NEWS: ebooks for Kindle, Barnes&Noble Nook, Sony.
Brian Kavanagh
published now at Smashwords as ebooks for Kindle, Barnes&Noble Nook,
Sony Reader, Kobo and on mobile phones and iPods PCs, laptops, palm-
helds.
Books are available for immediate sampling and sale in multiple ebook
formats, readable on virtually any ebook reading device.
I hope you'll take time to check it out at Smashwords, where you can
sample the first 50% of the book for free.
Here's the link to my book pages, where you can sample or purchase the
books:
Capable of Murder.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7963
The Embroidered Corpse.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7964
Bloody Ham.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7965
Here's the link to my Smashwords author profile:
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BrianKavanagh
You can find paperback versions at all leading online stores, AMAZON,
BARNES&NOBLE etc., and at BeWrite Books (including PDF) http://www.bewrite.net
They can also be ordered from almost any brick-and-mortar bookshop in
the world.
Beautifully presented Smashwords ebook editions are available in the
digital format of your choice at http://www.smashwords.com
Cheers,
Brian
http://beekayvic.tripod.com
Jim
> My books, Capable of Murder, The Embroidered Corpse and Bloody Ham are
> published now at Smashwords as ebooks for Kindle, Barnes&Noble Nook,
> Sony Reader, Kobo and on mobile phones and iPods PCs, laptops, palm-
> helds.
> Books are available for immediate sampling and sale in multiple ebook
> formats, readable on virtually any ebook reading device.
> I hope you'll take time to check it out at Smashwords, where you can
> sample the first 50% of the book for free.
I'm writing a novel about the Monday Guy who after years
of hauling tons of paper switches over to Kindle and --
you *knew* where this was headed -- uses his books
for kindling. Ha ha! Kindle, kindling. Get it?
Get it? I've got a million of 'em.
"Multiplicity of thoughts," as the Monday
Guy's superiors call the old school, have served
mankind poorly. They've caused Mesopotamian
flooding and bar room fights and fraternity bros
cramming in wee hours with useless arcana.
You can be too smart. Thinking leads to
self-doubt and brooding. Brooding is life-wasting.
The Monday Guy and his associates have determined
that there are 451 categories of literature from Deep
South Cooking to Deep Doodoo, with astrophysics
and Usenet and James Joyce in between. Their
epistemology isn't Anglo-linguistically centered like
Dewey Decimal or American-centered like LOC
classifications. No sir. They've wedged in Woody
Allen and Murasaki and Hitler, too. They're
*adaptive*. The Monday Guy's desert island list,
so to speak, with 451 Kindle editions fit neatly
between two hands, and bookstores which by
their nature are so not-green (think of the
redwoods! think of the Amazon rain forest!) be
damned. If you can't get your story into one
of 451 books, it has no place in the Monday
Guy's utopian world.
Marko Amnell
"Jim" <j.co...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
ca017db4-1863-4808...@c34g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
[...]
> The Monday Guy and his associates have determined
> that there are 451 categories of literature from Deep
> South Cooking to Deep Doodoo, with astrophysics
> and Usenet and James Joyce in between. Their
> epistemology isn't Anglo-linguistically centered like
> Dewey Decimal or American-centered like LOC
> classifications. No sir. They've wedged in Woody
> Allen and Murasaki and Hitler, too.
Hitler preferred Shakespeare to Goethe. Hitler amassed
a personal library of 16,000 volumes. 1,200 are now
stored in the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
80 are stored in a basement room at Brown University.
How do I know all this? Because I am currently
reading _Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped
His Life_ by Timothy Ryback. Hitler would also
underline certain passages in his books, such as passages
describing plans to deport all Jews from Europe. Hitler
owned a book describing the properties of prussic acid,
the substance sold commercially under the name Zyklon B.
Jack Campin - bogus address
> The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy Ryback.
I've browsed that, it looks interesting.
> Hitler owned a book describing the properties of prussic acid,
> the substance sold commercially under the name Zyklon B.
Not very convincing. Every high school chemistry text describes
it. The decision to adopt it was not taken until quite late in
the Holocaust,and there's no reason to suppose Hitler was the one
to suggest it. Zyklon B is a mixture with distinctive handling
properties that made it convenient; those would not be covered in
any book, you'd need to look at the manufacturer's data sheets.
Without the stabilizers used in the Zyklon B formula, prussic
acid would not have been usable as a practical gas chamber poison,
and only a skilled technician could have come up with the idea.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
e m a i l : j a c k @ c a m p i n . m e . u k
Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
mobile 07800 739 557 <http://www.campin.me.uk> Twitter: JackCampin
Jim
> "Jim" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
>
> ca017db4-1863-4808-b622-72adad78e...@c34g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>
> [...]
>
> > The Monday Guy and his associates have determined
> > that there are 451 categories of literature from Deep
> > South Cooking to Deep Doodoo, with astrophysics
> > and Usenet and James Joyce in between. Their
> > epistemology isn't Anglo-linguistically centered like
> > Dewey Decimal or American-centered like LOC
> > classifications. No sir. They've wedged in Woody
> > Allen and Murasaki and Hitler, too.
>
> Hitler preferred Shakespeare to Goethe. Hitler amassed
> a personal library of 16,000 volumes. 1,200 are now
> stored in the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
> 80 are stored in a basement room at Brown University.
> How do I know all this? Because I am currently
> reading _Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped
> His Life_ by Timothy Ryback.
Hitler!
10.80 USD from Amazon.com, but it's not due out
in the U.S. until January 12, a week from tomorrow.
You can browse the first few pages at Amazon's
site. (I did.) So we know he had an architectural guide
to Berlin, a city which at times he professed to
detest.
It's available in a Kindle edition, too.
Unicode is not compatible with the current
XML standard. One of my Web sites went
down at midnight Eastern time (GMT - 5)
because of *one* bad character in an
RSS feed which I had not anticipated.
(It was an 0x08.) I had just implemented
a Windows service that operates in the
background that caches RSS feeds
several times per day which is about
as often as the RSS sources change.
That way, I don't have to connect to a
remote source every time someone
visits my site. But until now, I hadn't
bothered to filter for bad data.
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled
discussion of Hitler's Kindle reader,
and if my mother's reading this, it
wasn't my idea to bring up Adolf.
Marko Amnell
"Jack Campin - bogus address" <bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
bogus-15E2AB....@news.albasani.net...
>> Because I am currently reading _Hitler's Private Library:
>> The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy Ryback.
>
> I've browsed that, it looks interesting.
>
>> Hitler owned a book describing the properties of prussic acid,
>> the substance sold commercially under the name Zyklon B.
>
> Not very convincing. Every high school chemistry text describes
> it. The decision to adopt it was not taken until quite late in
> the Holocaust,and there's no reason to suppose Hitler was the one
> to suggest it. Zyklon B is a mixture with distinctive handling
> properties that made it convenient; those would not be covered in
> any book, you'd need to look at the manufacturer's data sheets.
> Without the stabilizers used in the Zyklon B formula, prussic
> acid would not have been usable as a practical gas chamber poison,
> and only a skilled technician could have come up with the idea.
You're probably right.
Ryback only mentions the book in question once, on page xiv
of the preface:
"... and a 1931 handbook on poison gas with a chapter
detailing the qualities and effects of prussic acid, the
homicidal asphyxiant marketed commercially as Zyklon B."
Well, the book does discuss poison gas in particular, but
the mere fact Hitler owned such a book proves nothing.
Anyway, I didn't say it in my original post, but I'll say it
now. Ryback's book does much more than simply list
the books Hitler owned. He tries to reconstruct Hitler's
thoughts and intellectual development on the basis of
evidence such as the markings Hitler made in his books.
This makes the book a unique and valuable contribution
to trying to understand Hitler. Anyone who is interested
can read some of the Amazon reviews for more information.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Private-Library-Books-Shaped/dp/1400042046
Jim
The reason I mentioned the Web site
at all is because of the related subject
that Kindle displays different Unicode
alphabets, and I was half wondering
if a German reader has loaded a
text set in Fraktur script.
Jim
> "Jim" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
>
> ca017db4-1863-4808-b622-72adad78e...@c34g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>
>
> > The Monday Guy and his associates have determined
> > that there are 451 categories of literature from Deep
> > South Cooking to Deep Doodoo, with astrophysics
> > and Usenet and James Joyce in between. Their
> > epistemology isn't Anglo-linguistically centered like
> > Dewey Decimal or American-centered like LOC
> > classifications. No sir. They've wedged in Woody
> > Allen and Murasaki and Hitler, too.
>
> Hitler preferred Shakespeare to Goethe.
The Monday Guy comes seven or eight
years after Hitler's time. For anyone
who was puzzled at the use of "451,"
I intended a parody of _Fahrenheit 451_
whose "fireman" is named Guy Montag.
But then even John Updike or someone
acting for him had to explain to the
NY Times Sunday book review that
_Roger's Version_ was a spoof
on _The Scarlet Letter_.
Jack Campin - bogus address
>>> The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy Ryback.
>>> the substance sold commercially under the name Zyklon B.
> of the preface:
> "... and a 1931 handbook on poison gas with a chapter
> detailing the qualities and effects of prussic acid, the
> homicidal asphyxiant marketed commercially as Zyklon B."
Perhaps a German translation of Mario Sartori's _The War Gases_?
Written in Italian, not published in English until 1939 (I have a
copy). I don't know the earlier publishing history of the book,
but it would make sense for it to have made it into German a few
years before English.
It has most of what you'd need to know to set up a chemical warfare
infrastructure, at the state of the art established by WW1 and the
Italian Fascist campaigns in Libya and Abyssinia. The Nazis didn't
go down that route, so if Hitler read it, he must have consciously
rejected chemical warfare as a military strategy.
Next to the Bible, it's probably the most evil book I've ever read.
There are a surprising number of downloadable copies scattered round
the world - in India and Uzbekistan, for two (the Uzbek site has a
banner above its torrent links showing Santa in front of his bookshelf
holding his finger to his lips in a "shhh!" gesture).
Marko Amnell
>>>> Because I am currently reading _Hitler's Private Library:
>>>> The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy Ryback.
>>>> Hitler owned a book describing the properties of prussic acid,
>>>> the substance sold commercially under the name Zyklon B.
>> Ryback only mentions the book in question once, on page xiv
>> of the preface:
>> "... and a 1931 handbook on poison gas with a chapter
>> detailing the qualities and effects of prussic acid, the
>> homicidal asphyxiant marketed commercially as Zyklon B."
>
> Perhaps a German translation of Mario Sartori's _The War Gases_?
> Written in Italian, not published in English until 1939 (I have a
> copy). I don't know the earlier publishing history of the book,
> but it would make sense for it to have made it into German a few
> years before English.
It doesn't appear to be the right book. The Library of Congress online
catalogue lists the following German edition:
Die Chemie der Kampfstoffe.
LC Control No.: 52053487
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/52053487
Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
Personal Name: Sartori, Mario, 1903- [from old catalog]
Uniform Title: Chimien delle sostanze aggressive. German [from old catalog]
Main Title: Die Chemie der Kampfstoffe.
Edition Information: [2. neubearb. und erweiterte Aufl.]
Published/Created: Braunschweig, F. Vieweg, 1940.
Description: viii, 377 p. illus. 24 cm.
But that is the "2nd corrected and enlarged edition."
So when was the first German edition published?
The answer seems to be 1935:
Author Sartori, Mario
Title Die Chemie der Kampfstoffe / Mario Sartori, Hans Klumb (trad.)
Publisher Braunschweig : Vieweg & Sohn, 1935
Material 259 S. : Abb.
Spine title Sartori, Mario
Note 623
Summary Cet ouvrage, guere Recent, � le m�rite de permettre
au chercheur de faire le point sur l'Etat des connaissances en
mati�re d'armes chimiques avant la seconde guerre mondiale.
Lorsqu'on sait que les Italiens se sont servis de ce type d'armes
en Ethiopie, il prend une valeur suppl�mentaire...
URL http://www.alexandrie.ch/swissbase/f030/n050000/vbs031180.html
Marko Amnell
"Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message
7qgklm...@mid.individual.net...
I also found this note:
"The War Gases
THE first Italian edition of this work was published
in 1933, and in 1935 there appeared a German translation
by Dr. Klumb which was reviewed in NATURE of April 11,
193G, p. O98. A considerable number of books on gas
warfare have been written in the last twenty years, but
they mostly deal with its military and medical aspects and
give comparatively little information about the chemistry
of war gases."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v144/n3659/abs/144996a0.html
So the book Hitler owned couldn't have been
Sartori's _The War Gases_. Hitler's book was
published in 1931 while Sartori's book did not
appear until 1933.
Marko Amnell
>
> _Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy
> Ryback.
[...]
> Ryback's book does much more than simply list
> the books Hitler owned. He tries to reconstruct Hitler's
> thoughts and intellectual development on the basis of
> evidence such as the markings Hitler made in his books.
> This makes the book a unique and valuable contribution
> to trying to understand Hitler. Anyone who is interested
> can read some of the Amazon reviews for more information.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Private-Library-Books-Shaped/dp/1400042046
>
I just noticed this interesting review of the book.
http://www.librarything.com/work/6062883/reviews/
Invoking Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish essayist and philosopher who
wrote "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", in
"Illuminations", Rybeck believes that through the private library we are
able to "glimpse the collector preserved among his books." In nine
chronologically ordered essays (entitled "books"), each inspired by a book,
or books, from the preserved remnant collections of Hitler's libraries, and
from Hitler's marginalia, Rybeck sets out (successfully I feel) to
"illuminate those issues that occupied Hitler in his more private hours,
often at pivotal moments in his career."
