As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred

As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred

By: Paul Mason

Taken From:  The Guardian

As the world’s attention was captured by Madaya, the Syrian town suffering mass starvation, supporters of the Assad regime began posting photographs of delicious food to insult those starving. When a Muslim woman stood in silence at Donald Trump rally, wearing a T-shirt saying “I come in peace”, she was ejected – Trump’s supporters baying insults into her face.

Meanwhile, groups of apparently foreign men in Cologne staged what look like premeditated sexual assaults on women, prompting a new outburst of the racism barely hidden behind German constitutional reality.

In Hungary the president, Victor Orban, called for Europe to abandon Greece to the next wave of refugees, erecting a fallback line of razor wire at the Macedonian and Bulgarian borders. Turkey, meanwhile, having pocketed £3bn of European taxpayers’ money, set about an armed assault on its own Kurdish ethnic minority. Oh, and Isis executed five people in cold blood.

That’s just some of the moral lowlights of Week One, 2016. In the same week, the Chinese stock market crashed by 7% twice, dragging most western share indices significantly down. The oil price slumped, signalling further falls in the prices of commodities – from wheat to nickel – which are vital to growth in the emerging economies.

Amid this confluence of rising barbarity and falling economic growth, it was probably a good moment for Germany to republish Mein Kampf now it has run out of copyright. The 2016 version of Hitler’s book, subtitled “a critical edition”, outsold its initial print run four times over last week. That pales against the 10m copies circulated inside Nazi Germany, but it’s a start.

Because the more we read Mein Kampf, the more we can understand how an ordinary racist loudmouth, with a grudge and a fantasy, turned an entire continent towards genocide. The subject matter of Mein Kampf is not fascism: it is social democracy, the Jewish people and the military defeat of the German empire in the 1914-18 war, which in Hitler’s mind were all linked. Marxism was a Jewish creed, destined to depopulate the earth, said Hitler. The German workers had been “coerced” into supporting the socialists; now they would have to be coerced out of this project using violence and propaganda. The Jewish people would be destroyed.

It took just 10 years from scribbling this in prison, as leader of a banned party, for Hitler to achieve power. That happened, primarily, because the German economy collapsed and because no major power was willing to enforce the world “order” established at Versailles in 1919. But it also happened because, by the mid-1930s, a lot of people had begun to hate each other.

Since 1945, every generation in the educated world has been taught “the lessons” of the rise of Nazism. But surveying the world at the start of 2016 it seems as if we have been learning the wrong lessons. The world is awash with hatred. And since around a quarter of its inhabitants have mobile social media accounts we are leaving a very detailed evidential trail about its spread.

Israeli social media, for example, has been, since the 2014 Gaza conflict, gripped with narratives of race hate towards Arabs. This, in turn, has fuelled a growing attack on Israeli Jewish human rights organisations; the government is forcing them to declare their “foreign funding”.

In Turkey, the government claims 448 “militants” have been killed in the past as its forces crack down on the armed Kurdish left group the PKK, subjecting large parts of the Kurdish region to outright military occupation. The moderate, leftwing HDP party, which scored 10% in the last election, is being targeted too: its offices burned, its leader the subject of a judicial investigation for insulting the Turkish nation, insulting the president and “producing the propaganda of a terror organisation”.

In Saudi Arabia, 47 prisoners are executed in a manner calculated to produce what happened next: a severe diplomatic breakdown between the Sunni and Shia polities in the Persian Gulf.

It is impossible to view this global rise of rage, ethnic conflict, victimisation and the curtailment of democratic norms with anything other than alarm. In particular, because it is happening on the cusp of a second global economic downturn. The collapse of growth in those middle-income countries dependent on commodities, combined with mass unemployment in southern Europe and the stagnation of China, may not produce another catastrophic financial event. But it does not need to. The route to a different kind of catastrophe is all too clear, as countries resort to trade embargoes, currency war and overt manipulation of the oil supply as geopolitical tools. The result is likely to be the deglobalisation of the world; the political destabilisation of the emerging economies; more floods of refugees from conflict zones the west cannot be bothered to engage with.

Amid all this, the danger is not just another demagogue toting a modern Mein Kampf; there are thousands of little Mein Kampfs being written on social media by people who feel victimised and betrayed and have come to the conclusion that someone else’s death, starvation, expulsion or torture would solve their problems.

The longer it goes on, the more hatred is exchanged on Twitter, the more irrationalism is stirred up by demagogues, the harder it becomes to see this phase of world history ending with the de-escalation of tension and the reinstallation of multilateral order.

Our best shot at avoiding chaos comes from reinvigorating the institutions whose neglect lie at the root of the situation: the UN, the International Criminal Court, the Geneva conventions and national democracies encroached upon by arbitrary power and hereditary elites. And principles – such as privacy, the rule of law, restraint and proportionality.

Even as I write that, I realise how meagre these forces have become when ranged against the emotive power of revenge, hatred, racism, and the public celebration of ignorance and irrationality. But they are all we have.