not the lost war, as it now pleases them to say and to believe. For the loss of the war was only the cause of their activity, and not, as they now assert, the result of ‘bad’ leadership. The enemy, too, did not consist of cowards; he, too, knew how to die; his number was, for the first day, greater than that of the German army, his technical armament had the arsenals of the whole world at his disposal; thus the fact that the German victories which were gained by fighting against a whole world during four years were due, with all heroic courage and all ‘organization,’ only to superior leadership, cannot be denied in the face of reality. The organization and the leadership of the German army were the most colossal affair which the earth has ever seen so far. Its deficiencies were within the bounds of general human imperfection as a whole...”
This is a bit confusing to me, but it seems that Adolf is saying here that ‘War’ is not the thing that should be despised here; it is the ‘loss of war’ one should hate. The War was good, the only thing wrong with it, is the fact that we lost. War is good, great, glorious, and heroic. The German people should be proud of their leaders and their soldiers because they battled the whole world and nearly won. If it weren’t for the enemy within their own country, they could have been the victors and the new rulers of all Europe. Once again we have Adolf completely oblivious as to the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ of a thing and concerned solely with the winning or loosing.
My personal belief that all wars are a sad tragedy of the basic human condition, put me at somewhat of a loss here. I see no glory in war only human death and defeat. I see war as a failure among peoples of the world to solve their problems and get along with one another. I can only interpret this as the basic rhetoric of a competitive instinct. I have heard ex-Vietnam veterans utter this same logic, and with the same vindictive for ‘the traitors’ back home, and the ‘American Marxist or Communist or Leftist’ press.
Adolf is obviously the embodiment of a dominant personality. All the conquerors throughout history must be of a similar ilk; Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Constantine etc. I don’t like dominating type people, but yet there are those that consider me dominating. The difference, or a difference between them and me, as I see it, is that I have no desire to control or manipulate the lives of others. I voice my views in defense of my right to live independently, and as a protection against those who, as Adolf, feel they have a right to dominate me.
The enemy, as I see it, is ‘War’ itself. And War is the attempts of Peoples and Nations to solve their problems by violence. So it is plain to see that Adolf and I are at complete odds on this issue. So, what does a man like myself do when confronting a man like Adolf?
Unfortunately, I fight. So where are we? I do not have the courage nor the love and respect for my fellow man, as a Gandhi, or a Christ, to resist passively, or to turn the other cheek. So how do we solve this problem? How do Adolf and I co-exist?
Somehow I and those like me must present stronger logic and defeat those with the Adolf inclination from blooming within the society. Adolf, and those like him could be as dominating as they wished, but if they gained no followers, they could accomplish very little. But how do we pick out the Adolfs from the Gandhis, or the Christs?
Well, one obvious difference is that one preaches of hate and destruction, while the other preaches of love and cooperation. Another is that one speaks of the necessity of War while the other speaks of the futility of War. Adolf pulls no punches here, he isn’t hiding his true motives. He is an outright advocate of War and violence. Obviously ‘his kind’ has an appeal to the belligerent side of mankind.
“...Do nations perish at all by a lost war as such? … The answer to this can be very short: Whenever nations receive in their military defeat the return for their inner corruption, cowardice, and lack of character, in short for their unworthiness. If this is not the case, then the military defeat will become the impulse for a coming greater rise rather than the tombstone of a nation’s existence ... Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an undeserved catastrophe, but rather a deserved punishment by eternal retribution. We more than deserved this defeat ... Had not one in many circles actually expressed joy at the misfortune of the fatherland in the most shameless way? But who does this if he does not really deserve such punishment? Indeed, did one not go even farther and boast of finally having caused the front to retreat? And it was not the enemy who did this, no, no it was Germans who piled such disgrace upon their heads! Did misfortune perhaps hit them unjustly? Since when, however, does one step forward in order to attribute the war guilt to oneself? And this, despite realization and knowledge to the contrary!”
I must once again point out the phrase ‘eternal retribution’. Adolf is a believer in something, and his God, a God of war obviously, has revenged the German people for their cowardice. He has revenged all of the German people for the cowardice of only a few of the German people; the ones who had turned away from victory, and renounced the righteousness of the cause. These are the people who undermined the war effort, defeated the troops in the field, collapsed the government at home, and surrendered the nation to its enemies. Because these Germans had stooped to worshipping a false idol (Marxism and peace) their God had chosen to punish them with servitude, poverty, and the loss of their birthright to a nation.
Does this all sound familiar? And now Moses, I mean Adolf, will lead his people to the Promised Land via the battlefield, of course. I hate to say this but here again

I must fault the preconditioning of Religion for setting the groundwork for the ready acceptance of an unfounded logic.
Religion convinces its followers to accept a course of action based on faith, and this faith should be adhered to even above reason. Religion convinces its followers to believe in a God whose existence cannot be substantiated, or proven. So Religion is basically founded upon an unconfirmed suspicion. From this unconfirmed suspicion Religion then proceeds to establish a foundation of principals, supposedly provided by, from and directly through this Unconfirmed Suspicion. And this is achieved primarily through a mystical and divine revelation.

