Francis R. Nicosia. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Book)

Francis R. Nicosia. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv + 324 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88392-4.

Grand Illusion? The Relationship between Zionism and Nazism in the 1930s

Forty years after the Second World War, a group of post-Zionist historians began to write a new vein of historiography sharply critical of the Yishuv in Palestine's instrumentalist view of European Jewry, its relationship with Nazism, and what they perceived as its failure to do more to rescue European Jewry during the Holocaust. Some reiterated 1930s' era critiques that accused Zionists of ideological identification with Nazism, working contacts with Nazis in defiance of the boycott, and a narrow focus on the needs of the Yishuv in building the "Jewish state" at the expense of a German Jewry suffering under Nazi rule.[1] Israeli scholars, like Tom Segev in The Seventh Million, have pointed to the Ha'avara (Transfer) agreement as a prime example of the Yishuv leadership sacrificing the interests of German and world Jewry for those of the Yishuv in seizing upon the "complementary interests of the German government and the Zionist movement."[2] Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (1984), alleged that German Zionists were responsible for the survival of the Nazi regime because of their naïve and partisan cooperation with the Nazis in the Ha'avara agreement, in defiance of the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. Against the context of this debate over the relationship between Zionism and Nazism (one that of late has recently taken on even more sinister connotations in current anti-Zionist likening of Zionism to Nazism), Francis R. Nicosia's thorough examination of this relationship lays to rest such dubious charges of collaboration, while also uncovering new and unexamined areas of research that contribute greatly to our understandings of both Nazism and Zionism. Most fundamentally, Nicosia reminds us that there were limits on Jewish power before (and during) the war, and that the relationship between the Zionists and the Nazi movement was inherently unequal; in every single step along the way, the range of options for the German Zionists and the Yishuv leadership was limited by this great power imbalance.

Rather than focus generally on the relationship between Germany and its Jews (something that Nicosia suggests has already been covered extensively), Nicosia examines the relationship between a specific conception of German nationalism (a volkisch, anti-Semitic one) and Zionism (a volkisch, Jewish nationalist ideology). In so doing, he adds a significantly new approach to the study of the relationship between Germany and the Jews in general and to the history of Zionism and Nazism in particular. Through a focus on early ideology, Nicosia also points to an irony: whereas Theodor Herzl thought that Zionism would ultimately succeed in eliminating anti-Semitism, the Nazis believed that Zionism could be used in their effort to ultimately eliminate the Jews from German soil. From its inception, he notes, the Zionist movement was always concerned over how it would be received by the non-Jewish world, and, for Herzl, by anti-Semites especially, even at a time when support for Zionism, and by extension, the departure of Jews from Europe, could in fact be perceived as an anti-Semitic viewpoint. This ironic disconnect between the aims of the Zionists, the perceptions of the anti-Semites, and the elimination of Jews from European society pointed to the limits of this working relationship. Still, as Nicosia suggests, "in the end, the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in Germany helped to define what each was and, perhaps more importantly, what each was not during the period of about half a century before the onset of the final solution" (p. 9).

Nazis and Zionists were in agreement that it was not possible for Jews to be both German and Jewish--the volkisch conception of national identity that both held to be at the core of their nationalisms made this impossible. By tracing the evolution of Nazi understandings of Zionism (from usefulness to irrelevance), Nicosia also provides crucial insight into the development of Nazi Jewish policy as well and refutes an intentionalist reading of such policy: "Thus, the policies of Hitler's regime toward Zionism and the Zionist movement in Germany before 1941, as examples of the implementation of its anti-Semitic ideology, only diminish the likelihood that the 'final solution' was part of an earlier plan or intention to ultimately mass murder the Jews of Europe" (pp. 10-11). When viewed in context, at the time of its implementation, the Ha'avara agreement must be understood as part of the regime's support for Jewish emigration, not as previewing in some way steps leading to the Final Solution. "Throughout the 1930s, as part of the regime's determination to force the Jews to leave Germany, there was almost unanimous support in German government and Nazi party circles for promoting Zionism among German Jews, and Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine" (p. 79). Still, by making use of the Zionist movement when it was convenient for Nazi policy, "the regime, perhaps unwittingly, permitted the Zionists a significant role in shaping some important components of Nazi policy prior to the genocide. These components, already important aspects of Zionist policy prior to the Nazi ascent to power in 1933, included the Ha'avara Transfer agreement, Zionist occupational retraining programs, large-scale community education programs, and the process of illegal immigration into Palestine. These were all Zionist initiatives that became elements of Nazi Jewish policy prior to the 'final solution'" (p. 284). The coalescing of Nazi and Zionist policy at key points around a shared goal of Jewish immigration from Germany gave preference to certain German Zionist objectives and, as Nicosia reminds us, regardless of whether such was the intent or not, by allowing thousands of Jews to reach Palestine in this way, saved their lives before WWII.

