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Tag: Mein Kampf

  • Censoring Mein Kampf – or anything – simply makes its ugly ideas more attractive

    Censoring Mein Kampf – or anything – simply makes its ugly ideas more attractive

    By Kate Maltby History Last updated: July 4th, 2014

    Is this the Summer of Censorship? In the US, it emerged that the NBC network requested a film trailer remove the word “abortion” in order to be advertised on its website. From New York to Tel Aviv, there are calls to scrap the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “The Death of Klinghoffer”, lest it “inflame anti-Semitism”. Here in Britain, we’re being urged to ban junk food advertising full-stop, the same week as the “Right To Be Forgotten” came into force, which allows those wealthy and clued-up enough to sue internet search engines into removing information they find embarrassing from search results, however accurate that information may be. So major newspapers are being informed their content will not be displayed on Google, but in the interests of privacy, they can’t be informed why, or who requested the block. It’s a misnomer, another instance of what I’ve called our chronic addiction to the language of rights. Hear a mention of a “right to be forgotten” on the radio, and who could possibly object? Rephrase it as “the right to forget Robert Peston’s exposure of the financial crisis”, or as Mark Stephens calls it, “the right to burn the index cards in a library of record”, and it suddenly sounds a lot more sinister.

    But the  biggest censorship row brewing is one of our oldest. A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a jovial bookseller in Istanbul. We were talking in German, which was quicker for him than English, and closer to the realms of possibility for me than Turkish. Having established, therefore, my interest in Germany, his eyes lit up. “Ah! I have a real secret for you. It’s banned in Germany, you know. The Jews won’t let you read it.” And as I bristled in doorway, uncertain whether how safely I would walk the streets of Cağaloğlu if I confronted him on his own turf, my formerly charming companion pressed into my hands a shiny, newly published copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

    I thought of my Turkish encounter this week, as it emerged that the Interior Ministers of the 16 German Länder have just agreed to do their utmost to continue the legal injunctions on publications of Mein Kampf in Germany after copyright expires on the first day of 2016. Currently, the state of Bavaria owns the literary estate of Adolf Hitler, and limits publication in Germany to a few excerpts for official history textbooks. As Sally McGrane reports in The New Yorker, the state has even withdrawn support for an academic edition which plans to publish the text with heavily critical annotations. For example, the passage in which Hitler complains about the treatment of First World War veterans will be accompanied by a reminder that his own regime would later gas 5,000 shell-shocked veterans of that war under his euthanasia plan. But even this official history is an allowance too far for the Bavarian state, which withdrew its authorisation last December (though it gave up on reclaiming its money). The highly respected Institute for Contemporary History is pressing ahead with the project nonetheless, and hopes that it will be able to publish after the copyright expires in 2016 – but the ongoing legal battles which inspired this week’s announcement may yet see the Institute’s years of academic study buried.

    Berlin’s caginess over the issue is understandable – Hitler’s legacy remains acutely sensitive in Germany, and in a nation which once centrally instituted state power to enact the most totalitarian of brutalities, the libertarian position of absolving the nation state any ongoing cultural responsibility chafes against a collective memory.  To be more cynical, no politician wants to be the minister who brought back Mein Kampf. And as McGrane’s report makes clear, Germany is haunted by the image of “Neo-Nazis handing out the book in school yards”.

    But if there’s a danger of Mein Kampf flooding school libraries, it’s not in Germany.  In Turkey, where Israel remains the local villain, the book is a best seller. And when I remember my friendly bookseller in Istanbul, I remember how sure he was that the ban would be the book’s unique selling point, his absolute conviction that censorship implied conspiracy. The publication of Mein Kampf may well be a traumatic moment for Germany internally. But as a leading player on the global stage, it also has an international responsibility. Germany’s leaders need to think about how the Mein Kampf ban affects the Middle East, and what it says about the West’s values of free speech, at a time when we are constantly forced to defend ourselves against accusations of hypocrisy. I think I may explode if I hear one more activist claim that the West, collectively, discriminates against Islam, because we decline to ban blasphemy against the Prophet, while Germany maintains its bans against Holocaust Denial or publishing Mein Kampf. This is the self-pity of the oppressor, demands for special treatment dressed up as victimhood. Germany’s bans around Holocaust material are the exception in the West’s approach to freedom of speech, not the rule. But they are a dangerous exception, undermining any claim that Western civilisation promotes an equal playing field of ideas.