Talk about a house built on a weak foundation?
My belief is that if a person can accept this notion as a truth, then this person’s commonsense has been undermined, and the groundwork has thus been set for almost any kind of outrageous thinking on any subject. If one can believe in an illogical, irrational God, then one has to ask what is beyond his believing possibilities.
Adolf, though indirectly, continues to tap into this fertile, already cultivated ground of Divine interpretation of events. The Bible has already set the ground work for a vengeful and malicious and abusive God who will punish and destroy nations for any number of illogical and emotional transgressions. And of course, no one ever hears from God directly, but only through his divinely inspired agents. I think that it is becoming clear that Adolf considers himself as some sort of Prophet. As he said earlier, to defeat a religious belief, you must replace it with a stronger one. I think that Adolf is making up his own religion.
It is also difficult to understand why Adolf is working so hard here to shift the burden of blame away from the army, but on the following page we have a very revealing footnote.
[“After the War a strange frenzy of jubilation was indulged in by various groups of Germans. There was dancing all night in the streets and villages and towns; delirious welcomes to homecoming sweethearts shocked the sedate. The German government sent emissaries to welcome troops returning to Berlin and to invite their support in putting the new government on a firm basis; but few consented to stay, and those who did were normally soon out of control. Soldiers who took up quarters in the Berlin Schloss at Liebknecht’s behest re-emerged decked in the ex-Kaiser’s uniforms, their pockets stuffed with silver from the Imperial cupboards. Most striking detail of all, Berlin was on Christmas Eve, 1918, perilously close to the brink of revolution. The government had no armed forces on which it could rely; the revolutionaries had amassed considerable strength. But as if at a prearranged signal, everybody went off to celebrate and the crisis was over. For years nationalist referred to these things as indications of the base qualities that were hidden in the German psyche ... On both sides orgies of lust and madness, for which Europe could hardly parallel in history, marked the end of the conflict. In Germany, American and British observers saw passers-by ... beset officers, tear the insignia from their shoulders, and bash their sabres against the pavement. One observer wrote in his diary ... ‘there will be a reaction against these things, and it will not be pleasant to contemplate’...”]
One can only read this and think of the terrible treatment of Vietnam veterans returning from that disaster. I remember being totally shocked to even hear of these things. It was beyond my comprehension how a nation could ‘demand’ military service and unwavering loyalty to its causes and then spit in the faces of its returning soldiers. But this footnote informs us that we were not the first nation to treat our soldiers thusly. What a scar this must leave on any loyal soldiers mind. To risk his life, and see his friends die, to kill others on behalf of a commitment to loyalty for the most part, and then return to the nation for which he expended this effort, only to be abused and mistreated.
And the footnote goes on;
[“...Yet such phenomena did not illustrate the sentiment of either the people or the army as a whole. In November, 1918, a battalion of veterans, covered with grey mud, starved to the bone, marched homeward through the streets of Munster. On they came with firm tread, rifles slung on their shoulders, looking for all the world like a procession of wraiths arisen from the battlefields of the Marne. The thousands gathered along the streets stood in awe-struck silence, until finally a universal sob that shook the crowd seemed to come from every throat ... They were utterly stunned by the sadness of their defeat, for which nothing had prepared them. And they were left to carve out their own destiny by officers who, after years of dictatorship, wished now to get the ruins off their hands...”
So, immediately after the loss, the people in the streets turned against the war, the soldiers, the leaders that preached of the glory of the war, and the generals who lead the war. Adolf obviously took all of this very personal. He felt this to be a symptom of a disease within the German people; a self destructive disease, because the German people had turned upon themselves, exhibiting a split psychotic personality.
Again, I think this to be a common psychological problem within any nation of people. We all grow up thinking that our opinions and our values are the opinions and values of all of the people of the nation. It takes considerable learning and understanding, and maturity of point of view to come to grips with the notion that there are people who are of ‘our kind’ and a part of ‘our nation’ who are at complete disagreement with ‘our’ principles, and are working within the same nation and government for the purpose of achieving opposite and conflicting goals.
Adolf is so convinced of the righteousness, and correctness of his views that he considers any point of view to the contrary to be psychotic.
In our country today we have people who think that this society is founded on the principals of cooperation and kindness to others, especially the less fortunate and less capable, and that the state in its capacity as a government should be directed towards this goal. In other words we should be a country involved in the spirit of love and sharing. There are others who believe that this country was founded on the principles of individual achievement, personal ambition and even greed and that any attempts by the government to stifle these tendencies are not within the spirit of the land, and its founders, or the basic principles of human nature.
But isn’t this once again the personal dilemma of each and every one of us in all of our relationships with others. To whom do we show love, and where and in what circumstances should this love be held back? How much should we give to our children, and how much should they be required to get on their own? How do we raise respectable self-sustaining children and yet give into the demands of our love for them and the tendency to provide for them, their every need. Who is truly in need and who is simply lazy; which is doing his or her best and still not able to reach our minimum standards?