And while some German Zionists may have been cautiously optimistic that Nazi and Zionists goals might coalesce, Nicosia reminds us that in this uneven relationship, the Nazi regime did not afford German Zionists any special treatment as less Jewish than other German Jews, and continued to view Zionism as "an important instrument in addressing both parts of the process" of reversing Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Germany and ending Jewish life in the Reich through emigration (p. 105). This was never an even relationship; through a masterful use of sources representing both sides of this study--records of various Nazi and German state agencies from the period, as well as German and non-German Jewish and Zionist organizations--Nicosia demonstrates the manner in which Nazism and Zionism talked past, but not with, each other. Likewise, the structure of the book combines a focus on Nazi perceptions and manipulations of Zionism, with Zionist perceptions of Nazism and the possibilities for action within the framework. Importantly, Nicosia adds his chapter on Revisionist Zionism in Germany--an all too often overlooked element of this time period--and detail on the intriguing figure of Georg Kareski, president of the State Zionist Organization in Germany.

As Nicosia concludes, ultimately, there was absolutely no way in which they could actually "collaborate," for "in the end, the Nazis maintained a contempt for Zionism as for all things Jewish, as representative of what they considered to be some of the most dangerous and abhorrent characteristics of the Jews as a people" (p. 290). The Zionists, in reinforcing the drive to promote a Jewish consciousness and identity, were just as Jewish as the non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, and thus, "inseparable from the object of Nazi hatred and intent" (ibid.). While Herzl might have originally believed that "the initial movement [of Jews out of Europe] will put an end to anti-Semitism," little did he know that in under fifty years it would represent one step on the path to the almost complete victory of Germandom over Judaism.[3] In examining the inherently unequal relationship between these two nationalist movements, Nicosia has made an important contribution to both the history of Zionism and Nazism (and more broadly to the fields of German and Jewish history), while correcting misconceptions about the limits of actual Jewish and Zionist power.

Notes

[1]. See Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, "Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered," Modern Judaism 19, no. 1 (1999): 21-40 for an overview.

[2]. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 20. The Ha'avara agreement, concluded in August 1933 between the German Zionist Organization and Third Reich officials, facilitated the passage of close to forty thousand German Jewish émigrés headed for Palestine by enabling them to retain sufficient assets to qualify for visas (most German Jewish émigrés surrendered nearly all their assets before departure from Germany), while leaving some assets for the Reichsvertretung (the Reich Representation of German Jews) to perform relief work with German Jews. The agreement also provided a market for German exports, which were purchased in Palestine with the proceeds used to pay costs for new emigrants.

[3]. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2006), 15.

Reviewed by Avinoam Patt (Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies)
Published on H-Judaic (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23871

Who’s Afraid of Mein Kampf?

A copy of Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf from 1940 in Berlin, Germany
Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

As Hitler's infamous book enters the public domain, its history shows that censorship can't stop dangerous ideas.

Steven Luckert Dec 31, 2015 Global

Adolf Hitler’s notorious book is about to get a new lease on life. The copyright for Mein Kampf, which has been held for 70 years by the government of the German state of Bavaria, expires at midnight on December 31, 2015. From that moment on, any publisher interested in reprinting the Nazi leader’s virulently anti-Semitic, racist tome will be free to do so.

That realization has spawned understandable fears, especially in Germany itself, where the work has been banned since the author’s death. But in January it will be republished in the country for the first time since World War II ended, albeit in heavily annotated form. Some worry that Mein Kampf will once again be a bestseller in the lands where the Holocaust occurred, a symbolic posthumous victory for its author. At a time when anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia are on the rise in Europe, its republication could foment ethnic and religious hatred. The growth of militant populist right-wing parties throughout Europe, including in Germany, shows that such fears have a basis in fact.
Related Story

Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism

But the history of the book, and of Hitler’s words more generally, demonstrates that there’s no clear-cut relationship between banning speech and halting the spread of ideas. The Nazi party grew despite Germany’s early efforts to curb Hitler’s speech; by the same token, today, his ideas are repudiated around the world despite being more widely accessible than ever before. The story is instructive as Europe and the United States continue to grapple with the question of how to combat newer extremist ideologies.

This is not the first time that Hitler’s words have generated public concern. Following his conviction for high treason in 1924, various German state governments barred the Nazi leader from public speaking for several years. It was during this low time in his political career that he penned Mein Kampf. The overpriced book was not an immediate bestseller; its sales dramatically increased only when the Nazi Party rose from insignificance to political prominence after 1930. By the end of 1932, close to 230,000 copies had been sold.

The Great Depression created a conducive environment for Nazi messaging. Millions of Germans cast their votes for the extremist movement, but the vast majority of them had neither read Mein Kampf nor subscribed to a Nazi newspaper. The Nazis reached huge audiences with much more appealing propaganda. Hitler the orator influenced far greater numbers than Hitler the writer. It was only after he came to power in 1933 that Mein Kampf became a staple on German bookshelves. Thereafter, Germany rapidly became a closed marketplace of ideas, where censorship and book banning ruled and anti-Semitism and racism were unassailable tenets of the new regime.