In Book One we are transported back to a "dreary Monday in late November
1915", when a corporal in the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment,
Hitler, bought "Berlin" by Max Osborn. This book, on the cultural treasures
of Berlin, reveals Hitler the artist, Hitler the tourist, and the Hitler who
shared Osborn's "militant Prussian chauvinism".
In Book Two we have "Peter Gynt" inscribed to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart.
Eckart, a founder of the German Worker's Party, later renamed the National
Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDP), was to make a profound impact on
Hitler (and the world). Taking the 31 year-old ex-corporal Eckart would
become Hitler's "patron, mentor, and father figure," shaping "the soft clay
of Hitler's emotional and intellectual world," and scripting "Hitler's role
as history's most infamous anti-Semite." As Eckart once said, "Follow
Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who called the tune!"
In Book Three, Rybeck examines Hitler the writer; his works, influences and
development; starting with "Mein Kampf", which he would write in Landsberg
Prison after the failed "Beer Hall Putsch". Hitler then embarked on his
second literary attempt - a memoir of his wartime service, now lost. Hitler
would go on to write a sequel to "Mein Kampf", and then a third volume,
which would never see print but has been largely preserved.
In Book Four, there is a discussion of Hitler and the philosophers. From
Leni Riefenstahl's gift of a first edition (1848) eight-volume set of the
collected works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we are
launched into an examination of Hitler's association with the works of
Fichte, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer amongst others; but it is
perhaps the approximately 50 volumes from various authors, published by J.F.
Lehmann Verlag and gifted to Hitler from the publisher that "preserve the
National Socialist legacy in the full range of its multifaceted nuance and
mendacity, a veritable compendium of the perverse moral, ethical, social,
political, legal, economic, and historical absurdities and excesses we have
come to associate with the Nazi era."
In Book Five, "Book Wars", we are given insight into the struggle between
National Socialism and the church. This struggle is encapsulated in two
books, "Foundations of National Socialism" by Alois Hudal, an Austrian
Bishop, who hoped the book would split the party from within; and "The Myth
of the Twentieth Century" by Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's "'chief ideologue'
in charge of the 'spiritual' welfare of the German people."
In Book Six, we look at Hitler's fascination with matters of the occult and
the spirit. Rybeck examines books such as "Law of the World" by Max Riedel,
and those of Schleich and Schertel, in which he suggests "we glimpse at
least a portion of Hitler's essential core." In Schertel's 'ektropic' man
there is no such thing as "real" and "unreal", "right" and "wrong".
In Book Seven, "Frontline Reading, 1940", the book "Schlieffen" by Hugo
Rochs launches us on an essay examining Hitler's relationships with his
staff and his vast library of military books that helped build his thinking,
strategically and tactically, in the earliest stages of the war.
In Book Eight, Sven Hedin's "America in the Battle of the Continents"
provides "a history of the outbreak of the war as (Hitler) believed it would
ultimately be recorded for prosperity." Hedin, a famous Swedish explorer,
Germanophile, and friend to Hitler, wrote that the origins of the Second
World War lay squarely at the feet of the Americans and British.
In Book Nine, the abridged German translation of Thomas Carlyle's 1858
biography of Frederick the Great forms the basis for a discussion on the
parallels that Hitler perceived between himself and the late King he so
revered. As the war was drawing to a close, Germany was hoping for a
miracle; as Frederick the Great had awaited a miracle in 1861 with his
empire in the brink of ruin. And, just as the death of the tsarina Elizabeth
brought that miracle to Frederick, the death of Roosevelt brought the
prospect of salvation to Hitler.
Three Appendices provide excerpts from past works on the make-up of Hitler's
library, and there are 42 in-text photographs. The high quality of the paper
(in rough-cut) and typescript (Monotype Dante) in the hardcover Knopf
publication is a pleasure to the touch and to the eye, and befits the
quality of the writing.
Marko Amnell
>
> "Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message
> 7qeefc...@mid.individual.net...
>>
>> _Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life_ by Timothy
>> Ryback.
>
> [...]
>
>> Ryback's book does much more than simply list
>> the books Hitler owned. He tries to reconstruct Hitler's
>> thoughts and intellectual development on the basis of
>> evidence such as the markings Hitler made in his books.
>> This makes the book a unique and valuable contribution
>> to trying to understand Hitler. Anyone who is interested
>> can read some of the Amazon reviews for more information.
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Private-Library-Books-Shaped/dp/1400042046
>>
>
> I just noticed this interesting review of the book.
> http://www.librarything.com/work/6062883/reviews/
>
> Invoking Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish essayist and philosopher who
> wrote "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", in
> "Illuminations", Rybeck believes that through the private library we are
> able to "glimpse the collector preserved among his books." In nine
> chronologically ordered essays (entitled "books"), each inspired by a
> book, or books, from the preserved remnant collections of Hitler's
> libraries, and from Hitler's marginalia, Rybeck sets out (successfully I
> feel) to "illuminate those issues that occupied Hitler in his more private
> hours, often at pivotal moments in his career."
[...]
> In Book Six, we look at Hitler's fascination with matters of the occult
> and the spirit. Rybeck examines books such as "Law of the World" by Max
> Riedel, and those of Schleich and Schertel, in which he suggests "we
> glimpse at least a portion of Hitler's essential core." In Schertel's
> 'ektropic' man there is no such thing as "real" and "unreal", "right" and
> "wrong".
This is the most interesting chapter in my opinion. It reveals how
Hitler's thinking was shaped by occult and mystical writers such
as Ernst Schertel. Schertel was an interesting character who not
only wrote about magic and the occult, but organized his own
dance company to advance his theories of "trance dancing", a sort
of Dionysian dance through which the dancers and audience could
get in touch with mystical forces. Quite bizarre... one of the dancers
in his company was a Finnish girl named Inge Frank.
Due to Ryback's work in uncovering the influence of Schertel on
Hitler, Schertel's book on magic has been translated into English:
http://www.amazon.com/Magic-History-Practice-Ernst-Schertel/dp/0578024578
"In May of 2003, Timothy Ryback, the author of "Hitler's Private Library:
The Books That Shaped His Life" had an article published in The Atlantic
Monthly. In the article he detailed several of the books held in a portion
of Hitler's library at Brown University. Mr. Ryback also mentioned some
of the passages Hitler marked in these books. One particular passage was
worthy of attention: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him
will never give birth to a new world." That passage appeared in the
book "Magic: History / Theory / Practice", written by Dr. Ernst Schertel.
Schertel was a researcher of alternative sexual practices, nudism, and
the occult. After finishing his book Magic in 1923 he sent a dedicated
copy to Adolf Hitler. Now, for the first time ever, "Magic: History/
Theory/Practice" has been translated into English, with all sixty-six
Hitler annotations intact."
What were Schertel's dance productions like? Well, here is a
description from the book _Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and
Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935_:
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Ecstasy-Movement-1910-1935-Criticism/dp/0520206630
"So far, the most detailed description of a performance by this group comes
from Hanns Heinz Rosmer, who reviewed a Munich performance for Der Blitz (7
September 1925, 4). Rosmer indicated that what he saw was neither a ballet
nor a program of discrete little dances but a "ballo furioso" composed of
"curious feelings, manic impulses, and excitations," which released
"pulsations of the darkest and most incendiary manner." In other words,
quite unusual for the time, the company performed a single, large work
unified not by a story or characterizations but by an abstract emotional
structure. At first, the dancers moved "as if asleep, quite naked," in
glaring green spotlights. A strange, unknown music vibrated: "a music like
sounds of nature, like wind rustling through the forest, like distant
moaning, like sweet curls of color. And suddenly a climax, a thunder, a
shaking, a voluptuously tortuous shrieking and clanking. Gongs roar and
drums rattle. The bodies hurl themselves into a fantastic intoxication,
crawl over each other, actually suck each other, their eyes wide open like
dark holes . . . primeval wildness, stormy upheaval, and a violent red
glaring on the bodies." A "powerful drumroll" abruptly produced "the deepest
silence"; then a "gentle white light" began to "flow over the bodies. The
music sounded like an organ and sobbed like a nightingale's song." The
female dancers rose and appeared to hover over the stage, their bodies
glittering with diamond droplets and silver tassels.
Although Rosmer was enthusiastic about the piece, Schertel seems not to have
cared much about gaining the interest of conventional dance audiences or
critics, for most performances of the Traumb�hne Schertel occurred in rented
theatres before invited audiences. Schertel regarded the company as a
completely experimental unit, more useful in developing an audience for
Parthenon publications than in building one for modern dance itself. But
even if he was simply an aristocratic dilettante cultivating an expensive
and perhaps prurient hobby, Schertel's dance cult was significant as an
expression of a virulent, redemptive irrationality associated with both
dance and modernity. It is difficult to imagine dance in any other era
inspiring the magnitude of pure experimentation achieved by Schertel, who
attempted large-scale abstract projects with an ensemble of eight dancers
(including at least two males) and integrated dance performance into an
ambitious cultural enterprise involving photographic "trance," nudism,
startling musico-scenographic effects, the dissemination of pornography, and
the construction of an ecstatic, paganistic religion of the body. And he
pursued all this without a school, a clearly identifiable style of movement,
or a conventionally understood audience for dance."
Marko Amnell
[...]
> Due to Ryback's work in uncovering the influence of Schertel on
> Hitler, Schertel's book on magic has been translated into English:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Magic-History-Practice-Ernst-Schertel/dp/0578024578
>
> "In May of 2003, Timothy Ryback, the author of "Hitler's Private Library:
> The Books That Shaped His Life" had an article published in The Atlantic
> Monthly.
You can read the article here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/895696/posts
> In the article he detailed several of the books held in a portion
> of Hitler's library at Brown University. Mr. Ryback also mentioned some
> of the passages Hitler marked in these books. One particular passage was
> worthy of attention: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him
> will never give birth to a new world." That passage appeared in the
> book "Magic: History / Theory / Practice", written by Dr. Ernst Schertel.
> Schertel was a researcher of alternative sexual practices, nudism, and
> the occult. After finishing his book Magic in 1923 he sent a dedicated
> copy to Adolf Hitler. Now, for the first time ever, "Magic: History/
> Theory/Practice" has been translated into English, with all sixty-six
> Hitler annotations intact."
Here are some examples of the passages marked by Hitler:
"Our body represents an accumulation of potential and kinetic world energies
and ranges on the way from the line of our ancestors, to the animal, plant,
and crystal down to the beginning of all things."
".Through our bodies flood the energies of the universe, out of the infinite
into the infinite. What we call our `soul' is the sum of all world energies,
all pasts of the world and states of the world."
"That we, who are living today, do not really know how to deal with the
`sensory world,' that it appears to be empty, dull, even oftentimes
annoying, that we perceive our body as a `prison' of our `soul,' that we are
consequently at best capable for mystique, and only in the rarest cases
capable of magic, is because of the extinguishing of the ability of which
all the late times are lacking, and which consists in experiencing the
`outer world' as an incarnation of `spiritual' contents. But only he is a
magician who is able to inspire things and solidify the soul.
"We call the central focus of the cosmic forces in us our `god' or our
`demon.' It describes the punctual projection of the whole dynamic of the
universe with all of its abysmal infiniteness in our self, it signifies the
deepest sense, the first being and the highest value, created in the center
of our consciousness out of the senseless, being-less and value-less chaos
of paracosmic forces."
"Every demon-magical world is centered towards the great individuals, from
whom basic creative conceptions spring. Every magician is surrounded by a
force field of para-cosmic energies, and as already indicated he acts to the
highest degree `ektropically' upon the cosmic dynamic. The individuals which
are infected by him form a `community of his `people' (Volk) and create a
complex of life of a certain imaginative framework which is called
`culture.' From that moment on, when these imaginative-magical forces of
cohesion run dry, the result is a deteriorating people (Volk) and with them,
their culture."
"Satan' is the creative, value-setting and value-increasing principle. Satan
is the fertilizing, destroying/constructing warrior. "He who does not have
the demonic seed within himself will never give birth to a magical world."
"The mass of today lives only materially, but not with the body, it feels
only intellectually but not with the soul." "Only the magician is therefore
able to also learn something from historical symbols, only he is able to
interpret life forms which have faded away."
"Satan is the beginning. Satan is in everything that lives and appears, he
acts in the last tenderest beam of light of the last star." "All reality is
only Phantoms. Our demon is struggling, and he is struggling in pain and
hardship. We must suffer with him to share victory with him."
Arindam Banerjee
> "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message
>
> 7rl8jsF5d...@mid.individual.net...
>
> [...]
>
> > Due to Ryback's work in uncovering the influence of Schertel on
> > Hitler, Schertel's book on magic has been translated into English:
>
Looks like Hitler was essentially Jewish in his metaphysical
approach. Because for the Jews Satan is God's #2, most certainly not
the fallen and rebellious angel of Christian conception! Long time
back someone in usenet said that Satan became evil to Christian as a
result of a mis-translation of the ancient Jewish texts. What
important bungling, that!
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee
Marko Amnell
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
e308117b-256d-48ee...@h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
I knew that several top Nazis were interested in
the occult even before I read Ryback's book,
but his speculations have deepened my
understanding of Hitler's own views on
the occult. Of course none of this is certain
as it is based on extrapolations gleaned
from nothing more than pencil markings in
books owned by Hitler. Hitler wrote no
marginalia.
Before reading Ryback's book, I basically
thought that the reasons for the Holocaust
were that Hitler initially wanted to deport
all Jews from Germany and territories occupied
by Germany, but when this became impossible
for various reasons (including the refusal of
Western countries to accept such large numbers
of Jewish refugees) Hitler finally opted to
exterminate the Jews in the death camps.
I thought that Hitler was driven by theories
about racial purity which led him to believe
that Jews were polluting the German race,
and the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
about secret Jewish plots to take over
the world. These are the sorts of reasons you
will find in Nazi propaganda such as the film
"The Eternal Jew" or the newspaper Der Stuermer.
