Teaching Mein Kampf at the University of Tel Aviv

[professor Linh Dinh with a student at the University of Tel Aviv, circa 2025]

Jewish Dan Duffy just endorsed my reasonable proposal to teach Holocaust literature at Yeshiva University or University of Tel Aviv, “For sure, you would be a terrific teacher of those texts. You might get across to the young people that you don’t have to agree with the reading, or the teacher.” That Dan and I have been friends for 29 years is irrelevant.

My disdain of college professors doesn’t extend to myself. Each man’s shit suits his own nose. Settling into Ramat Aviv, I’ll add another course, Reading Mein Kampf. To prepare, I’ve come up with a student’s guide, so avail yourself! The Holocaust belongs to us all.

Mein Kampf was banned in Germany from 1945 to 2016. What justifies banning any book? Outside Germany, Mein Kampf wasn’t just available but widely read. I saw it sold in Albania, a country with almost no experience of Jews. Further, it was Communist from 1946 to 1991, so 45 years of the most intense Marxist indoctrination. Why do Albanians care what Hitler has to say about anything?

Many must assume it’s one long diatribe against Jews, but, for many pages, Hitler almost sounds like a very sharp Jew, James Howard Kunstler:

In our great modern cities the proletariat does not show much attachment to the place where it lives. This feeling results from the fact that their dwelling-place is nothing but an accidental abode, and is also partly due to the frequent change of residence which is forced upon them by social conditions.

There is no time for the growth of any attachment to the town in which they live. Another reason lies in the cultural barrenness and superficiality of our modern cities […]

The following is the essential thing to be noticed. Our great modern cities have no outstanding monuments that dominate the general aspect of the city and could be pointed to as the symbols of a whole epoch, yet almost every ancient town had a monument erected to its glory.

It was not in private dwellings that the characteristic art of ancient cities was displayed, but in the public monuments which were not meant to have a transitory interest but an enduring one.

This was because they did not represent the wealth of some individual citizen but the greatness and importance of the community.

It was under this inspiration that those monuments arose which bound the individual inhabitants to their own town in a manner that is often almost incomprehensible to us today.

[…]

Among the broken arches and vast spaces that are covered with ruins from the ancient world the colossal monuments which still arouse our wonder have not been left to us from the commercial palaces of those days but from the temples of the gods and the public edifices that belonged to the State.

The community itself was the owner of those great edifices. Even in the pomp of Rome during the decadence it was not the villas and palaces of the citizens that occupied the most prominent place, but rather the temples and the baths, the stadia, the circuses, the aqueducts, the basilicas, etc., which belonged to the State and therefore to the people as a whole.

In medieval Germany also, the same principle held good, although the artistic outlook was quite different. In ancient times the theme that found its expression in the Acropolis or the Pantheon was now clothed in the form of the Gothic Cathedral.

In the medieval cities these monumental structures towered gigantically above the swarm of smaller buildings, with their framework walls of wood and brick, and they remain the dominant feature of these cities even to our own day, although they are becoming more and more obscured by the tenement houses.

[…]

The dimensions and quality of our public buildings to-day are in deplorable contrast to the edifices that, represent private interests.

If a similar fate should befall Berlin as befell Rome, future generations might gaze upon the ruins of some Jewish department stores or joint-stock hotels and think that these were the characteristic expressions of the culture of our time.

Jewish department stores! There’s your anti-Semitism. In 2015, there was a German film, Look Who’s Back. Though it slyly reflects a longing for Hitler, you must forgive that defeated nation. It’s about done. If Adolf was really around, he would retch, along with many if not most tourists, at Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. So vast and hideous, it’s just Jewish revenge. Frank Gehry is also getting even. His Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas is designed to drive even passing motorists insane. Pity those MIT students who must somehow learn inside his Stata Center. His Goldstein Estate in Frankfurt-Schwanheim is akin to mass murder. Zombies live there.

Hitler spoke of “a veritable civic desert” with citizens indifferent to their own city. Haven’t we gone way beyond that? Deracinated from everything, most have become hostile to unmediated reality.

Hitler was appalled at how ugly the world had become. He traced this to our moral corruption. The depraved crave hideousness. A century later, have we regained our sense of awe at the sublime, sacred or well crafted? Of course, not. You can’t respond to what you don’t see. Your world is 6 X 3 inches. A failed painter, Hitler was merely mediocre. He hated Cubist paintings. Does anyone enjoy looking at them now?

With Berlin and other burgs gaseous chambers of depravity and decadence, Hitler was incensed, but keep in mind Nazis were divided about who were really degenerate. As a painter of ugliness, Max Beckmann isn’t far behind Hieronymous Borsch. Otto Dix is also outstanding. Kirchner’s colors are superbly tuned.

Culturally, Hitler was certainly not a progressive:

The more vile and miserable the men and products of an epoch, the more they will hate and denigrate the ideal achievements of former generations.

What these people would like best would be to destroy completely every vestige of the past, in order to do away with that sole standard of comparison which prevents their own daubs from being looked upon as art.

Therefore the more lamentable and wretched the products of each new era, the more it will try to obliterate all the memorials of the past. Any real innovation that is for the benefit of mankind can always face comparison with the best of what has gone before, and frequently even serves to reveal the true value of the latter.

Knowledge of the past has never been weaker, and I speak as one who has taught at UPenn, University of Leipzig, Bard, Naropa, Muhlenberg and University of Montana. That any institute of higher learning would hire a college drop out like me to teach anything proves how degraded our education has become! Self learning is best.

Before Hitler dropped out of school at age 16, he “had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and völkisch nationalism.” The Greek root of dynasty, δῠνᾰστείᾱ, means dominion, lordship or political power. A dynasty is political power asserted over generations by one family. Why should anyone be loyal to this tiny, self serving group over his nation? Shouldn’t you be a völkisch nationalist like Hitler?

Of course not, if you’ve been educated in France, Spain, UK, USA or Germany, etc. In the West, nationalists are deemed racist, which isn’t incorrect, but there’s a twist. The worst racists are those who oppose your völkisch nationalism!

Tribalistic Jews only oppose your tribalism. Since Israel was founded and is maintained by genocides, to defend its right to exist is to support genocides. For Americans, this isn’t ideological but literal. They’ve been paying for genocides. Some are so stupid as to die while committing genocides for Jews. Others come home with heads like half chewed matzo balls.

Even Jews who speak against Israel’s war crimes defend its existence. While appealing for more dialogues or a two-state solution, they warn against rising anti-Semitism. We must unite to fight Fascism, capitalism, nationalism and neo-colonialism, say liberal Jews, but attacks on banksters or land grabbing Jews’ right to a Fascistic, genocidal state are just thinly disguised anti-Semitism.

The bifurcation of Jews into Zionists vs. progressives gives legitimacy to both. Just as with Democrats vs. Republicans, it doesn’t threaten but facilitate their master plan. This also allows pussified goyim to criticize Jews most pathetically. “I’m only squeaking against Zionists, massa!”

Hitler:

A great movement, called Zionism, the aim of which was to assert the national character of Judaism, was strongly represented in Vienna.

To all outward appearances it seemed as if only one group of Jews championed this movement, while the great majority disapproved of it, or even repudiated it, but a closer investigation of the situation showed that since that part of Jewry which was styled ‘liberal’ did not disown the Zionists as if they were not member of their race, but rather as brother Jews who publicly professed their faith in an unpractical, and even, dangerous way, there was no real rift in their internal solidarity.

[to be continued]

[Frank Gehry’s Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle]

[Frank Gehry’s Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas]

[Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin]

[Philly drunk in Leipzig on 11/10/15]