Today, Mein Kampf is available in more languages and countries than it was during the Nazi era. With only a few keystrokes one can download a copy, in any one of a variety of languages, off the Internet for free. Neo-Nazis—or ISIS fanatics, or any other extremists—haven’t had to wait until 2016 to get the text, and legal prohibitions haven’t stopped anyone from obtaining or disseminating it: If people want it, they already have it.

Moreover, the Bavarian government’s record of enforcing copyright has been spotty at best, and not due to a lack of effort. In countries where its legal authority was recognized, republication of Mein Kampf was denied. Yet in the Middle East, and even in some European countries, some publishers just thumbed their noses at German copyright law.

In the United States, Mein Kampf has never been prohibited, though some Jewish organizations opposed the sale of the book in 1933, at a time when populist demagogues were spreading their vitriolic anti-Semitism. Mein Kampf was not even banned when the United States went to war against Nazi Germany. In fact, the book’s U.S. publisher, Houghton Mifflin, urged Americans to study Mein Kampf as part of their patriotic responsibilities, and advertised it in The New York Times Book Review in 1944.

U.S. agencies analyzed the book to understand what made Hitler tick and how to best reform German society after the war. Members of the American public, too, tried to better understand the nature of the enemy by perusing Mein Kampf. In early 1939, just months before war broke out in Europe, an unabridged, critical, annotated English edition appeared in American bookshops. Libraries acquired multiple copies of Mein Kampf to feed the demand, and GIs slogged through it on military bases. Its availability did nothing to change American public opinion in favor of Nazi Germany.
The death and destruction caused by the Nazi regime did more to discredit Mein Kampf than any ban.

However, in postwar Germany, the Allies, including the United States, took a hard line on Mein Kampf. They banned the book and made its dissemination a criminal offense. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Soviet, British, and American leaders had pledged “to destroy German militarism and Nazism and to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world.” To this end, Allied occupation forces dissolved and prohibited the Nazi Party and affiliated organizations and revoked Nazi laws. They also ordered the removal of all Nazi and militarist propaganda from German public life.

As part of this policy, American authorities in Germany pulped tons of Nazi literature, including Mein Kampf, to print new textbooks, newspapers, and other materials. In October 1945, American military officials staged an impressive ceremony before newsreel cameras in which the lead type used to print Mein Kampf was melted down to produce page plates for the first postwar German newspaper in the U.S. zone.

By March 1947, the cleansing of Nazi literature from German public life was so successful that Library of Congress staff complained that—despite the millions of copies of Mein Kampf that had been printed by the Nazis—they couldn’t find 150 copies for transport to American universities.

The thoroughness of the Allied purge of Hitler’s words reflects just how dangerous occupation authorities thought they were in postwar Germany. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials cited Hitler’s magnum opus as evidence that Germany’s leaders had conspired to commit crimes against humanity. Major F. Elwyn Jones, junior counsel for the United Kingdom, described Hitler’s book as key to understanding the Nazis’ plans for genocide: “From Mein Kampf the way leads directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz and the gas chambers of Maidanek.[sic].”

But Germany today is a very different place, and so is the world. The death and destruction caused by the Nazi regime did more to discredit Mein Kampf than any ban. In seven decades of democracy, Germans have been exposed to both Hitler’s words and Hitler’s crimes in films, print, and school. Neither the release of his unpublished second book in 1961, nor that of a mammoth edition of his collected speeches in the 1990s, triggered a major resurgence of Nazism in Germany or elsewhere.

Given Germany’s past, and the critical role the ideology expressed in Mein Kampf played in the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, vigilance is entirely appropriate. Understandably, some Holocaust survivors and organizations, such as the World Jewish Congress, have called for a continued ban on republishing the book. Germany’s Central Council of Jews has taken a different position, arguing that although the lapse of Mein Kampf ‘s copyright represents a potential danger, knowledge of the text is essential for understanding the Holocaust and National Socialism, and that the organization would not oppose the publication of the new critical, annotated edition published by Munich’s respected Institute of Contemporary History.

Sensitive to these concerns, German authorities have taken precautions to mitigate the threat when Mein Kampf’s copyright expires. Several German state officials have indicated that they will prohibit any editions designed to incite racial, ethnic, or religious hatred under the nation’s strict laws on dangerous speech.
With the rapid expansion of the Internet, it is nearly impossible to suppress the spread of ideas, both good and bad.

Other German representatives believe that using selected excerpts from the critical edition of Mein Kampf will help to immunize young people from extremism. Josef Kraus, the longtime president of Germany’s teachers’ association, has pointed out that keeping silent or banning the book could have more dangerous consequences than publishing it. In today’s environment, it is better to discuss Mein Kampf openly and critically in the classroom than to have curious students seek it out on the Internet, where teachers will have no chance of influencing them.

The public debate about Mein Kampf raises a much broader question on how best to confront dangerous propaganda in today’s constantly changing information environment. With the rapid expansion of the Internet, and social media in particular, it is nearly impossible to fully suppress the spread of ideas, both good and bad. ISIS, for example, has repeatedly displayed its ability to disseminate its pernicious messages globally, even when governments or media providers take down the group’s videos or tweets. Tech-savvy extremists know how to navigate the deep labyrinths of the web to find new venues from which to transmit hate. Finding appropriate ways of addressing this problem is now the world’s collective challenge. Censorship is too feeble a weapon to defeat dangerous speech.