In "The Eternal Jew" it is asserted, for example,
that in 1933 sixty per cent of shops in Berlin
were owned by Jews, half of the lawyers and
judges were Jewish, the average income of Jews
in Berlin was ten times the average income of
non-Jewish German workers, and so on. If there
was nothing more to Hitler's anti-Semitism than
this, then his desire to deport the Jews would not
be very different from, say, Idi Amin's desire to
deport tens of thousands of ethnic Indians
from Uganda, which he in fact did in 1972.
Idi Amin wanted to get rid of the successful
Indian shopkeepers and businessmen so that
black Africans would run the businesses instead.
But Ryback's analysis of Hitler's interest
in the occult suggests that Hitler may have
seen the Jews as some kind of special magical
people who presented an occult danger to Germany.
Hitler saw himself as a genius who had been
chosen by Providence (the cosmic "creative
force") to lead the German people to greatness
in a literally cosmic struggle. The subjects
that Ryback finds Hitler interested in include
supposed parallels between the biological and
the spiritual, such as analogies between
infection by bacteria and the way ideas
"infect" large numbers of people. Ryback
analyses Hitler's reading of Carl Ludwig
Schleich, a German surgeon (who e.g. pioneered
local anesthesia) and writer who explored
precisely these sorts of analogies between
the biological and the spiritual, and was
cited by Schertel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Ludwig_Schleich
Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
in which the soul of the individual is connected to
the entire cosmos within the realm of the
spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
the biological matter of the individual rejoins
physical nature upon the death of the biological
organism. Furthermore, Hitler seems to have
believed that in addition to the five ordinary
senses, there are several additional occult
senses that allow exceptional individuals to
perceive the deeper, hidden connections between
things and to foresee the fate of the world
(this is explored in the unpublished manuscript
"Law of the World" by Max Riedel, which the
author sent to Hitler). So, when Hitler spoke
about making a prophecy, as he sometimes did in
his speeches, he may have literally believed
that he was a prophet who was better attuned
to the spiritual world than most other people.
I have not read Schertel's book on magic yet
(I became curious enough that I ordered it
from Amazon), so I am not sure what Schertel
means when the talks about the "ektropic", the
demonic, Satan and so on. But if I had to guess,
I would say that what he is talking about is the
way that a great man, a spiritual leader, creates
new values and the basis for a new culture. The
leader projects his inner world, his vision, from
the inside to the outside ("ektropic", meaning
"inside-out"). In doing so, he ignores the way the
world was before his projection of his vision,
i.e. he is indifferent to distinctions such as
"real" and "unreal", "true" and "false", "right"
and "wrong" because his radical new vision will
create and re-order such distinctions. This is
a bit similar to the process of the rise and fall of
civilizations as theorised by Oswald Spengler.
This radical creation of new values is thus
necessarily "beyond good and evil" or in some
sense "demonic". "Satan" would be the name for this
demonic principle in the Jewish and Christian
religious traditions. Bear in mind that Schertel
really believed in magic, he had carried out
extensive research into magic in places such
as sub-Saharan Africa, so it is not clear how
he believed that these historical and cultural
changes played out at the occult or spiritual level.
Presumably, Hitler saw himself as just this kind
of great spiritual leader who was bringing a
new world into being -- the thousand year Reich.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
> e308117b-256d-48ee-abcf-e9bf51343...@h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
Lots of very interesting points here, Marko. But my point is that to
Hitler the Devil was not evil, quite the opposite. Today even the
Catholic Church in its Religious Education studies does not equate the
Devil with evil, as it used to in the Middle Ages (and also before and
after, for many centuries). So in the broader sense Hitler's non-
demonisation of the Devil anticipated the changes to the Church's
modern and liberal outlook, codified in 1963 in Vatican2.
Hmm, so as I make it out, the dominant Jews of Europe went along with
the dominant Protestants in being indifferent to the latter's
demonisation of Satan, such an integral part of the latter's psyche.
Hitler was the inevitable socio-political reaction to this; for an
alternative he turned to a different metaphysics and theology, which
ironically was a re-statement of the original Judaism where Satan was
never demonised, but acted as the Chief Prosecutor and #2. Since the
alternative (genuine Judaism) would undermine the Christianised
Judaism (which the dominant Jews practised, in order to not alienate
the so very many and so powerful world-conquering Protestants who
worshipped their ancient texts) we had to have the Second World War -
the Christian world-view had to be protected at all costs.
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
> e308117b-256d-48ee-abcf-e9bf51343...@h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
>
>
Distinctly non-Hindu stuff here, for Hinduism has nothing to do with
beginnings and ends, save of the individual soul in its transitory
body.
> >> ".Through our bodies flood the energies of the universe, out of the
> >> infinite
> >> into the infinite. What we call our `soul' is the sum of all world
> >> energies,
> >> all pasts of the world and states of the world."
Well, no. The Soul is what is permanent and imperishable, and a part
of the Divine. It merges with the Divine after death, and is present
once again in every living creature. The Spirit is what gives
individuality to each Soul. Thus while the Soul is as say something
common, the Spirit refers to our psyche, to which the tags of net
actions relating to past and present existences are attached, and the
nature of these tags define what states we will inherit, or experience
in present and future mortal or spritual life.
> >> "That we, who are living today, do not really know how to deal with the
> >> `sensory world,' that it appears to be empty, dull, even oftentimes
> >> annoying, that we perceive our body as a `prison' of our `soul,' that we
> >> are
> >> consequently at best capable for mystique, and only in the rarest cases
> >> capable of magic, is because of the extinguishing of the ability of which
> >> all the late times are lacking, and which consists in experiencing the
> >> `outer world' as an incarnation of `spiritual' contents. But only he is a
> >> magician who is able to inspire things and solidify the soul.
This is taking magic far too seriously and also wrongly. The purpose
of magic is twofold - firstly it is for entertainment, and also subtle
instruction that things in real life are not necessarily what they
seem. This nature of magic leads to the comprehension of true magic -
which while holding on to physical laws of nature, known and unknown,
has the capacity of suddenness in terms of impact upon any favoured
person. A life-changing experience, thus, has magic and is beyond the
scope of reason. To the extent this capacity is standardised, we have
scientific progress and its technical consequences.
> >> "We call the central focus of the cosmic forces in us our `god' or our
> >> `demon.' It describes the punctual projection of the whole dynamic of the
> >> universe with all of its abysmal infiniteness in our self, it signifies
> >> the
> >> deepest sense, the first being and the highest value, created in the
> >> center
> >> of our consciousness out of the senseless, being-less and value-less
> >> chaos
> >> of paracosmic forces."
Put it another way, for every life form, the universe begins with its
birth, and dies with its death. There are thus as many universes as
life forms. Their intersections impacting upon each individual, form
group and also individual comprehension.
> >> "Every demon-magical world is centered towards the great individuals,
> >> from
> >> whom basic creative conceptions spring.
Basic creative conceptions are the direct blessing of the Divine. He
who is thus blessed gets them - the very many who do not, are
whingeing unproductive ruling scum who use their vast numbers to
persecute the blessed, when not engaged in tearing each other to
pieces.
Well, all this makes perfect sense from the correct Jewish approach
where Satan is the opposite of Evil - Satan is God's #2, the Chief
Lieutenant and also the Chief Prosecutor.
> > Looks like Hitler was essentially Jewish in his metaphysical
> > approach. Because for the Jews Satan is God's #2, most certainly not
> > the fallen and rebellious angel of Christian conception! Long time
> > back someone in usenet said that Satan became evil to Christian as a
> > result of a mis-translation of the ancient Jewish texts. What
> > important bungling, that!
>
> I knew that several top Nazis were interested in
> the occult even before I read Ryback's book,
> but his speculations have deepened my
> understanding of Hitler's own views on
> the occult. Of course none of this is certain
> as it is based on extrapolations gleaned
> from nothing more than pencil markings in
> books owned by Hitler. Hitler wrote no
> marginalia.
>
> Before reading Ryback's book, I basically
> thought that the reasons for the Holocaust
> were that Hitler initially wanted to deport
> all Jews from Germany and territories occupied
> by Germany, but when this became impossible
> for various reasons (including the refusal of
> Western countries to accept such large numbers
> of Jewish refugees) Hitler finally opted to
> exterminate the Jews in the death camps.
How horrible!
1. Why did he have to exterminate them instead of just keeping them
there? As far as I can see, from the movie Schindler's List, the Jews
were earning their keep by working for the Reich. Why wasn't
segregation working? The Americans and the British did not have to
kill the Japanese or the German nationals in their countries.
2. If Hitler wanted to show off to the world after winning the War,
then surely he would have to explain why he exterminated the Jews?
What explanation could he have given?
> I thought that Hitler was driven by theories
> about racial purity which led him to believe
> that Jews were polluting the German race,
> and the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
> about secret Jewish plots to take over
> the world.
So exactly who is running the world today, if not Jews? Please do not
misunderstand, I have no basic objection to any group (including Jews)
ruling the world. It could be Jews, it could be the Italian Mafia,
the Japanese or Chinese ganglords, the Islamic or Christian
fundamentalists, Mao-Stalin-Lenin-Che worshippers, British
imperialists etc. But as far as I can see, it is the Jews along with
the leading Protestants (believers or fashionably atheistic) who are
running everything of any importance in today's English-speaking
world. To say that they are not running that dominant world, when all
evidence shows that that is exactly what they are doing, is
dishonest. Not that honesty gets you anywhere these days, but it so
happens that there is still free speech, at least in Usenet/Internet,
and I being the stupidest of all to make use of same.
These are the sorts of reasons you
> will find in Nazi propaganda such as the film
> "The Eternal Jew" or the newspaper Der Stuermer.
> In "The Eternal Jew" it is asserted, for example,
> that in 1933 sixty per cent of shops in Berlin
> were owned by Jews, half of the lawyers and
> judges were Jewish, the average income of Jews
> in Berlin was ten times the average income of
> non-Jewish German workers, and so on.
Well, so were they correct so far as those facts go? As I understand,
Hitler wanted to be an architect, but could not make it as the ruling
Jews threw him out. So he took to politics, and took revenge.
Evidently many other Germans shared his fate - the indifference of the
ruling Jews to their brilliance, they probably felt, deserved the
severest retaliation.
If there
> was nothing more to Hitler's anti-Semitism than
> this, then his desire to deport the Jews would not
> be very different from, say, Idi Amin's desire to
> deport tens of thousands of ethnic Indians
> from Uganda, which he in fact did in 1972.
> Idi Amin wanted to get rid of the successful
> Indian shopkeepers and businessmen so that
> black Africans would run the businesses instead.
That is not true. A top Indian govt official told me that Idi got a
lot of Indian businessmen together, and asked just one question: how
many of you are related by marriage to any African? Ten? five? One?
No? Zero! Why the hell do you think we want you here, then? Get
lost, you bloody racists! So Idi's desire to get rid of Indians was
due to the fact that they were not intermixing, which as you yourself
say, is the exact opposite of Hitler's grouse (Jews were polluting the
race). Another not unimportant fact is that Uganda went down the
chute after the successful but snooty Indians had to leave, while
Germany under Hitler soared after the Jews lost their dominance when
Hitler took power.
> But Ryback's analysis of Hitler's interest
> in the occult suggests that Hitler may have
> seen the Jews as some kind of special magical
> people who presented an occult danger to Germany.
Thanks to Internet, we can find out for ourselves exactly what Hitler
and Goebbels had to say about the Jews. We need not consult second
hand analysts.
> Hitler saw himself as a genius who had been
> chosen by Providence (the cosmic "creative
> force") to lead the German people to greatness
> in a literally cosmic struggle. The subjects
> that Ryback finds Hitler interested in include
> supposed parallels between the biological and
> the spiritual, such as analogies between
> infection by bacteria and the way ideas
> "infect" large numbers of people. Ryback
> analyses Hitler's reading of Carl Ludwig
> Schleich, a German surgeon (who e.g. pioneered
> local anesthesia) and writer who explored
> precisely these sorts of analogies between
> the biological and the spiritual, and was
> cited by Schertel.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Ludwig_Schleich
>
> Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
> physical nature upon the death of the biological
> organism.
As I noted earlier, this what you say is plain Upanishadic thinking
which Hitler had no knowledge about, from the quotes above from
Schertel. There the soul is defined differently, in terms of
energies. But according to Upanishadic thinking the soul has no
qualities we can discern, apart from being imperishable and a part of
the Divine. To say that Hitler was some kind of a Hindu, is wrong.
At best he had a cock-eyed notion of Hinduism, by following Neitzsche
or Schertel who were far off that mark. Bacteria, ideas, energies,
etc. are far too Western and modern concepts!
Furthermore, Hitler seems to have
> believed that in addition to the five ordinary
> senses, there are several additional occult
> senses that allow exceptional individuals to
> perceive the deeper, hidden connections between
> things and to foresee the fate of the world
> (this is explored in the unpublished manuscript
> "Law of the World" by Max Riedel, which the
> author sent to Hitler). So, when Hitler spoke
> about making a prophecy, as he sometimes did in
> his speeches, he may have literally believed
> that he was a prophet who was better attuned
> to the spiritual world than most other people.
Well, he was born to the prophetic tradition of the Jews, and perhaps
raised accordingly. So naturally he would adopt such an attitude. He
could not have anything other than a would-be prophet as a role
model. While studying same, he most likely came across the early and
correct Jewish notion that the Devil was not a bad guy.
