Fiat Lux

When I was still in high school and didn't have much else to do in my senior year, I checked a copy of Mein Kampf out and read it. First, even allowing for translation, the original language must have been the German version of Engrish. Taking it from Adolf Hitler's mastery of German, one would not have expected this to be the magnum opus of the leader of a large First-World country, one would have seen it instead as the type of literature one encounters among the various extremist movements today, overlong, meandering in a lot of points, and with a lot of grotesque metaphors even for the time (and not surprisingly der Fuhrer was a big porn connoisseur).

The idea seemed like a mirror version of What Is To Be Done, namely a view of the group to be killed in bloody red slaughter (pun half-intended) as various peoples Hitler didn't like, as opposed to parasitical imperialistic big business. The idea of the Ubermensch was to create by means of pre-Watson and Crick science a group of people who would be superior and establish a New Fascist Man. This, naturally, in the vein of Manifest Destiny, meant that the inferior Slavs would fade away and a German state would expand on a house of Slavic corpses. Oh, and let's not forget that in Hitlerland the Jews are all-powerful people out of a Dan Brown novel as opposed to the traditional whipping boy of Eurochristian culture. Half the book is his autobiography, in which he comes across as a self-adulating large ham like his predecessor the Kaiser (who said when told he had a small cold "No, no, it must be a big cold. Everything about me must be big.') , and a ham who hated the society he was born in but also hated Vienna, his one experience with big cities. The second half was this large-scale vision of his version of the Nazi Party, which didn't become final until the Night of the Long Knives. Even taking into account that for a few years Hitler ran a fairly large European Empire, I would rank this book and its author as a 3.5 on a 10-point scale.

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