Source: The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/12/mein-kampf-copyright-expiration/422364/

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sandrine Sanos

Aesthetics, Politics, and Abjection: Gendered Fantasies of Race and Nation among 1930s French Far-Right Intellectuals

The intellectual far right in 1930s France sought to reimagine national belonging by challenging what they saw as pervasive moral degeneration and a crisis in a national sense of masculine sexuality. These challenges involved articulating an exclusionary, even violent, antisemitism, and scholars have long debated precisely how to account for the political choices and rhetorical strategies mobilized by far-right writers and journalists from the period. In this lucid and thoughtfully argued book, Sandrine Sanos argues against prevailing historiographical and literary approaches to the work of far-right intellectuals and journalists in 1930s interwar France. Specifically, she challenges scholars who have conceived of interwar far-right politics as thoroughly determined by the “shameful” homosexual longings of its most ardent practitioners. She explains that scholars have unduly privileged biographical readings that view antisemitic political commitments as pathological outcroppings of “deviant” homosexual and homosocial obsessions and desires. For Sanos, antisemitic fantasies of national regeneration in interwar France cannot be tied simply to the “perverted” masculinity of leading far-right figures. Her study focuses instead on the ways in which gendered discourses of sexual perversion became central themes in what she calls the “aesthetics of hate” developed by far-right thinkers.

Drawing on the literary and political writings of such figures as Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Thierry Maulnier, Maurice Blanchot, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Sanos convincingly demonstrates that “we must take more seriously the ways in which the tropes of heterosexual deviance, sexual perversion, and abject homosexuality helped mark the bounds of the male citizen and the meaning of public letters in French history” (p. 203). These tropes, she explains, actually constituted the ideological foundations of interwar far-right thought and as such they were explicitly mobilized by intellectuals writing for publications like Je Suis Partout, Combat, and L’Insurgé. The figures Sanos analyzes in The Aesthetics of Hate emerged from early twentieth-century right-wing nationalist and monarchist circles and took inspiration from Charles Maurras, the leading figure in reactionary and antisemitic politics from the turn of the century. One of the book’s goals is to show how these intellectuals formed a loosely knit movement bent on redefining Frenchness (in the face of what they perceived to be social “abjection”) according to a political grammar that united discourses of gender, race, and sexuality (p. 4). Sexuality was a key category for the writers Sanos analyzes, as they called for a renewed French heterosexual masculinity (and, hence, a renewed sense of French citizenship) over and against the “unmanly” bodies of Jews and colonized subjects who were often coded as homosexual. As she puts it, “the appropriate gendered and sexual underpinnings of the social order” had become unmoored after the experience of the First World War and the embrace of modernity, and far-right intellectuals sought to “restore” stable sexual identities as moral foundations for national regeneration (p. 29). Thus the figures Sanos studies were obsessed with well-regulated gender roles, denunciations of sexual “deviance” (which tended to be linked with Jews, communists, and foreigners), and the restoration of a whole masculine self that had been torn asunder by sexual difference.

Central to Sanos’s argument here is the idea that far-right thinkers sought political responses to the tense and fraught social climate of 1930s France in the realm of aesthetics. Art and literature (and aesthetic form as such) provided these figures with potential avenues for regenerating and demarcating anew a corrupt and degraded social body that had been beset from without and from within by democratic and “foreign” (i.e., Jewish) intrusion. This claim explains why she aims to avoid narrowly historicizing the movement she seeks to define; instead, she ties historicizing readings to close consideration of “the narrative and rhetorical strategies [far-right intellectuals] developed in their journalism and in their literary writings” (p. 6).

As she points out in her introduction, the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics that frames her study owes less to what Walter Benjamin referred to as fascism’s aestheticization of politics than it does to Jacques Rancière’s theorization of how the overlapping of aesthetics and politics provokes new “distributions of the sensible;” she rightly highlights how Rancière’s work foregrounds aesthetics as politics and how this emphasis helps to define “the common of a community” (p. 7). This is precisely the problem that haunted far-right thinkers in the interwar period who were obsessed with renewing or recreating a bounded masculine self and, by extension, a bounded national community in response to the excesses of modern life. This theoretical point is an original and timely contribution, given how Rancière’s work has succeeded in drawing the attention of many critics back to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Yet Sanos only devotes a paragraph of her introduction to this observation, which nonetheless undergirds the theoretical thrust of her project. One cannot help but feel that this underdeveloped discussion of Rancière is a missed opportunity, since its pertinence seems to demand a more sustained and in-depth engagement. Additional fleshing out of this point might reveal more clearly how far-right intellectuals’ turn to aesthetics for political solutions generated new “ways of doing and making,” in Rancière’s terms, that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”[1] The creation of new forms of visibility in particular seems crucial for Sanos’s study, since the far-right figures and publications she examines sought to make perceptible a pathological Jewishness (embodied by socialist Léon Blum, leader of France’s Popular Front government) that they felt was responsible for the abjection of France’s social body. Since Sanos views her project as a contribution to both the historiography and literary theory of far-right politics in France, drawing out her reading of Rancière a bit further would have been especially revealing.