>
> I have not read Schertel's book on magic yet
> (I became curious enough that I ordered it
> from Amazon), so I am not sure what Schertel
> means when the talks about the "ektropic", the
> demonic, Satan and so on. But if I had to guess,
> I would say that what he is talking about is the
> way that a great man, a spiritual leader, creates
> new values and the basis for a new culture. The
> leader projects his inner world, his vision, from
> the inside to the outside ("ektropic", meaning
> "inside-out"). In doing so, he ignores the way the
> world was before his projection of his vision,
He would be silly to ignore that, for you have to study carefully what
you want to destroy. Mao, Lenin, etc. did just that.
> i.e. he is indifferent to distinctions such as
> "real" and "unreal", "true" and "false", "right"
> and "wrong" because his radical new vision will
> create and re-order such distinctions.
True. Very true for Mao, Lenin, etc. You gotta get rid of the landed
classes!
This is
> a bit similar to the process of the rise and fall of
> civilizations as theorised by Oswald Spengler.
> This radical creation of new values is thus
> necessarily "beyond good and evil" or in some
> sense "demonic".
This is wrong. The great leader is always right and always good. The
old order he wants to upset is always wrong and always evil. For the
multitudinous cannon-fodder do not understand wishy-washy equivocating
academic chat. They have respect only for the great leader who gives
clear and simple directives.
"Satan" would be the name for this
> demonic principle in the Jewish and Christian
> religious traditions.
Hmm, Satan has gotta remain a bad guy for the rapture-wallahs and
their Jewish leaders.
Bear in mind that Schertel
> really believed in magic, he had carried out
> extensive research into magic in places such
> as sub-Saharan Africa, so it is not clear how
> he believed that these historical and cultural
> changes played out at the occult or spiritual level.
> Presumably, Hitler saw himself as just this kind
> of great spiritual leader who ...
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Marko Amnell
[...]
>>> "Satan is the beginning. Satan is in everything that lives and
>>> appears, he acts in the last tenderest beam of light of the last star."
>>> "All reality is only Phantoms. Our demon is struggling, and he is
>>> struggling in pain and hardship. We must suffer with him to share
>>> victory with him."
>
> Well, all this makes perfect sense from the correct Jewish approach
> where Satan is the opposite of Evil - Satan is God's #2, the Chief
> Lieutenant and also the Chief Prosecutor.
I can't really comment on this because I don't know what
"Satan" meant to Ernst Schertel. Amazon is promising
an estimated arrival date of February 9th for my copy
of his book _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ (the above
quote is from that book) so maybe I can return to this subject
some time next month.
[...]
>> Before reading Ryback's book, I basically
>> thought that the reasons for the Holocaust
>> were that Hitler initially wanted to deport
>> all Jews from Germany and territories occupied
>> by Germany, but when this became impossible
>> for various reasons (including the refusal of
>> Western countries to accept such large numbers
>> of Jewish refugees) Hitler finally opted to
>> exterminate the Jews in the death camps.
>
> How horrible!
> 1. Why did he have to exterminate them instead of just keeping them
> there? As far as I can see, from the movie Schindler's List, the Jews
> were earning their keep by working for the Reich. Why wasn't
> segregation working? The Americans and the British did not have to
> kill the Japanese or the German nationals in their countries.
Hitler was engaged in massive social engineering
carried out with the cruelest and most brutal methods
imaginable. In his New Order for the East, the Slavs
were to be reduced to slave status by exterminating
their upper classes, and Jews were also only good for
slave labour. But Hitler didn't want to keep all of the
Jews. There is an entry in Joseph Goebbels's diary dated
March 27, 1942 which is relevant here:
"The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be
described here more definitely. Not much will remain
of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60
per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only
about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor."
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-excerpts-01.html
It has been pointed out that the Nazis themselves calculated
that before the exterminations there were 11 million Jews
in Europe. If 6 million were killed, that is close to Goebbels's
figure of 60 per cent. Hitler wanted to use the conquered
territories in the East for the resettlement of German farmers.
So he wanted to reduce the existing population of Slavs and
Jews to make room for the German settlers.
> 2. If Hitler wanted to show off to the world after winning the War,
> then surely he would have to explain why he exterminated the Jews?
> What explanation could he have given?
The extermination of the Jews in the death camps was a
secret operation. Very few people knew about it, although
there were of course rumours circulating that something
horrible was happening. The local residents close to camps
like Auschwitz saw thousands upon thousands of people
entering the camp on trains, much more than the camp
could hold or feed. And they could smell the burning flesh
from the crematoria in the air. But if Hitler had won the war,
there would have been no proof that Jews were exterminated.
>> I thought that Hitler was driven by theories
>> about racial purity which led him to believe
>> that Jews were polluting the German race,
>> and the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
>> about secret Jewish plots to take over
>> the world.
>
> So exactly who is running the world today, if not Jews?
For such a relatively small group of people, Jews have
significant influence and power in the world today,
and many of them use this influence to, for example,
support the policies of Israel. But that is not saying that
Jews "run the world" or that there is a Jewish conspiracy
to take over the world.
> Please do not
> misunderstand, I have no basic objection to any group (including Jews)
> ruling the world. It could be Jews, it could be the Italian Mafia,
> the Japanese or Chinese ganglords, the Islamic or Christian
> fundamentalists, Mao-Stalin-Lenin-Che worshippers, British
> imperialists etc. But as far as I can see, it is the Jews along with
> the leading Protestants (believers or fashionably atheistic) who are
> running everything of any importance in today's English-speaking
> world.
I think the influence of the Jewish lobby on the U.S. Government
can easily be exaggerated. It's there, of course, as Israel
and American Zionists certainly want to do all they can to
have the U.S. on their side. But the U.S. Government also often
acts against Israeli interests. And the U.S. does not run the
world either. China, Russia and many other states whose
interests do not coincide with U.S. interests also have
significant power today.
> To say that they are not running that dominant world, when all
> evidence shows that that is exactly what they are doing, is
> dishonest. Not that honesty gets you anywhere these days, but it so
> happens that there is still free speech, at least in Usenet/Internet,
> and I being the stupidest of all to make use of same.
> > These are the sorts of reasons you
> > will find in Nazi propaganda such as the film
> > "The Eternal Jew" or the newspaper Der Stuermer.
> > In "The Eternal Jew" it is asserted, for example,
> > that in 1933 sixty per cent of shops in Berlin
> > were owned by Jews, half of the lawyers and
> > judges were Jewish, the average income of Jews
> > in Berlin was ten times the average income of
> > non-Jewish German workers, and so on.
>
> Well, so were they correct so far as those facts go?
I don't know. My guess is that the film might have
exaggerated, but that the real figures were probably
close to the ones in "The Eternal Jew".
> As I understand, Hitler wanted to be an architect,
> but could not make it as the ruling Jews threw him out.
No, he failed twice to get accepted into art school in Vienna
because he wasn't good enough. Hitler's main interest was
in painting not architecture, and he supported himself for
a while by selling low-quality paintings (mostly copied
from postcards).
> So he took to politics, and took revenge.
> Evidently many other Germans shared his fate - the indifference of the
> ruling Jews to their brilliance, they probably felt, deserved the
> severest retaliation.
The reasons for Hitler's anti-Semitism are complex, and
of course we can never really know why he hated the
Jews so much. It was certainly a constant conviction
throughout his life. Ryback emphasises this point in
his book.
>> If there
>> was nothing more to Hitler's anti-Semitism than
>> this, then his desire to deport the Jews would not
>> be very different from, say, Idi Amin's desire to
>> deport tens of thousands of ethnic Indians
>> from Uganda, which he in fact did in 1972.
>> Idi Amin wanted to get rid of the successful
>> Indian shopkeepers and businessmen so that
>> black Africans would run the businesses instead.
>
> That is not true. A top Indian govt official told me that Idi got a
> lot of Indian businessmen together, and asked just one question: how
> many of you are related by marriage to any African? Ten? five? One?
> No? Zero! Why the hell do you think we want you here, then? Get
> lost, you bloody racists!
That's an interesting anecdote. The deportation of the Indians
(and other Asians) is shown in some films about Idi Amin, such
as "The Last King of Scotland" and "Amin - The Rise and Fall"
but the anecdote you recount was not in either film. "The Last
King of Scotland", by the way, is an excellent film (but fails to
make it clear that it is fiction, not fact) while "Amin - The Rise
and Fall" is a cheap exploitation movie.
> So Idi's desire to get rid of Indians was
> due to the fact that they were not intermixing, which as you yourself
> say, is the exact opposite of Hitler's grouse (Jews were polluting the
> race). Another not unimportant fact is that Uganda went down the
> chute after the successful but snooty Indians had to leave, while
> Germany under Hitler soared after the Jews lost their dominance when
> Hitler took power.
Yes, it is one of the tragedies of sub-Saharan Africa that
there are not enough local businessmen. This problem is
highlighted in many studies of development problems in
Africa. Africa needs its own indigenous capitalism to
succeed. Amin tried to build exactly that (by racist methods)
but failed.
>> But Ryback's analysis of Hitler's interest
>> in the occult suggests that Hitler may have
>> seen the Jews as some kind of special magical
>> people who presented an occult danger to Germany.
>
> Thanks to Internet, we can find out for ourselves exactly what Hitler
> and Goebbels had to say about the Jews. We need not consult second
> hand analysts.
Yes, but Hitler did not speak or write much about his
occult beliefs. Nevertheless, he had dozens of books
about the occult in the surviving portion of his library
(which is less than 10 per cent of his total library).
He took these occult books with him to the bunker
near the end of the war, which meant they were among
his favourite books. By analyzing his reading material,
and Hitler's pencil markings in the books, Ryback is
able to come up with fascinating analyses of Hitler's
thinking. In many cases, he is able to corroborate
these textual analyses by finding similar ideas expressed
in Hitler's speeches and recorded private conversations.
Interviews with people who knew Hitler also back up
his analyses. Ryback's book is a fresh and important
contribution to our understanding of Hitler.
Ryback does not claim that Hitler was any kind of Hindu.
Ryback analyses Hitler's reading of occult works, such as
those of Ernst Schertel, Carl Ludwig Schleich and Max
Riedel. I have tried to give some indication of whose these
three authors were, as Ryback highlights them in particular
(and they were mentioned in the review I posted earlier in
this thread). Hitler started life as a Bavarian Roman Catholic,
and Christianity was important to him in his youth. As a boy,
he used stand on a chair dressed like a priest, for example,
and give a sermon to his sister. Later he rebelled against
organized religion, feeling that it oppressed man's religious
feelings. But he retained a profound lifelong interest in the
occult, which up until now has been poorly understood.
> At best he had a cock-eyed notion of Hinduism, by following
> Neitzsche or Schertel who were far off that mark. Bacteria,
> ideas, energies, etc. are far too Western and modern concepts!
Ryback asserts that Hitler was much more influenced by
occult writers such as Schertel, Scheich and Riedel than
by philosophers such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.
>> Furthermore, Hitler seems to have
>> believed that in addition to the five ordinary
>> senses, there are several additional occult
>> senses that allow exceptional individuals to
>> perceive the deeper, hidden connections between
>> things and to foresee the fate of the world
>> (this is explored in the unpublished manuscript
>> "Law of the World" by Max Riedel, which the
>> author sent to Hitler). So, when Hitler spoke
>> about making a prophecy, as he sometimes did in
>> his speeches, he may have literally believed
>> that he was a prophet who was better attuned
>> to the spiritual world than most other people.
>
> Well, he was born to the prophetic tradition of the Jews,
> and perhaps raised accordingly. So naturally he would
> adopt such an attitude. He could not have anything other
> than a would-be prophet as a role model. While studying
> same, he most likely came across the early and
> correct Jewish notion that the Devil was not a bad guy.
As I said, I'm not sure what the Devil meant to Schertel
(or to Hitler) so I will have to resume that topic later.
But Hitler certainly developed a notion of himself as
a leader who had been chosen to lead Germany by a
higher power. His studies of occult writings allowed
him to find just�fications for this belief.
Yes, certainly, and no-one was more forceful than Hitler
in asserting such simple certainties in his *public* speeches.
But Ryback suggests that in *private*, Hitler believed in
occult notions of the "demonic" or "ektropic" man who
is "beyond good and evil" when he magically creates new
values. Hitler developed a private, occult metaphysics
that supported his conviction that he was a great leader,
a prophet, who had been chosen by Providence to lead
Germany to greatness.
Marko Amnell
> Hitler started life as a Bavarian Roman Catholic
Err, make that "Austrian Roman Catholic".
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> [...]
>
> >>> "Satan is the beginning. Satan is in everything that lives and
> >>> appears, he acts in the last tenderest beam of light of the last star."
> >>> "All reality is only Phantoms. Our demon is struggling, and he is
> >>> struggling in pain and hardship. We must suffer with him to share
> >>> victory with him."
>
> > Well, all this makes perfect sense from the correct Jewish approach
> > where Satan is the opposite of Evil - Satan is God's #2, the Chief
> > Lieutenant and also the Chief Prosecutor.
>
> I can't really comment on this because I don't know what
> "Satan" meant to Ernst Schertel. Amazon is promising
> an estimated arrival date of February 9th for my copy
> of his book _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ (the above
> quote is from that book) so maybe I can return to this subject
> some time next month.
How much Schertel meant to Hitler is a matter of conjecture.
Officially Nietzsche was the greatest Nazi philosopher, and Goebbels
their chief ideologue.
> [...]
>
> >> Before reading Ryback's book, I basically
> >> thought that the reasons for the Holocaust
> >> were that Hitler initially wanted to deport
> >> all Jews from Germany and territories occupied
> >> by Germany, but when this became impossible
> >> for various reasons (including the refusal of
> >> Western countries to accept such large numbers
> >> of Jewish refugees) Hitler finally opted to
> >> exterminate the Jews in the death camps.
>
> > How horrible!
> > 1. Why did he have to exterminate them instead of just keeping them
> > there? As far as I can see, from the movie Schindler's List, the Jews
> > were earning their keep by working for the Reich. Why wasn't
> > segregation working? The Americans and the British did not have to
> > kill the Japanese or the German nationals in their countries.