    Mein Kampf is, of course, unreadable. Seven hundred pages long in the official Nazi edition, it reminds me above all of the screed spewed out by Elliot Rodger, the mentally ill misogynist killer from California. It’s as ragefully biographical – what McGrane generously calls “bildungsroman style”, and what nowadays would be a little-read livejournal entry – with chapters called “In the House of my Parents” and “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna”. If Hitler were female, he’d have included a chapter called “My Bitter First Period”. But even were Hitler’s prose peerless, it would remain important for us to engage with dangerous ideas. That’s why I was horrified to learn earlier this term that at my own university, UCL, the student union had taken it upon itself to ban a “Nietzsche Society”, in so far as a pompous union has the power to do so. (Their published statement on the matter emphasises the union’s dedication to “fighting the root cause of fascism — capitalism”, which is the Closing of the British Mind in a neat nutshell. I thought their job was to help students support themselves). When I was an undergraduate, I encountered Nietzsche seriously for the first time – and sure enough, I felt an odd thrill at finally hearing an intellectual explanation of a philosopher’s name which had always evoked taboo. But there’s nothing like spending hours jawing with purist 21-year-olds about every possible translation of die ewige Wiederkehr to wean one away from fascism. Perhaps, if Germany really wants to neutralize the dangers of Mein Kampf, it needs to institute a new set of punishments in schools. Force your kids to write out lines of Hitler’s verbiage in detention, and there’s no way they’ll waste lunch breaks passing it round the playground.

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  • Immigration and Islam Raise Questions of Dutch Identity

    Immigration and Islam Raise Questions of Dutch Identity

    Amid Rise of Multiculturalism, Dutch Confront Their Questions of Identity

    By STEVEN ERLANGER

    AMSTERDAM — Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who admitted to mass killings last month, was obsessed with Islam and had high praise for the Netherlands, an important test case in the resurgence of the anti-immigrant right in northern Europe.

    14dutch articleLarge

    Herman Wouters for The New York Times

    Albert Cuyp Market, on a popular street in Amsterdam. In light of the mass killings in Norway, the Netherlands’ population of Muslim immigrants from Morocco and Turkey has stirred debate.

    The sometimes violent European backlash against Islam and its challenge to national values can be said to have started here, in a country born from Europe’s religious wars. After a decade of growing public anger, an aggressively anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim politician, Geert Wilders, leads the third-largest party, which keeps the government in power.

    In Slotervaart, a majority immigrant neighborhood in southwestern Amsterdam, Maria Kuhlman and her friends watched Muslim families stroll by on a Ramadan afternoon, some of the men in robes and beards, the women wearing headscarves. A large blond woman shouted, “Go Wilders!”

    Mr. Wilders’ Freedom Party, which combines racist language with calls for more social spending, won 15.5 percent of the vote in June 2010. He was recently acquitted of charges of hate speech for comparing the Koran to “Mein Kampf” and calling mosques “palaces of hatred.” Mr. Wilders has said that immigrant Muslims and their children should be deported if they break the law, or engage in behavior he has described as “problematic, ” or they are “lazy.” He also warns of the supposed Muslim plot to create “Eurabia.” He declined repeated interview requests.

    While many Dutch recoil at his language, he touches on real fears. “Sometimes I’m afraid of Islam,” Ms. Kuhlman said. “They’re taking over the neighborhood and they’re very strong. I don’t love Wilders. He’s a pig, but he says what many people think.”

    Now, after Norway, the Dutch are taking stock. The killings frightened everyone, said Kathleen Ferrier, a Christian Democrat legislator born in Surinam, who had objected to her party joining a Wilders-supported government. “Norway makes it clear how much Dutch society is living on the edge of its nerves,” she said. “Wilders says hateful things and no one objects. We have freedom of speech, but you also have to be responsible for the effect of your words.”

    Taboos about discussing ethnicity and race — founded in shame about delivering Dutch Jews to the Nazis — are long gone.

    via Immigration and Islam Raise Questions of Dutch Identity – NYTimes.com.

  • UK, Racism; From the streets to the courts

    UK, Racism; From the streets to the courts

    a6A mini-pogrom in Ulster has shocked Britain. But a legal battle with the far right is brewing on the mainland.