The book’s chapters engage a variety of themes and figures, offering an intellectual genealogy of the 1930s far-right movement; a contextualization of the “crises” caused by modernity to which far-right journals responded by calling for a renewed sense of virility that would restore order and boundaries to a (masculine) national subject that had been decentered; and a synthetic analysis of how the far-right press polemically and even violently negotiated their fixation with the French nation’s “abjection.” The discourse and thematics of abjection thoroughly permeated the thought and written work of figures like Maulnier and Rebatet, and the figure of the “Jew” served to embody an abject national modernity that had to be transcended via a turn to aesthetics and the “rigorous order” of form (p. 113).

Two of Sanos’s strongest chapters are given over to extended studies of individual writers, Blanchot and Céline, respectively. In the first of these, she historicizes Blanchot’s interwar journalism, viewing his early far-right and antisemitic work as born of a contingent and problematic historical moment and situating her reading of his early career in response to the work of scholars who have retroactively dismissed or minimized the content of his far-right writing. She makes a similar analytic move in the following chapter on Céline, reading his antisemitic pamphlets as continuous with his literary work (especially Voyage au bout de la nuit [1932]) and as a piece of the “cultural discourses of difference and otherness” embraced by “the intellectual and literary far right” (p. 162). In both of these cases, Sanos reads canonical literary figures against the grain, illuminating provocative continuities between their 1930s writing and later literary production and, through careful historical exegesis, laying bare their intellectual and political affinities with the interwar far right more broadly.

Her chapter on Céline deals in part with his racist and hygienicist conception of social contamination, highlighting how colonial interaction with race and blackness in Africa caused his protagonist in the pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), to grow acutely aware of pervasive Jewish influence on an abject society at home in France. This observation reflects another key element of Sanos’s argument, namely, that far-right figures in interwar France racialized Frenchness within the nation by linking strident denunciations of Jews to colonial ideologies that were enacted abroad in the empire (particularly, in Africa). This is an especially fascinating and provocative point; however, whereas she deals with it at some length in her reading of Céline, at other moments in the book she brings it up only briefly, and it remains unclear precisely how meaningful this turn to questions of empire was for members of the antisemitic French far right. This aspect of her argument is handled most directly in a several-page subsection of chapter 6 (on representations of race in the journal Je Suis Partout) that takes up how the journal approached the problem of colonialism. She points out that Martinican writers René Maran and Paulette Nardal actually produced articles for Je Suis Partout’s colonial affairs page, but she does not go so far as to synthetically historicize the unlikely and paradoxical relationship with far-right intellectuals that these figures must have experienced. Since Sanos refers to this aspect of her argument throughout the book, one expects a fuller and more synthetic treatment of the ways antisemitism was articulated through a racialized colonial grammar than what is actually provided. Such an idea merits extended attention, especially since discourses of race were so central to far-right intellectuals’ collective senses of masculinity and nationality.

The Aesthetics of Hate is nonetheless a rich, well-researched, and well-documented study that succeeds in complicating historical and literary approaches to what Sanos rightly identifies as the far-right ideological confluence of aesthetics and politics in interwar France. She evinces a keen sense of the debates in the field as well as of her work’s place in relation to them, which lends the book and her writing a sense of scholarly self-awareness that makes for engaging reading. Sanos’s analyses of journalistic and literary “fantasies of abjection” avoid the pathologizing logic against which she argues and instead shed convincing light on “a particular aesthetics where young far-right intellectuals reimagined nation, race, and bodies articulated in a gendered and sexual discourse of male identity, citizenship, and civilization” (p. 14).

Note

[1]. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

Sandrine Sanos. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xi + 369 pages. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-7457-4.

Reviewed by Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Published on H-SAE (June, 2013)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38444
https://networks.h-net.org/node/21311/reviews/21626/izzo-sanos-aesthetics-hate-far-right-intellectuals-antisemitism-and

How a new edition of 'Mein Kampf' hopes to debunk Hitler's lies

A mesh of "half-truth and outright lie" in Adolph Hitler's memoir-manifesto, "Mein Kampf," prompted scholars to spend three years completing a new edition chock-full of fact-check annotations, according to The New York Times.

That's to "defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism," Alison Smale wrote for The Times. The work's copyright expires Dec. 31, which made the academics' efforts possible.

The Times noted why the release of the edition, which includes 2,000 pages and 3,500 academic annotations, wasn't possible until now.

"Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler's manifesto, 'Mein Kampf,' been officially published in German," The Times reported. "Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author's death."

This time around, the work will "dismantle the core doctrines" Hitler deployed to justify the Holocaust, Marie Solis wrote for Mic.

The bottom line: "Scholars want to disrupt a narrative of hate," according to Mic.

Still, some argue in regards to whether reprinting such a controversial text is a good idea.