>
> Hitler was engaged in massive social engineering
> carried out with the cruelest and most brutal methods
> imaginable.
Did he beat Pol Pot in brutality? My younger daughter saw a museum in
Cambodia, where there are hundreds of skulls. They were beaten to
death with stick blows. Pol Pot killed millions of his own
countrymen. Mao and Stalin did more killings. These Communists take
a lot of beating, so far as methods and numbers go.
So what are the undeniable evidences about his brutality? Is there a
museum of battered-in skulls somewhere in Europe, as there is in
Cambodia?
> In his New Order for the East, the Slavs
> were to be reduced to slave status by exterminating
> their upper classes, and Jews were also only good for
> slave labour.
I think that the non-co-operation of the Eastern Europeans was
Hitler's biggest problem. They initially welcomed the Nazis, as
liberators from Communism, but later turned against them. This fact
changed the entire outcome of WW2. Yes, the racism of the Nazis
turned against them. How much more that was, in contrast to the
racism of the British, Americans, etc will remain a matter of
conjecture. I think they were about the same, racism wise, as their
armed forces included many non-white people. The one plus point
about communists was and is their lack of racism. It was their main
source of popularity in the third world, along with their willingness
to share technology. In one library book that I read here, it was
written that Hitler's final solution for the Jews would be to ship
them to Madagascar after the war was over.
But Hitler didn't want to keep all of the
> Jews. There is an entry in Joseph Goebbels's diary dated
> March 27, 1942 which is relevant here:
>
> "The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be
> described here more definitely. Not much will remain
> of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60
> per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only
> about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor."http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-exc...
Is this evidence sufficient to keep the Holocaust deniers quiet? If
the evidence for the Holocaust is absolutely compelling, why do they
need laws to making its denial a criminal offence?
> It has been pointed out that the Nazis themselves calculated
> that before the exterminations there were 11 million Jews
> in Europe. If 6 million were killed, that is close to Goebbels's
> figure of 60 per cent. Hitler wanted to use the conquered
> territories in the East for the resettlement of German farmers.
> So he wanted to reduce the existing population of Slavs and
> Jews to make room for the German settlers.
So what is the incontrovertible evidence for this? The Holocaust
deniers say that 0.5 million Jews were killed in the camps, and that
due to disease and malnutrition.
See, anyone can fool around with figures. To give an example, after
the 1984 killing of Indira Gandhi, the Indian PM, by her Sikh
bodyguard, her partymen went on a rampage and killed many Sikhs in and
around Delhi. Now as to numbers - how many? From my rooftop, I could
see as many as six fires burning, and my boss said that he has some a
few dead bodies. Houses and shops were burnt. No doubt about all
these facts. Now if you ask any Sikh, he will say that many thousands
or tens of thousands were murdered - there is no limit to the numbers,
especially if he resides abroad. The local papers of the time
estimated as a guess that overall a thousand or so may have died. The
numbers that police had to investigate I do not know, but in a black
book that was subsequently brought out by the Sikhs to target the
Congress people responsible for the killings, they named a hundred-odd
victims. The upshot is that no one really knows how many people are
killed in riots or uprisings.
What happens is that if a single dead body is seen or heard by many
thousands, the tally is multiplied thousandfold. This happens for any
tragedy, that is not authoritarianly documented, but based upon
hearsay. Thus, Chinese will never say that Mao murdered 20 million or
more people, but that is the figure you get in works such as
Ripley's.
Maybe it will help to check out the world census for the Jews before
and after WW2. What are the figures?
Yes, in his Mein Kampf Hitler praises the white North Americans for
wiping out the native Indians, and taking over their land and
resources. It is thus likely that he would have followed their
example in Eastern Europe. However, Hitler shows a soft corner for
the weaker races, saying that they needed benevolent domination to
become stronger. In other words, he wanted to do to the slavs what he
found the British already doing unto the Indians. The British rule
was racist no doubt, but on the whole fair and while painful to the
ego, by no means genocidal. My grandfather told me how they had
debates is school, as to how British rule had benefited India or not.
Most people were in favour of British rule - they thought it was the
best possible thing that could have happened, especially after
centuries of Islamic rule.
> > 2. If Hitler wanted to show off to the world after winning the War,
> > then surely he would have to explain why he exterminated the Jews?
> > What explanation could he have given?
>
> The extermination of the Jews in the death camps was a
> secret operation. Very few people knew about it, although
> there were of course rumours circulating that something
> horrible was happening. The local residents close to camps
> like Auschwitz saw thousands upon thousands of people
> entering the camp on trains, much more than the camp
> could hold or feed. And they could smell the burning flesh
> from the crematoria in the air. But if Hitler had won the war,
> there would have been no proof that Jews were exterminated.
It is strange that the Allies did not make much of this during the
War. It is difficult to believe that so many millions were murdered
and not one word of this came out in the press. They would not have
minded printing any rumour, would they? Again, if the proofs are
convincing, what need of laws to make the denial an illegality?
> >> I thought that Hitler was driven by theories
> >> about racial purity which led him to believe
> >> that Jews were polluting the German race,
> >> and the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
> >> about secret Jewish plots to take over
> >> the world.
>
> > So exactly who is running the world today, if not Jews?
>
> For such a relatively small group of people, Jews have
> significant influence and power in the world today,
> and many of them use this influence to, for example,
> support the policies of Israel. But that is not saying that
> Jews "run the world" or that there is a Jewish conspiracy
> to take over the world.
The now-dominant English speaking world - who rules it if not the Jews
and their WASP admirers? They have already won two World Wars, have
all the money, power, fame, etc. all for themselves and their so-eager
hangers-on, so why be shy of acknowledging their uncontested
superiority? Why this bashfulness? To guess the answer, they do not
want to behave like some asshole dictator in order to keep on
remaining on top, by forestalling the inevitable reaction to their
declared supremacy. Clever as this strategy is, it should not prevent
the unbiased and unimportant - such as I - from saying what is what.
> > Please do not
> > misunderstand, I have no basic objection to any group (including Jews)
> > ruling the world. It could be Jews, it could be the Italian Mafia,
> > the Japanese or Chinese ganglords, the Islamic or Christian
> > fundamentalists, Mao-Stalin-Lenin-Che worshippers, British
> > imperialists etc. But as far as I can see, it is the Jews along with
> > the leading Protestants (believers or fashionably atheistic) who are
> > running everything of any importance in today's English-speaking
> > world.
>
> I think the influence of the Jewish lobby on the U.S. Government
> can easily be exaggerated. It's there, of course, as Israel
> and American Zionists certainly want to do all they can to
> have the U.S. on their side. But the U.S. Government also often
> acts against Israeli interests.
Huh? Is that like saying, the US Govt also often, much more often,
acts against the US interests? See, Israel is the holy land for the
WASPs, and the Jews there are defending it from the Muslims. Crusades
et al, mate. An ongoing job!
And the U.S. does not run the
> world either. China, Russia and many other states whose
> interests do not coincide with U.S. interests also have
> significant power today.
Nothing compared to the English-speaking world. Anyway, the only lot
to take them on, the Muslims that is, have no doubts that the Jews are
running the show.
Why can't we, he states his reasons very clearly in Mein Kampf, and in
great detail too. Not that his reasons are necessarily sound, and
still less it is that we should dislike the Jews on his account.
However if we go by statistics (following the 6 million figure so well
known) then it would be unfair to neglect the statistics that shows
Jewish dominance in Europe prior to Hitler.
Amin was basically mad. More later, Marko. Gotta go now.
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee
> him to find justífications for this belief.
Marko Amnell
[...]
>> I can't really comment on this because I don't know what
>> "Satan" meant to Ernst Schertel. Amazon is promising
>> an estimated arrival date of February 9th for my copy
>> of his book _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ (the above
>> quote is from that book) so maybe I can return to this subject
>> some time next month.
>
> How much Schertel meant to Hitler is a matter of conjecture.
Absolutely. Ryback's unearthing of him as a possible major
influence on Hitler's thinking is nevertheless fascinating.
No-one had pointed to Schertel's influence before Ryback.
> Officially Nietzsche was the greatest Nazi philosopher,
> and Goebbels their chief ideologue.
Well, some Nazis admired Nietzsche but Nietzsche was
certainly no Nazi. For one thing, he died decades before
the Nazi Party was founded. And Nietzsche made it clear
in his writings that he was not an anti-Semite.
I would say that Alfred Rosenberg was the chief Nazi ideologue.
He was the author of the book _The Myth of the Twentieth
Century_, a huge best-seller back in the 1930s and '40s in
Germany. Rosenberg postulated e.g. that Jesus Christ was an
Aryan, not a Jew. I read some excerpts once in an anthology
and it fully lived up to its reputation for turgid unreadability.
Goebbels was the propaganda minister, so I would call him
the chief Nazi propagandist, not the chief ideologue.
[...]
>> But Hitler didn't want to keep all of the
>> Jews. There is an entry in Joseph Goebbels's diary dated
>> March 27, 1942 which is relevant here:
>>
>> "The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be
>> described here more definitely. Not much will remain
>> of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60
>> per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only
>> about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor."
>> http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-exc...
>
> Is this evidence sufficient to keep the Holocaust deniers quiet? If
> the evidence for the Holocaust is absolutely compelling, why do they
> need laws to making its denial a criminal offence?
Well, in Germany it is also illegal to perform the Horst-Wessel-Lied
(the SA hymn and unofficial national anthem of Nazi Germany) in
public, or to show Nazi propaganda films like "The Eternal Jew",
"Jud Suess" or "Die Rothschilds - Aktien auf Waterloo", except for
educational purposes. I'm opposed to this censorship, just as I'm
against laws penalizing Holocaust denial.
>> It has been pointed out that the Nazis themselves calculated
>> that before the exterminations there were 11 million Jews
>> in Europe. If 6 million were killed, that is close to Goebbels's
>> figure of 60 per cent. Hitler wanted to use the conquered
>> territories in the East for the resettlement of German farmers.
>> So he wanted to reduce the existing population of Slavs and
>> Jews to make room for the German settlers.
>
> So what is the incontrovertible evidence for this? The Holocaust
> deniers say that 0.5 million Jews were killed in the camps, and that
> due to disease and malnutrition.
Most Holocaust deniers are motivated, not by an interest in
historical accuracy, but by the wish to make National Socialism
acceptable again. There is a famous statement of this position:
"Harold Covington (the leader of the National Socialist White
People's Party) sent a letter on July 24, 1996 via email to a number
of neo-Nazi supporters (many of whom were Holocaust deniers).
In this message, Covington explained Holocaust denial in a manner
that has been used by its opponents and critics as a definitive
answer to the question, "Why do people deny the Holocaust?"
"Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their
precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of
international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated
the most massive, cynical fraud in human history...I recall seeing a
television program on revisionism a few years ago which closed with
Deborah Lipstadt making some statement to the effect that: the real
purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an
acceptable political alternative again. I normally don't agree with
anything a Jew says, but I recall exclaiming, 'Bingo! Got it in one!
Give that lady a cigar!'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Holocaust_denial
As for the evidence that the Nazis killed 6 million
Jews, if you have the time, read the following webpage.
It's rather long, but will give you a good understanding
of what the evidence consists of, as well as why the
attempts to refute the evidence have failed:
http://www.nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi
I'm not a historian or an expert on the Holocaust but from
what I have read I think it's fair to say that the evidence
for the Holocaust is varied, extensive and strong. The
evidence includes testimony from witnesses, both
perpetrators and victims, including key individuals such
as Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who
gave a full and detailed confession. There is also
material and documentary evidence captured from Nazis
after the war.
[...]
>> > 2. If Hitler wanted to show off to the world after winning the War,
>> > then surely he would have to explain why he exterminated the Jews?
>> > What explanation could he have given?
>
>> The extermination of the Jews in the death camps was a
>> secret operation. Very few people knew about it, although
>> there were of course rumours circulating that something
>> horrible was happening. The local residents close to camps
>> like Auschwitz saw thousands upon thousands of people
>> entering the camp on trains, much more than the camp
>> could hold or feed. And they could smell the burning flesh
>> from the crematoria in the air. But if Hitler had won the war,
>> there would have been no proof that Jews were exterminated.
>
> It is strange that the Allies did not make much of this during the
> War. It is difficult to believe that so many millions were murdered
> and not one word of this came out in the press. They would not have
> minded printing any rumour, would they? Again, if the proofs are
> convincing, what need of laws to make the denial an illegality?
In the documentary film "The World at War" there is an interview
with Anthony Eden. Eden was the Foreign Secretary of Britain
during World War II (and later prime minister). Eden says that
when the British Government began to receive reports of mass
killings of Jews in territories occupied by Germany in Eastern
Europe, the Cabinet decided that they had to make this information
public. So Eden gave a speech about what they had learned in
the House of Commons and he said that the reaction was extraordinary.
All the MPs listened in silence and then Lloyd George, who I
think was Speaker at that time, said that if the House wishes to,
it can now show its sympathy for the victims by standing, and
all the MPs stood up. Lloyd George then turned to Eden and
said that it was the first time he had seen that happen in all his
decades in the House of Commons. Eden's speech was widely
reported by newspapers and other media:
"1942: Britain condemns massacre of Jews
"The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, has told the
House of Commons about mass executions of Jews by
Germans in occupied Europe.
"Mr Eden also read out a United Nations declaration
condemning "this bestial policy".
"He said news of German atrocities sent in by the Polish
Government and widely reported in the press this month
would only serve to strengthen allied determination to
fight Nazism and punish all those responsible.
"After his announcement the House rose and held a
one-minute silence in sympathy for the victims."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/17/newsid_3547000/3547151.stm
[...]