    RACIST bogeymen leered out of newspaper pages in both Britain and Northern Ireland this week. On the mainland, the far-right British National Party (BNP), which won its first two seats in the European Parliament earlier this month, was given an ultimatum by Britain’s equality watchdog to step in line with non-discrimination laws or face legal action. Separately, white thugs in Ulster hounded more than a hundred Romanian immigrants—mainly Roma gypsies—out of their homes and, in most cases it now seems, away from the province altogether.

    The attacks in south Belfast were of the sort that Northern Ireland hoped had died with the Troubles. Over several nights crowds stoned the homes of immigrant families, smashing windows and posting extracts of Mein Kampf through letterboxes. Tension between locals and east European immigrants had simmered since football hooligans clashed at a match between Poland and Northern Ireland in March. When the intimidation reached a peak on June 16th, the Romanians were moved to a church hall and then to a leisure centre. On June 23rd Northern Ireland’s government announced that most had decided to return to Romania.

    Northern Ireland elected no far-right politicians to the European Parliament in the polling on June 4th. Nonetheless, many in Britain reckon that their neighbours over the water are a more prejudiced bunch than they are themselves. Socially, Ulster leans to the right: civil partnerships, greeted with a shrug by most British Tories, attracted protests in Belfast when they were introduced in 2005; abortion is also more restricted than on the mainland.

    It may be that these conservative attitudes extend to scepticism about outsiders. A survey published on June 24th by Northern Ireland’s Equality Commission, a statutory watchdog, found that nearly a quarter of the population would be unhappy if a migrant worker moved in next-door. People were even more hostile to Irish travellers, sometimes called gypsies (and often confused with Roma). Just over half said they would mind having travellers living next to them.

    Comparing these results with the rest of Britain is hard because surveys produce different answers according to how a question is worded. Across the United Kingdom, less than a tenth of whites say they would mind having a black or Asian boss (though nearly a third admit to being at least “a little” racially prejudiced). But the trends on the mainland and in Ulster are in sharp contrast. British hang-ups about minorities have fallen pretty steadily over the past 20 years, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey, a big questionnaire. By contrast, Northern Irish dislike of travellers is up by a quarter from 2005.

    Yet sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland are relatively low. Only 6% now say they would mind having a neighbour of a different faith. One theory goes that the fizzling out of the old disputes has helped to stoke other ones. “The attitudes that facilitate sectarianism may find new outlets in new times,” suggested Bob Collins, the head of the commission. Immigrants are not the only victims: anti-gay sentiment, falling across Britain, has gone up by more than half in Northern Ireland since 2005.

    Glass houses

    The election of a man with a conviction for inciting race hatred to represent northern England in the European Parliament spoils any pretty notion that all is well on the mainland. But the selection of Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and his colleague Andrew Brons, a former National Front chairman, has provoked a legal challenge from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a mega-watchdog.

    The EHRC wrote to Mr Griffin on June 23rd that it believed the BNP fell foul of the law in its race-based membership policy, its hiring (which appears to be restricted to party members) and what the EHRC interpreted as hints that the party would not provide an equal service to constituents of all races. Unless the BNP changes its ways by July 20th, the watchdog will seek a court order to force it to; if the party held that in contempt it could face fines, imprisonment—and publicity.

    Why pounce now? First, the EHRC was born only in 2007. Its predecessor, the Commission for Racial Equality, lacked the power to pursue this sort of independent legal challenge. Second, the law has been clarified: the law lords ruled in November 2007 that certain functions of political parties are indeed subject to the Race Relations Act of 1976, which had been in doubt.

    Most obviously, the action was triggered by the electoral success of the BNP which, coupled with talk in Westminster about voting reform likely to benefit small parties, has made it harder to dismiss as a sideshow. Others have moved against the BNP since the election: the Royal British Legion, a veterans’ group, publicly called on Mr Griffin to stop wearing its poppy emblem; the government is pondering banning BNP members from teaching, just as they are already banned from the police and prison services. A forthcoming bill on equal opportunities is expected to include a clause explicitly to stop the BNP and its ilk from insisting on race-based membership.

    If the EHRC’s complaint goes to court, it will not be the first time a case against a political party has tested race-relations laws. The 1976 act followed a House of Lords ruling in 1973 upholding the right of East Ham South Conservative Club to ban a Sikh because of his race. And the 2007 Lords’ ruling that has clarified the grounds for the EHRC’s current case was over a complaint by a Pakistani man—upheld by their lordships—against the Labour Party.

    Economist