Svati Kirsten Narula wrote for Quartz many scholars and librarians view "Mein Kampf" — translated in English to "My Struggle" — as a "toxic and dangerous text."

And German authorities refused to allow reprintings of the book in fear it would incite hatred, according to BBC News. Because of that, officials indicated they'll limit the public's access to the new "Mein Kampf" edition "amid fears that this could stir neo-Nazi sentiment."

However, Caroline Mortimer wrote for The Independent that the team of academics said a scholarly version to refute Hitler's lies is an appropriate way to reprint the book.

Christian Hartmann, lead of the team, told David Charter for The Times they created a "very reader-friendly edition."

"We firmly connect Hitler's text with our comments, so that both are always on the same double page. I could describe it in martial terms as a battle of annihilation — we are encircling Hitler with our annotations," Hartmann said, according to The Times. "Our principal was that there should be no page with Hitler's text without critical annotations. Hitler is being interrupted, he is being criticised, he is being refuted if necessary."

According to The Independent, many Jewish leaders remain opposed to the reprint.

"I am absolutely against the publication of 'Mein Kampf,' even with annotations," The Independent quoted Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, as saying. "Can you annotate the Devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler? This book is outside of human logic."

Mic reported the edition will cost $63 and hits bookstore shelves in January.

Payton Davis is the Deseret News National intern. Send him an email at pdavis@deseretdigital.com and follow him on Twitter, @Davis_DNN.

Source: Deseret News National
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/6921/How-a-new-edition-of-Mein-Kampf-hopes-to-debunk-Hitlers-lies.html

Paul Preston, contrario a retirar calles o monumentos franquistas: "No se puede borrar a Franco de la Historia"

El hispanista inglés apuesta por incluir en la placa la explicación de quién fue y qué hizo la persona que lleva el nombre de la calle con el fin de que sirvan como "instrumentos de educación".

El hispanista inglés Paul Preston.- EUROPA PRESS

EUROPA PRESS

MADRID.- Paul Preston ha publicado Franco (Debate), una edición revisada y actualizada de la biografía del Caudillo con motivo del cuarenta aniversario de su muerte en la que el historiador retrata a un dictador del que considera que no debe "ser borrado de la Historia" a través de la eliminación de los restos de su Régimen.

Preston se ha mostrado contrario en una entrevista con Europa Press a retirar placas de calles franquistas o a derribar el Valle de los Caídos, entre otros ejemplos, asegurando que deberían ser utilizados "como instrumentos de educación". "Mi solución para las calles, en aquellas que tengan nombres de militares, no sería la de sustituir ese nombre por Nelson Mandela u otra personalidad, sino incluir debajo en la placa la explicación de qué fue lo que hizo esta persona", ha apuntado.


Respecto a los restos de Franco, considera necesario devolverlos a la familia para que le den sepultura, e insiste en la importancia de convertir el Valle de los Caídos en "un centro de educación". "Pero es complicado, porque aunque la torre y la basílica son arquitectónicamente una de las maravillas del mundo, fue hecha por obreros esclavos", ha matizado.

Considera necesario devolver los restos de Franco a la familia para que le den sepultura y convertir el Valle de los Caídos en "un centro de educación"

En esta nueva edición, Preston ha incluido dos capítulos nuevos: uno en el que analiza cómo se ha biografiado a Franco antes y después de su muerte; y otro en el que aborda su antisemitismo, que fue variando según avanzó la II Guerra Mundial.

Antisemitismo

"Él era bastante antisemita hasta el final de la II Guerra Mundial, que pasaron a mandar los americanos y se dio cuenta de que los judíos tenían mucha influencia", ha señalado el autor, tras recordar que durante el conflicto Franco pudo haber salvado la vida de varios judíos procedente de Alemania y el régimen demoró esta ayuda provocando la muerte de muchos de ellos.

En cualquier caso, el historiador ha afirmado que los nuevos datos sobre el Caudillo que han salido en los últimos 20 años desde la primera edición de su libro no le han hecho "cambiar de idea para nada" sobre lo ya escrito.

Una de ellas es el famoso encuentro en Hendaya entre Franco y Hitler, en el que Preston defiende que, si finalmente España no entró en la II Guerra Mundial, no fue por la negativa de Franco. "Hitler venía en viaje de reconocimiento y se dio cuenta de que no compensaba porque lo que ofrecía como aliado era muy poco. Se podría hasta decir que hubo un acuerdo tácito entre aliados y el eje para que España quedase neutral", ha aseverado.

Franco, "el cid del siglo XX"

A día de hoy, el autor continúa viendo al dictador como un hombre que "se creía El Cid del siglo XX" y esperaba que, como con aquella reconquista, "llegara un gran imperio". "Pero la realidad es que no tenía medios para construir ese imperio y, para hacerlo, habría necesitado la ayuda de Hitler", ha apuntado.