>> The reasons for Hitler's anti-Semitism are complex, and
>> of course we can never really know why he hated the
>> Jews so much. It was certainly a constant conviction
>> throughout his life. Ryback emphasises this point in
>> his book.
>
> Why can't we, he states his reasons very clearly in Mein Kampf, and in
> great detail too. Not that his reasons are necessarily sound, and
> still less it is that we should dislike the Jews on his account.
> However if we go by statistics (following the 6 million figure so well
> known) then it would be unfair to neglect the statistics that shows
> Jewish dominance in Europe prior to Hitler.
But how did Hitler develop the views that he expounds
in Mein Kampf? Presumably his early experiences
as a down-and-out artist in Vienna in 1907-13 were a
formative period. But what did he read back then? Who did
he talk to? And so on. We don't really know, although
there are lots of interesting hints. For cinematic depictions,
I enjoyed the films "Hitler - The Rise of Evil" and "Max"
which portray Hitler the starving artist in Vienna before
World War I and Hitler the up-and-coming demagogue
in Munich after World War I.
Arindam Banerjee
> Yes, it is one of the tragedies of sub-Saharan Africa that
> there are not enough local businessmen. This problem is
> highlighted in many studies of development problems in
> Africa. Africa needs its own indigenous capitalism to
> succeed. Amin tried to build exactly that (by racist methods)
> but failed.
The tragedies of Africa are many, and very difficult to solve. Maybe
the best thing that can be done is to prevent their leaders opening
bank accounts outside Africa. Fat chance! The loan money to Africa
returns to the lenders via corruption, and the poor people getting
nothing have to pay off the stolen loans with interest too. The
country is thus deprived of resources, the people starve, but on the
plus side the lending West is fat and prosperous. And also,
sanctimonious.
> >> But Ryback's analysis of Hitler's interest
> >> in the occult suggests that Hitler may have
> >> seen the Jews as some kind of special magical
> >> people who presented an occult danger to Germany.
>
> > Thanks to Internet, we can find out for ourselves exactly what Hitler
> > and Goebbels had to say about the Jews. We need not consult second
> > hand analysts.
>
> Yes, but Hitler did not speak or write much about his
> occult beliefs.
So I conclude that they were merely passing fancies, not to be taken
too seriously. His serious works included lifting Germany from dire
economic conditions, to a near world-power status. A superb
achievement! His defeat united Europe into the peaceful state it is
now - yet, Europe is no poor ugly fractious English-run modern
India. The happiness and prosperity that practically all Europeans
enjoy today, and will keep on enjoying into the foreseeable future -
and this includes Germans too - can thus be attributed to Hitler who
followed the rational, technical, secular and socialistic path of
Napoleon. The consistent demonisation of Hitler has a purpose - his
serious efforts at economic reform are thus overlooked, and not
implemented by the Third World which thus remains as an object of
scorn and slave labour to the dominant West.
Nevertheless, he had dozens of books
> about the occult in the surviving portion of his library
> (which is less than 10 per cent of his total library).
> He took these occult books with him to the bunker
> near the end of the war, which meant they were among
> his favourite books. By analyzing his reading material,
> and Hitler's pencil markings in the books, Ryback is
> able to come up with fascinating analyses of Hitler's
> thinking. In many cases, he is able to corroborate
> these textual analyses by finding similar ideas expressed
> in Hitler's speeches and recorded private conversations.
> Interviews with people who knew Hitler also back up
> his analyses. Ryback's book is a fresh and important
> contribution to our understanding of Hitler.
Okay, so one may find so many comic books, murder novels, etc. in
anyone's library. One can draw any conclusions one want to. Main
point is that it was a pastime for him, as he did not develop any
policy or strategy for the public based upon the occult. Very many
people are interested in the occult! After all, the key issues
relating to the meaning of life, after life, spirituality, causality,
unknown etc. cannot be found scientifically but through personal or
shared experience.
Now that's a mercy, given the level of demonisation done unto Hitler.
However, you were making out right now that he followed Hindu
philosophy. So as I see it there is no case for holding that he was
some sort of Hindu.
> Ryback analyses Hitler's reading of occult works, such as
> those of Ernst Schertel, Carl Ludwig Schleich and Max
> Riedel. I have tried to give some indication of whose these
> three authors were, as Ryback highlights them in particular
> (and they were mentioned in the review I posted earlier in
> this thread). Hitler started life as a Bavarian Roman Catholic,
> and Christianity was important to him in his youth. As a boy,
> he used stand on a chair dressed like a priest, for example,
> and give a sermon to his sister. Later he rebelled against
> organized religion, feeling that it oppressed man's religious
> feelings. But he retained a profound lifelong interest in the
> occult, which up until now has been poorly understood.
>
> > At best he had a cock-eyed notion of Hinduism, by following
> > Neitzsche or Schertel who were far off that mark. Bacteria,
> > ideas, energies, etc. are far too Western and modern concepts!
>
> Ryback asserts that Hitler was much more influenced by
> occult writers such as Schertel, Scheich and Riedel than
> by philosophers such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.
Anyone can make out anything as valid, and believe in anything as
true, if one is a relativist. Relativism rules today, yet the main
fact remains that one cannot go much by personal whimsical choices and
some scribblings. The official stand taken is the one that is
meaningful, as it is objective and so common for all. To make the
point that Hitler did not really believe in his official stand, more
proof from his public stance is required. Nothing private is valid!
Like, when I describe Gandhi as not a Hindu (though officially he was
one) but a closet-Christian instead, I can point out his *public*
indifference to the plight of murdered Hindus; his great affection for
Christians and Christianity; his missionary associates; his quoting of
Christian scriptures; his indifference to Hindu scriputues by reducing
them to just the Gita; his love for Christian/American media, etc.
> >> Furthermore, Hitler seems to have
> >> believed that in addition to the five ordinary
> >> senses, there are several additional occult
> >> senses that allow exceptional individuals to
> >> perceive the deeper, hidden connections between
> >> things and to foresee the fate of the world
> >> (this is explored in the unpublished manuscript
> >> "Law of the World" by Max Riedel, which the
> >> author sent to Hitler). So, when Hitler spoke
> >> about making a prophecy, as he sometimes did in
> >> his speeches, he may have literally believed
> >> that he was a prophet who was better attuned
> >> to the spiritual world than most other people.
>
> > Well, he was born to the prophetic tradition of the Jews,
> > and perhaps raised accordingly. So naturally he would
> > adopt such an attitude. He could not have anything other
> > than a would-be prophet as a role model. While studying
> > same, he most likely came across the early and
> > correct Jewish notion that the Devil was not a bad guy.
>
> As I said, I'm not sure what the Devil meant to Schertel
> (or to Hitler) so I will have to resume that topic later.
My point was that if Jews demonise Satan, or not object to the
demonisation of Satan by Christians, they are doing their own religion
and metaphysics great disservice. While Jews have no concept of
Karma, they cannot be immune to its consequences. As evident, from
their sad history. The suck-up Jews always exploit, and the rage of
the population falls upon the good, productive, harmless Jews.
> But Hitler certainly developed a notion of himself as
> a leader who had been chosen to lead Germany by a
> higher power. His studies of occult writings allowed
> him to find justífications for this belief.
You do not need the occult for such justification. A leader is a
leader only when he has followers. The occult is open to all, not
just Hitler.
Yes, how else can you be a mass-based leader?
> But Ryback suggests that in *private*, Hitler believed in
> occult notions of the "demonic" or "ektropic" man who
> is "beyond good and evil" when he magically creates new
> values. Hitler developed a private, occult metaphysics
> that supported his conviction that he was a great leader,
> a prophet, who had been chosen by Providence to lead
> Germany to greatness.
So he did lead not only Germany, but also Europe into its present
greatness. Which is undoubted. An unnecessary mishap like WW2 did
happen, but what are those bad memories in contrast to the peace and
prosperity to be enjoyed by many many millions for many centuries?
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee.
Marko Amnell
>> > As I noted earlier, this what you say is plain Upanishadic thinking
>> > which Hitler had no knowledge about, from the quotes above from
>> > Schertel. There the soul is defined differently, in terms of
>> > energies. But according to Upanishadic thinking the soul has no
>> > qualities we can discern, apart from being imperishable and a part of
>> > the Divine. To say that Hitler was some kind of a Hindu, is wrong.
>>
>> Ryback does not claim that Hitler was any kind of Hindu.
>
> Now that's a mercy, given the level of demonisation done unto Hitler.
> However, you were making out right now that he followed Hindu
> philosophy.
I never said that Hitler was any kind of Hindu.
I have no idea where you got that idea. Please
pay more attention to what you read. All I said
was the Hitler had a profound lifelong interest
in the occult.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> [...]
>
> >> I can't really comment on this because I don't know what
> >> "Satan" meant to Ernst Schertel. Amazon is promising
> >> an estimated arrival date of February 9th for my copy
> >> of his book _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ (the above
> >> quote is from that book) so maybe I can return to this subject
> >> some time next month.
>
> > How much Schertel meant to Hitler is a matter of conjecture.
>
> Absolutely. Ryback's unearthing of him as a possible major
> influence on Hitler's thinking is nevertheless fascinating.
> No-one had pointed to Schertel's influence before Ryback.
>
> > Officially Nietzsche was the greatest Nazi philosopher,
> > and Goebbels their chief ideologue.
>
> Well, some Nazis admired Nietzsche but Nietzsche was
> certainly no Nazi. For one thing, he died decades before
> the Nazi Party was founded. And Nietzsche made it clear
> in his writings that he was not an anti-Semite.
True. In fact, he said that Europe owed a lot to the Jews. However,
he did say that while okay they weren't really first rate.
> I would say that Alfred Rosenberg was the chief Nazi ideologue.
> He was the author of the book _The Myth of the Twentieth
> Century_, a huge best-seller back in the 1930s and '40s in
> Germany. Rosenberg postulated e.g. that Jesus Christ was an
> Aryan, not a Jew. I read some excerpts once in an anthology
> and it fully lived up to its reputation for turgid unreadability.
Heh-heh, did he know that they have Jesus Christ's grave in Srinagar
(India)? According to the local tradition there, Jesus (Isa Masih to
them) lived there for a 100 years, quite happily. There was a show on
this in ABC TV (I mean, the Australian ABC, not the US one).
> Goebbels was the propaganda minister, so I would call him
> the chief Nazi propagandist, not the chief ideologue.
>
> [...]
>
> >> But Hitler didn't want to keep all of the
> >> Jews. There is an entry in Joseph Goebbels's diary dated
> >> March 27, 1942 which is relevant here:
>
> >> "The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be
> >> described here more definitely. Not much will remain
> >> of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60
> >> per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only
> >> about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor."
> >>http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-exc...
>
> > Is this evidence sufficient to keep the Holocaust deniers quiet? If
> > the evidence for the Holocaust is absolutely compelling, why do they
> > need laws to making its denial a criminal offence?
>
> Well, in Germany it is also illegal to perform the Horst-Wessel-Lied
> (the SA hymn and unofficial national anthem of Nazi Germany) in
> public, or to show Nazi propaganda films like "The Eternal Jew",
> "Jud Suess" or "Die Rothschilds - Aktien auf Waterloo", except for
> educational purposes. I'm opposed to this censorship, just as I'm
> against laws penalizing Holocaust denial.
Very good. Laws against Holocaust denial make no sense if it really
happened. On the other hand, they raise a whole can of worms - who is
lying, who has what to hide? Free speech denied is liberty
imperilled.
Again, democracy makes no sense if any party is banned. Terrorism is
the alternative, and who wants that? The whole point of democracy is
to do away with the civil wars and unrests that would have to happen
if people of opposing ideologies and interests occupied the same
geography. Or we have a united fascist state, where those who do not
agree or conform do not belong - they must get out, or accept second-
rate status.
> As for the evidence that the Nazis killed 6 million
> Jews, if you have the time, read the following webpage.
> It's rather long, but will give you a good understanding
> of what the evidence consists of, as well as why the
> attempts to refute the evidence have failed:http://www.nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi
>
> I'm not a historian or an expert on the Holocaust but from
> what I have read I think it's fair to say that the evidence
> for the Holocaust is varied, extensive and strong. The
> evidence includes testimony from witnesses, both
> perpetrators and victims, including key individuals such
> as Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who
> gave a full and detailed confession. There is also
> material and documentary evidence captured from Nazis
> after the war.
Okay I will go through the site. But the main fact that will convince
me one way or the other are the numbers of Jews before and after the
WW2. In short, census values, if their taking was honest, or beyond
dispute.
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/17/newsid_3...
Was this for Nazis murdering them systematically in the concentration
camp gas chambers? Did the British know that they were actually
murdering them by the millions? A few massacres here and there, is
one thing - but state sponsered genocidal programs are immensely more
horrible. They raise very fundamental questions relating to human
nature, that we all share. So the question is not of massacre, bad
though that is, but state-sanctioned genocide. And that too, not any
dictatorial theological/barbarian state exterminating non-believers/
defeated ones, or atheistic Maoists/Stalinists/PolPotists who could
kill by the tens of millions to annihilate the perceived class enemy
formed from Marxist-Leninist thought; but the German state, heir to a
very proud and productive culture.
> [...]
>
> >> The reasons for Hitler's anti-Semitism are complex, and
> >> of course we can never really know why he hated the
> >> Jews so much. It was certainly a constant conviction
> >> throughout his life. Ryback emphasises this point in
> >> his book.
>
> > Why can't we, he states his reasons very clearly in Mein Kampf, and in
> > great detail too. Not that his reasons are necessarily sound, and
> > still less it is that we should dislike the Jews on his account.
> > However if we go by statistics (following the 6 million figure so well
> > known) then it would be unfair to neglect the statistics that shows
> > Jewish dominance in Europe prior to Hitler.
