Banning Mein Kampf was not on the bad side of history. It's rarely black and white.

asadotzler 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.

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fabian2k 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not actually banned in Germany. Though I think the only edition you can buy here is annotated, which does seem like a good idea.

	▲	hulium 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.
	▲	tgv 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It actually was forbidden in other countries. But that's not the point. I do not consider banning this particular book bad, nor on the wrong side of history. Do you?

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Barrin92 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.

Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.

The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.