El autor continúa viendo al dictador como un hombre que "se creía El Cid del siglo XX"

Preguntado sobre alguna actuación positiva de Franco durante la dictadura, Preston ha asegurado que no hubo ninguna por su parte, "aunque sí pasaron cosas buenas". "Hubo sobre todo dos, la neutralidad de España en la II Guerra Mundial y el crecimiento económico de los años 60, pero no se debieron a Franco, sino a las remesas de dinero de emigrados y a la inversión de compañías extranjeras y turistas", ha destacado.

Por último, se ha mostrado a favor de obras como la de Pérez Reverte para "acercar la Guerra Civil" a los jóvenes, si bien alertando de que se trata de un "tema muy complicado que a veces requiere más de 20 años estudiarlo para luego contarlo". "Con las simplificaciones se pierde mucho de la Historia, porque no se trata de blancos y negros", ha concluido.

Source: Público (España)
http://www.publico.es/politica/paul-preston-contrario-retirar-calles.html

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89
By Staff Reports October 31

Willis Carto, who spent decades leading an influential network of far-right organizations, including the Washington-based Liberty Lobby and a California institute dedicated to denying the Holocaust, and whose extremist views resonated with generations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements, died Oct. 26. He was 89.

His death was announced by the American Free Press, a publication he founded. No further details were available. After spending much of his adult life in California, Mr. Carto apparently lived near Jacksonville, Fla., in recent years, according to public records.

Mr. Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the 1950s, and the organization maintained a presence on Capitol Hill for decades. He had a publishing company, Noontide Press, that distributed extremist literature and launched several publications, including the Washington Observer newsletter and a weekly newspaper, the Spotlight, which had a national circulation of 300,000 in the early 1980s.

In letters and other statements, Mr. Carto voiced admiration for Nazi Germany and recommended that black Americans be deported to Africa. In 1981, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors anti-Jewish slurs and threats, called Mr. Carto “a professional anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and the mastermind” of a “propaganda empire.”

The reclusive Mr. Carto “does not speak in public,” a 1971 Washington Post investigation found. “He refuses to be interviewed. He shies away from cameras. He keeps an unlisted telephone number. He shields his residence address in suburban Los Angeles from public scrutiny.”

Yet he controlled or maintained connections with a variety of far-right groups that opposed taxes, gun control, foreign aid and school busing to achieve racial integration. One of his groups supported the minority white rule of defiant segregationist Ian Smith in the African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The Liberty Lobby’s political committee was led by former Texas congressman Bruce Alger, a right-wing zealot who once incited a riot in Dallas against then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1978, Mr. Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review, which promulgated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and denounced the Holocaust as a hoax. Mr. Carto reportedly kept busts of Adolf Hitler in his office at the California-based institute.

Through his publications and interconnected organizations, Mr. Carto exerted outsize influence on a variety of political issues and campaigns. He organized Youth for Wallace to support the 1968 presidential bid of Alabama segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace. The group was later renamed the National Youth Alliance, which, under its next leader, William L. Pierce, became the National Alliance, one of the country’s most prominent white separatist groups.

In the 1980s, Mr. Carto helped found the Populist Party, whose 1988 presidential candidate was David Duke, a onetime leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Carto was treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, which took in about $1 million a year by 1970, and also controlled the purse strings of other allied organizations. Over the years, employees accused him of financial improprieties and having an imperious style of leadership.

“Several former Liberty Lobby executives say Carto makes all major decisions, delegates little authority and trusts hardly anyone,” The Post noted in 1971. Behind his back, his employees called him “Little Hitler.”

Source: Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/willis-carto-influential-figure-of-the-far-right-dies-at-89/2015/10/31/80eb8aee-7f36-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html

See more:
Willis Carto, Far-Right Figure and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 89 (NY Times)
Willis Carto has been a major figure on the American radical right since the 1950s, when he set up his anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby with offices not far from the White House (SPLC)

Más nazi que Hitler. Rosenberg Diarios 1934-1944

El dietario de uno de los planificadores del Holocauto se publica ahora a nivel mundial tras permanecer desparecido desde los Juicios de Núremberg

Foto: Goering, Von Ribbentrop, Keitel y Rosenberg (primero por la derecha) en los Juicios de Nuremberg

Carlos Prieto

Imagine que le nombran a usted Director de Recursos Humanos de una empresa llamada Internacional Nacionalsocialista y le encargan elegir al nuevo Consejero Delegado. ¿El objetivo? Buscar al hombre que no solo guíe a la empresa hasta el liderazgo del sector de la Conquista, Destrucción y Barbarie a Gran Escala sino que, sobre todo, muestre mayor entusiasmo y convencimiento en la cruzada. De entre todos los candidatos, seleccionará usted a dos: un tal Adolf Hitler y un tal Alfred Rosenberg. ¿Con cual de los dos se quedaría? Con Hitler... ¿O quizá no?