>
> But how did Hitler develop the views that he expounds
> in Mein Kampf?
He was in jail, with nothing much else to do? Jews have always been
scape-goated, so nothing very original here, in my opinion.
Presumably his early experiences
> as a down-and-out artist in Vienna in 1907-13 were a
> formative period. But what did he read back then? Who did
> he talk to? And so on. We don't really know, although
> there are lots of interesting hints.
Vienna is a lovely place, and even a down-and-out artist there could
be happy at least sometimes. Even if he was Hitler.
For cinematic depictions,
> I enjoyed the films "Hitler - The Rise of Evil" and "Max"
> which portray Hitler the starving artist in Vienna before
> World War I and Hitler the up-and-coming demagogue
> in Munich after World War I.- Hide quoted text -
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> >> > As I noted earlier, this what you say is plain Upanishadic thinking
> >> > which Hitler had no knowledge about, from the quotes above from
> >> > Schertel. There the soul is defined differently, in terms of
> >> > energies. But according to Upanishadic thinking the soul has no
> >> > qualities we can discern, apart from being imperishable and a part of
> >> > the Divine. To say that Hitler was some kind of a Hindu, is wrong.
>
> >> Ryback does not claim that Hitler was any kind of Hindu.
>
> > Now that's a mercy, given the level of demonisation done unto Hitler.
> > However, you were making out right now that he followed Hindu
> > philosophy.
>
> I never said that Hitler was any kind of Hindu.
> I have no idea where you got that idea. Please
> pay more attention to what you read.
Please see what I have quoted from an earlier post, below. In your
second para, I got the impression that you were speaking for yourself,
and not quoting anyone. I regret any misunderstandings.
All I said
> was the Hitler had a profound lifelong interest
> in the occult.
>
>
>
> > So as I see it there is no case for holding that he was
> > some sort of Hindu.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Marko wrote:
>> Hitler saw himself as a genius who had been
>> chosen by Providence (the cosmic "creative
>> force") to lead the German people to greatness
>> in a literally cosmic struggle. The subjects
>> that Ryback finds Hitler interested in include
>> supposed parallels between the biological and
>> the spiritual, such as analogies between
>> infection by bacteria and the way ideas
>> "infect" large numbers of people. Ryback
>> analyses Hitler's reading of Carl Ludwig
>> Schleich, a German surgeon (who e.g. pioneered
>> local anesthesia) and writer who explored
>> precisely these sorts of analogies between
>> the biological and the spiritual, and was
>> cited by Schertel.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Ludwig_Schleich
>> Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
>> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
>> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
>> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
>> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
>> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
>> physical nature upon the death of the biological
>> organism.
end Marko wrote
Arindam wrote:
> As I noted earlier, this what you say is plain Upanishadic thinking
> which Hitler had no knowledge about, from the quotes above from
> Schertel. There the soul is defined differently, in terms of
> energies. But according to Upanishadic thinking the soul has no
> qualities we can discern, apart from being imperishable and a part of
> the Divine. To say that Hitler was some kind of a Hindu, is wrong.
end Arindam wrote
Marko Amnell
[...]
> Okay I will go through the site. But the main fact that will convince
> me one way or the other are the numbers of Jews before and after the
> WW2. In short, census values, if their taking was honest, or beyond
> dispute.
Demographic data show that there were six million Jews
missing after World War II. I'm not an expert on this subject
and can't give you a Web link to the data. You will have to
research this topic yourself if you are interested.
The statement by the United Nations War Crimes Commission
(which existed before the establishment of the UN itself) quoted
by Eden in the BBC story dated December 17, 1942 (linked to above)
refers to hundreds of thousands of people being killed in
"mass executions," as part of "Hitler's often repeated intention
to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe", a "bestial policy
of cold-blooded extermination":
"The attention of the Governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia,
Greece, Luxemborg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the USA,
the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northen Ireland, the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Yugoslavia, and the
French Committee of National Liberation, has been drawn to
numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not
content to denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories
over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most
elementary human rights, are now carring into effect Hitler's
often repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in
Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported,
in conditions of appaling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe.
In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse,
the gettoes established by the Nazi invaders are being systematically
emptied of all Jews except a few highly-skilled workers required
for war indestries. None of those taken away are ever heard of
again. The able-bodies are slowly worked to death in labour
camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or
are deliberately massacred in mass executions.
"The number of victims of these bloody cruelitis is reckoned in
many hundreds of thousand of entirely innocent men, women and
children.
"The above-mentioned Governments and the French National
Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial
policy of cold-blooded extermination."
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/un1942a.html
Note that the word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin
during World War II to describe the Nazi state policy of the
mass murder of Jews:
"He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he
coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family,
tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).[1] He first used
the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of
Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
Okay. So there is actual evidence that in 1942 the Allies knew that
there were reports of mass scale executions of the Jews. So to clinch
the case for the Holocaust, we have to check the census figures before
and after the WW2.
Marko Amnell
> Please see what I have quoted from an earlier post, below. In your
> second para, I got the impression that you were speaking for yourself,
> and not quoting anyone. I regret any misunderstandings.
Okay, so you drew the conclusion yourself that the
following description meant that Hitler "followed
Hindu philosophy":
"Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
in which the soul of the individual is connected to
the entire cosmos within the realm of the
spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
the biological matter of the individual rejoins
physical nature upon the death of the biological
organism."
That paragraph is my paraphrase of what Ryback
says in his book. On page 146 of _Hitler's Private
Library_ he writes:
"In Hitler's copy of the 1924 collection of essays by
Carl Ludwig Schleich, I found a series of penciled
markings in a chapter exploring the relationship
between cellular biology, immortality, and human
knowledge. 'What I physically succeeded in creating
in this life through struggle, exertion and suffering,
I give back a billion-fold with my immortal cells,
just like this small spark of life I call myself returns
to the organic property of the earth, my spiritual self
belongs to the universe,' Schleich observes, with the
pencil following in the margin. 'There it will find new
forms as it slowly rises until it achieves equality
with the collective soul of the world, and will rejoice
at the opportunity to nourish a star with a being that
is based upon my purified effigy.
"We find near identical passages marked in a 1923
handbook on the 'history, theory and practice' of the
occult by Ernst Schertel. In this handsome, red-linen
volume bearing the Hitler bookplate and Schertel's
'respectful' dedication, Hitler has marked a passage
in which Schertel cites Schleich, quoting almost
verbatim from him: 'Our body presents a collection of
potential and kinetic world energies and extends
beyond to other lineages through animals, plants and
crystals down to the very beginning of things.' Hitler's
pencil traces the passage in the margin. 'In our body
rests the entire history of the world, beginning with
the birth of the first star. Through our body flows
the energies of the universe, from the eternal to the
eternal. And these drive the mills of our existence.'
Hitler recast this same pantheistic vision in his own
words one evening in December 1941, while musing
on suicide. 'Even if you take your own life, you simply
return to nature as much in substance as in spirit and
soul,' he said, repeating the theme a few days later
and arriving at the same conclusion drawn by Schleich
and Schertel. 'The notion of eternity is fundamental
to our nature,' he said. 'Spirit and soul defintely return
to a collective reservoir--like the body. As the substance
of life, we thereby fertilize the foundation from which
new life emerges." (pp. 146-148)
So, something in Hitler's occultism reminds you
of Hindu philosophy. On the other hand, you said
that the notion of a beginning and end to things is
alien to Hindu philosophy. I know little about
Hindu philosophy so I can't comment on how similar
Hitler's occultism is to Hindu beliefs and teachings.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> [...]
>
> > Okay I will go through the site. But the main fact that will convince
> > me one way or the other are the numbers of Jews before and after the
> > WW2. In short, census values, if their taking was honest, or beyond
> > dispute.
>
> Demographic data show that there were six million Jews
> missing after World War II. I'm not an expert on this subject
> and can't give you a Web link to the data. You will have to
> research this topic yourself if you are interested.
Well, I went through the Nizkor site which you referred to, in its
rebuttal of the IHR issues.
Six million missing after WW2 is what they wrote, mainly half died in
Poland.
On objective grounds, what was the last reliable census of all the
Jews before the war, and the first reliable one after the war - that
is the question. The census is carried out by a very big group, and
while by no means impossible, screwing up the census data is not as
easy as putting up figures in any sort of news article.
This has not been touched in any of the 66 points made, but maybe I
missed it.
Six million out of a world population that should not be more than say
20 million at the time, is a very huge percentage 30% that is.
Surely, that will be shown up in the census statistics taken all over
the world. Why this simple point, based upon the conservation laws
upon which the proud and glorious Western technologies are based, has
not been addressed by either party in this case, beats me.
As for going by media reports, if I were to trust the antics of the
people in Delhi around the Australian embassy around this time, I
should have to think that I along with my family will be butchered if
we step out of the house! The less the sensation-mongers are
regarded, the better for overall health. The plain fact is that
Australia is a most excellent and safe place to live in, for most
people not looking for trouble, and generally behaving themselves.
Finally, both Nizkor and IHR are relativists, for all the modern West
is relativistic. Meaning, no matter what I say or do, I am as right
or wrong as I please, for such is my viewpoint. So, to expect pure
truth from either of them - as opposed to manifestations of self-
interest - is futile.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> > Please see what I have quoted from an earlier post, below. In your
> > second para, I got the impression that you were speaking for yourself,
> > and not quoting anyone. I regret any misunderstandings.
>
> Okay, so you drew the conclusion yourself that the
> following description meant that Hitler "followed
> Hindu philosophy":
I drew the conclusion that you wrote that Hitler followed Hindu
philosophy, based upon what I had quoted from what you wrote below. I
did not come to the conclusion that Hitler followed Hindu philosophy.
These two are entirely different.
> "Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
> physical nature upon the death of the biological
> organism."
Yes, as I said earlier, this is a key aspect, highly simplified, of
ancient Upanishad (Vedantic) thinking which is the philosophy behind
the Vedas.
> That paragraph is my paraphrase of what Ryback
> says in his book.
Okay, so this is your own work. You were paraphrasing, not quoting.
On page 146 of _Hitler's Private
>
> Library_ he writes:
>
> "In Hitler's copy of the 1924 collection of essays by
> Carl Ludwig Schleich, I found a series of penciled
> markings in a chapter exploring the relationship
> between cellular biology, immortality, and human
> knowledge. 'What I physically succeeded in creating
> in this life through struggle, exertion and suffering,
> I give back a billion-fold with my immortal cells,
"immortal cells" is not a Hindu concept. Sounds more semitic, like
eternal stay in Jewish heaven.
> just like this small spark of life I call myself returns
> to the organic property of the earth, my spiritual self
> belongs to the universe,' Schleich observes, with the
> pencil following in the margin.
The Universe is space and matter, and so nothing spiritual. According
to Hindu thinking the soul belongs to another dimension altogether.
'There it will find new
> forms as it slowly rises until it achieves equality
> with the collective soul of the world, and will rejoice
> at the opportunity to nourish a star with a being that
> is based upon my purified effigy.
Again, there is nothing particularly Hindu here, just someone's
observations. One person's idea of afterlife, etc. which could well
have been thought by an ancient intellectual Egyptian, Greek or
Chinese not too keen on the standard views of Heaven.
> "We find near identical passages marked in a 1923
> handbook on the 'history, theory and practice' of the
> occult by Ernst Schertel. In this handsome, red-linen
> volume bearing the Hitler bookplate and Schertel's
> 'respectful' dedication, Hitler has marked a passage
> in which Schertel cites Schleich, quoting almost
> verbatim from him: 'Our body presents a collection of
> potential and kinetic world energies and extends
> beyond to other lineages through animals, plants and
> crystals down to the very beginning of things.'
Again, nothing Hindu here. Chap did not know much about energy or
energies, at any rate from a scientific point of view. What he
probably meant was genes, but this was far before modern genetic
research.
Hitler's
> pencil traces the passage in the margin. 'In our body
> rests the entire history of the world, beginning with
> the birth of the first star. Through our body flows
> the energies of the universe, from the eternal to the
> eternal. And these drive the mills of our existence.'
He is talking about science here, in a poetic vein. Nothing spiritual
let alone religious here, except maybe the term "eternal". Nothing
particularly Hindu here, for the concept of eternal life after death,
etc. is standard to Christian and other semitic dogmas. And his
concept of "first star" shows that he is really semitic after all,
believing in creation.
> Hitler recast this same pantheistic vision in his own
> words one evening in December 1941, while musing
> on suicide.
I still do not see how he had the faintest inkling of Vedantic
thought, as you expressed as a paraphrase.
'Even if you take your own life, you simply
> return to nature as much in substance as in spirit and
> soul,' he said, repeating the theme a few days later
> and arriving at the same conclusion drawn by Schleich
> and Schertel.
Well, no, according to Vedantic thought. Suicide without noble purpose
is a crime, so as a result of such bad action or karma you are reborn
in a lower life form rather less in spirit and soul.
> 'The notion of eternity is fundamental
> to our nature,' he said.
No doubt, the leaders of the Egyptians, Chinese, etc. also thought
that, and when they bury Christians today they also make this point in
the service. They will be re-born to eternal life, when their Lord
Jesus Christ returns from Heaven.
'Spirit and soul defintely return
> to a collective reservoir--like the body.
They have to, if they exist. Every new-born is blessed with spirit and
soul - trailing thus the glory of the Divine, till they are corrupted
by the wicked ways of the world. Otherwise, the whole business of
*any* religion cannot make any sense. Not just Hinduism.
As the substance
> of life, we thereby fertilize the foundation from which
> new life emerges." (pp. 146-148)
> So, something in Hitler's occultism reminds you
> of Hindu philosophy.
No. Your paraphrase of some writer who quoted another of what Hitler
doodled or nodded about, did that. You thus show yourself far better
aware of the basics of Hindu philosophy, than you have shown Hitler to
be. For you were concise.