En efecto, si se trata de elegir al mayor nazi de todos los tiempos, la elección correcta no es fácil si nos atenemos a los orígenes del movimiento. El mismísimo Führer llamaba a Alfred Rosenberg “Padre de la iglesia del nacionalsocialista”. De su condición de ideólogo de cabecera del nazismo da fe lo temprano de su ardor antisemita: Quedaban cinco años para que Hitler escribiera Mi lucha (1925) cuando Rosenberg publicó su primer libro: La huella del judío a lo largo de la historia; texto que, como se pueden ustedes imaginar, no era un dechado de empatía hacia el judaísmo (sus primeros escritos atestiguaban un “antisemitismo francamente monomacíaco”, según su primer biógrafo). Algunos historiadores sostienen que el libro de Rosenberg "inspiró, al menos parcialmente, muchos pasajes antisemitas de Mi lucha".

El Führer le llamaba 'Padre de la iglesia del nacionalsocialista'

Rosenberg, que ocuparía cargos como la dirección de Exteriores del partido nazi o el ministerio del Reich para los Territorios Ocupados del Este, fue juzgado en Núremberg, condenado a muerte y ejecutado en la horca en octubre de 1946.

Crítica lanza ahora por primera vez sus Diarios 1934-1944, que desaparecieron misteriosamente durante los Juicios de Núremberg, y reaparecieron en EEUU en 2013 tras una investigación del Museo del Holocausto y el Gobierno estadounidense. Todos los dedos apuntan hacia Robert Kempner, uno de los fiscales de Núremberg, acusado de sacar los papeles de Alemania para traficar con el material.

Páginas truculentas

Hitler no envío a Rosenberg al Este durante la guerra por casualidad: "Le veía como un competente correligionario al que ningún otro miembro de la cúpula nacionalsocialista podía igualarse" en su fervor antibolchevique, cuentan Jürgen Matthäus y Frank Bajohr, editores del libro. El 2 de abril de 1941, Hitler nombra a Rosenberg hombre fuerte en los territorios ocupados del Este europeo. Así lo plasmó en su diario: “No creo que sea necesario que me detenga a explicar lo que siento. Estos veinte años de trabajo antibolchevique van a tener repercusiones políticas, más aún, repercusión en la historia de la humanidad…”.

En calidad de ministro para los Territorios Ocupados del Este, "Rosenberg se ocupó de orquestar ideológica y filosóficamente el Holocausto", hecho evidenciado en "varias iniciativas suyas relacionadas con la división del trabajo para la matanza organizada y sistemática”, analizan Matthäus y Bajohr.

Rosenberg, ¡cómo no!, intentaría maquillar su trayectoria a posteriori. Su "leyenda del pensador apartado de la realidad, bienintencionado, y desplazado por otros jerarcas del Partido Nazi más radicales que él", chocó contra el muro del Tribunal de Núremberg... y contra el de la realidad: Rosenberg había hablado y escrito hasta la saciedad sobre su odio a los judíos.

'La cuestión judía en Europa y Alemania solo estará resuelta cuando no haya ni un judío más en el continente europeo'

"En un discurso sin fecha, que probablemente se pronunció tras la batalla de Stalingrado, Rosenberg volvió a expresarse con claridad acerca de la situación de la 'solución final': había que 'eliminar esa suciedad, pues lo que hoy sucede con la eliminación de los judíos de todos los estados del continente europeo es también un hecho humano, concretamente un hecho humano duro, biológico'. Aunque hubiese cambiado algo desde la formulación de los ideales nacionalsocialistas, Rosenberg seguía sintiendo la 'antigua ira', y el objetivo no podía 'ser otro que el de antes: la cuestión judía en Europa y Alemania solo estará resuelta cuando no haya ni un judío más en el continente europeo'", escriben los editores del libro.

No obstante, Rosenberg se cuidó mucho de explicitar en los diarios su participación directa en las matanzas. Como se explica en la introducción, "la propensión a guardar intencionadamente silencio en las propias notas sobre incidentes que resultan desagradables o perjudiciales es una tendencia compartida" tanto por Rosenberg como por Joseph Goebbels, únicos líderes nacionalsocialistas en recoger sus reflexiones en diarios.

Por tanto, las mayores truculencias del dietario se encuentran en detalles costumbristas como el siguiente, sacado de la entrada del 27 de enero de 1940:

"Hoy al mediodía el Führer estaba nuevamente de buen humor… Hess le trasladó el relato de un capitán alemán que después de muchos años había estado de nuevo en Odessa. Le explicó que, al contrario que antes, no había encontrado ni un judío entre las autoridades. Esto dio pie al comentario tan frecuente en estos días de si realmente se está preparando en Rusia un cambio en este sentido. Yo dije que si de verdad comenzaba esa tendencia desembocaría en un terrible pogromo contra los judíos. El Führer dijo: entonces quizá le pida a él la asustada Europa que vele por la humanidad del Este… Todos se echaron a reír"... Hitler aprovechó las risas de sus subordinados para soltar el chiste final: "Y que Rosenberg sea el secretario de un congreso presidido por mí sobre el trato humano a los judíos...”. Más risotadas...

O la mezcla definitiva entre antisemitismo, nazismo y cuñadismo en la oficina nacionalsocialista…

Source: El Confidencial (España)
http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2015-09-06/mas-nazi-que-hitler_999635/