On the other hand, you said
> that the notion of a beginning and end to things is
> alien to Hindu philosophy.
Beginning and End, or Creation according to the Bible and the Rapture,
etc are concepts alien to Hindu philosophy and metaphysics, yes. As I
said earlier, the beginning and end relates to each life form, and
each life-form (body+spirit+soul) conceives its own limited universe.
In earlier posts on this thread, I have elaborated more on such
aspects. Of course, Hindu philosophy is vast, has many different
aspects, and so cannot be summarised in a few words. I can only put
up some points represent, thus do not contradict, the thrust or
essence of Hindu philosophy. There are as many philosophies as
peoples, just as there are as many universes as life-forms. :)
I know little about
> Hindu philosophy so I can't comment on how similar
> Hitler's occultism is to Hindu beliefs and teachings.
I have tried to point out the differences in this post. I am not a
scholar in this discipline, but I have had the good fortune to
associate with those whose knowledge is far superior.
Hitler is officially the greatest evil ever known to mankind, and to
nail him to Hinduism puts this religion in a very low light. As a
conversion strategy by the modern West for the Hindus to turn
Christians or self-despising atheists-allsorts, it is clever enough -
quite.
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee.
Marko Amnell
> On Jan 28, 6:43 pm, "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
>> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>> aa5c6090-76f3-41eb-9041-5b0461638...@q2g2000pre.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> > Please see what I have quoted from an earlier post, below. In your
>> > second para, I got the impression that you were speaking for yourself,
>> > and not quoting anyone. I regret any misunderstandings.
>>
>> Okay, so you drew the conclusion yourself that the
>> following description meant that Hitler "followed
>> Hindu philosophy":
>
> I drew the conclusion that you wrote that Hitler followed Hindu
> philosophy, based upon what I had quoted from what you wrote below. I
> did not come to the conclusion that Hitler followed Hindu philosophy.
> These two are entirely different.
I said nothing whatsoever about Hinduism
or Hindu philosophy. That is entirely your own
interpretation. Ryback, Schleich, Schertel
and Hitler also said nothing whatsoever about
Hinduism or Hindu philosophy. The only person who
has spoken about similarities between Hitler's occult
beliefs and Hinduism is *you*. It is intellectually
dishonest of you to accuse me of saying that Hitler
followed Hindu philosophy because something I
wrote reminds *you* of some aspects of Hindu
philosophy.
Here, again, is what I wrote:
"Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
in which the soul of the individual is connected to
the entire cosmos within the realm of the
spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
the biological matter of the individual rejoins
physical nature upon the death of the biological
organism."
You say this is a statement of a certain tenet
of Hinduism. That may be so. But occult beliefs
are often syncretistic. They combine various
doctrines and ideas from many sources. What
I said is that Hitler apparently believed in *some
kind* of pantheism. But there are many kinds of
pantheistic beliefs and belief systems. I did not
specify any particular pantheistic belief system.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jan 28, 6:43 pm, "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
> >> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> >> aa5c6090-76f3-41eb-9041-5b0461638...@q2g2000pre.googlegroups.com...
>
> >> > Please see what I have quoted from an earlier post, below. In your
> >> > second para, I got the impression that you were speaking for yourself,
> >> > and not quoting anyone. I regret any misunderstandings.
>
> >> Okay, so you drew the conclusion yourself that the
> >> following description meant that Hitler "followed
> >> Hindu philosophy":
>
> > I drew the conclusion that you wrote that Hitler followed Hindu
> > philosophy, based upon what I had quoted from what you wrote below. I
> > did not come to the conclusion that Hitler followed Hindu philosophy.
> > These two are entirely different.
>
> I said nothing whatsoever about Hinduism
> or Hindu philosophy. That is entirely your own
> interpretation.
Based upon your concise summary or paraphrase, yes, of course. It was
Hindu philosophy at a certain level of popular comprehension.
Ryback, Schleich, Schertel
> and Hitler also said nothing whatsoever about
> Hinduism or Hindu philosophy. The only person who
> has spoken about similarities between Hitler's occult
> beliefs and Hinduism is *you*.
If you put up some popular notion of Hindu philosophy, then as a Hindu
I can recognise it. And say it.
> It is intellectually
> dishonest of you to accuse me of saying that Hitler
> followed Hindu philosophy because something I
> wrote reminds *you* of some aspects of Hindu
> philosophy.
No. If you put up Hindu philosophy without naming it as such, then
pass it off as the evil Hitler's ideology, it merits a certain
attention. Which I imparted.
> Here, again, is what I wrote:
>
> "Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
> physical nature upon the death of the biological
> organism."
>
> You say this is a statement of a certain tenet
> of Hinduism. That may be so.
It is so, at a very hight level. It is the central spiritual aspect
of classical Hinduism, though of course there are differnt schools of
thought (Dvaita, Advaita and Vishista Dvaita) based upon it. Hitler
may or may not have known it, but there is nothing in which you have
written that shows that he put it the way you so lucidly did. His
sources were more diverse and more confused. And anyway he was a
dilettante in this matter, and his public postures and strategeies had
as you say nothing to do with Hinduism. He was totally European.
But occult beliefs
> are often syncretistic. They combine various
> doctrines and ideas from many sources. What
> I said is that Hitler apparently believed in *some
> kind* of pantheism. But there are many kinds of
> pantheistic beliefs and belief systems. I did not
> specify any particular pantheistic belief system.- Hide quoted text -
Arindam Banerjee
> > doctrines and ideas from many sources. What
> > I said is that Hitler apparently believed in *some
> > kind* of pantheism. But there are many kinds of
> > pantheistic beliefs and belief systems. I did not
> > specify any particular pantheistic belief system
Apart from Hinduism, there aren't too many popular pantheistic belief
systems left. Can't think of even one other, actually.
Marko Amnell
[...]
>> "Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
>> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
>> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
>> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
>> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
>> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
>> physical nature upon the death of the biological
>> organism."
>>
>> You say this is a statement of a certain tenet
>> of Hinduism. That may be so.
>
> It is so, at a very hight level. It is the central spiritual aspect
> of classical Hinduism, though of course there are differnt schools of
> thought (Dvaita, Advaita and Vishista Dvaita) based upon it.
Well, thanks for the explanation.
And by the way, my copy of Schertel's book
_Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ arrived.
I haven't read all of it yet, but at least based
on the early parts I can say it is an interesting
little book (only about 125 pages long), quite
apart from Hitler's reading of it. I think I might
have read it even if Hitler had never owned it,
if I had come across it in a bookstore. The early
parts consist of ethnographic comments on the
religious and magical beliefs of primitive peoples,
along the lines of, say, Frazer's _The Golden Bough_,
although some passages are fairly sinister and deal
with demonology. The preface notes that the
translation of the book took several years because
some translators did not want to finish translating
the book because "they found the subject matter too
disturbing to continue."
Marko Amnell
[...]
> I have not read Schertel's book on magic yet
> (I became curious enough that I ordered it
> from Amazon), so I am not sure what Schertel
> means when the talks about the "ektropic", the
> demonic, Satan and so on. But if I had to guess,
> I would say that what he is talking about is the
> way that a great man, a spiritual leader, creates
> new values and the basis for a new culture. The
> leader projects his inner world, his vision, from
> the inside to the outside ("ektropic", meaning
> "inside-out"). In doing so, he ignores the way the
> world was before his projection of his vision,
> i.e. he is indifferent to distinctions such as
> "real" and "unreal", "true" and "false", "right"
> and "wrong" because his radical new vision will
> create and re-order such distinctions. This is
> a bit similar to the process of the rise and fall of
> civilizations as theorised by Oswald Spengler.
I was correct in perceiving a similarity with the
ideas of Oswald Spengler. Now that I have the
book, I can see that Schertel was influenced by
Spengler, and cites him in his book. For example,
on page 56 Schertel writes:
"Cultural analysis as practiced by Nietzsche,
Woringer, Spengler, Keyserling, Pannwitz, and
others taught us the understanding of our own
and of foreign cultures in their respective
frameworks, and gave us, in contrast to the older
science of history, truly above-European benchmarks
for questions pertaining to different world views,
but at the same time fostered deep scepticism towards
our whole civilization."
So, here is some evidence that Hitler was influenced
by Spengler, at least indirectly via Schertel.
Spengler was admired by some Nazis, but he
eventually was rejected by the Nazi Party. As
wikipedia says:
"The National Socialists held Spengler as an intellectual
precursor but he was ostracised after 1933 for his
pessimism about Germany and Europe's future, his
refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority,
and his critical work the Hour of Decision."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
Ernst Schertel himself suffered a worse fate. The
preface to his book _Magic_ says:
"In 1933 he fled to Paris after the takeover of
Germany by the National Socialists, but he returned
to Germany in 1934. Shortly thereafter he was
rewarded with a seven year prison sentence for
'spreading licentious writings.' 1937 saw the
revocation of his doctorate by the University of Jena.
After the war he found work as an editor and
proofreader, occasionally publishing his own works."
So, Schertel's respectful dedication of his book to
Hitler did not help him when Hitler became the
dictator of Germany.
Arindam Banerjee
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda1...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>
>
> [...]
>
> >> "Hitler apparently believed in some kind of pantheism
> >> in which the soul of the individual is connected to
> >> the entire cosmos within the realm of the
> >> spirit. Upon death, the soul of the individual
> >> simply rejoins this spiritual pool, just as
> >> the biological matter of the individual rejoins
> >> physical nature upon the death of the biological
> >> organism."
>
> >> You say this is a statement of a certain tenet
> >> of Hinduism. That may be so.
>
> > It is so, at a very hight level. It is the central spiritual aspect
> > of classical Hinduism, though of course there are differnt schools of
> > thought (Dvaita, Advaita and Vishista Dvaita) based upon it.
>
> Well, thanks for the explanation.
Welcome. I often forget that Westerners have no clue at all of the
real Indian religion and philosophy. There are so many frauds around,
and the rest are suck-ups. For any Hindu there are thus two different
worlds: one of his friends, relatives, scriptures, pilgrimages,
festivala; and other the the fake world of media, academia,
entertainment and politics.
> And by the way, my copy of Schertel's book
> _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ arrived.
> I haven't read all of it yet, but at least based
> on the early parts I can say it is an interesting
> little book (only about 125 pages long), quite
> apart from Hitler's reading of it. I think I might
> have read it even if Hitler had never owned it,
> if I had come across it in a bookstore. The early
> parts consist of ethnographic comments on the
> religious and magical beliefs of primitive peoples,
> along the lines of, say, Frazer's _The Golden Bough_,
> although some passages are fairly sinister and deal
> with demonology. The preface notes that the
> translation of the book took several years because
> some translators did not want to finish translating
> the book because "they found the subject matter too
> disturbing to continue."
Heh-heh, what could be more disturbing than nukes, bacterial and
chemical warfare, diseases like cancer, starvation, genocide,
systematic destruction of the environment, hypocritical eisteinian
scientists, degraded gandian politicians, lousy music, and gotta-be
bore-whore to be celebs etc. etc etc in our ugly, fake world?
Let us know!
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee.
Marko Amnell
[...]
>> And by the way, my copy of Schertel's book
>> _Magic: History, Theory, Practice_ arrived.
>> I haven't read all of it yet, but at least based
>> on the early parts I can say it is an interesting
>> little book (only about 125 pages long), quite
>> apart from Hitler's reading of it. I think I might
>> have read it even if Hitler had never owned it,
>> if I had come across it in a bookstore. The early
>> parts consist of ethnographic comments on the
>> religious and magical beliefs of primitive peoples,
>> along the lines of, say, Frazer's _The Golden Bough_,
>> although some passages are fairly sinister and deal
>> with demonology. The preface notes that the
>> translation of the book took several years because
>> some translators did not want to finish translating
>> the book because "they found the subject matter too
>> disturbing to continue."
>
> Heh-heh, what could be more disturbing than nukes, bacterial and
> chemical warfare, diseases like cancer, starvation, genocide,
> systematic destruction of the environment, hypocritical eisteinian
> scientists, degraded gandian politicians, lousy music, and gotta-be
> bore-whore to be celebs etc. etc etc in our ugly, fake world?
>
> Let us know!
Well, since you ask... I don't feel writing a long
summary of the book, but let me say something...
After the early parts, which as I said consist of
ethnographic comments on the religious and magical
beliefs of primitive peoples (� la Frazer or Mauss),
Schertel's book deteriorates rapidly, intellectually
speaking. Soon he is revealed as a full-blown
epistemological relativist. Various discoveries in
different fields of science, such as Einstein's relativity
theory (your personal b�te noir, I know, but bear
with me), atomic physics, Freudian psychoanalysis,
Spenglerian cultural analysis and Schleich's psychophysiology
(whatever that is) lead, Schertel argues, to the inescapable
conclusion that any one worldview is as good as any
other and these different Weltanschauungs cannot be
compared in any way so as to judge which is correct.
So here we have proof that the Weimer Republic produced
relativists extreme enough to warm the cockles of the
heart of the most radical pomo in a 21st century comparative
literature department. And from there it is a short step
for Schertel to produce pseudoscientific arguments to
justify clairaudience, clairvoyance, telekinesis, divination,
and other magical phenomena as real and potent. There
are interesting details throughout, as well as the striking
aphoristic passages which seemed to have caught Hitler's
attention. On the whole, I was glad when I had finished and was
able to move on to other reading. But Ernst Schertel's
_Magic_ will take its rightful place on my bookshelf
alongside other works on the occult such as Erik Hornung's
_The Secret Lore of Egypt_, _Arcana Mundi: Magic
and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds_
(an anthology translated and annotated by Georg Luck),
_Alchemy_ by E.J. Holmyard, _The Masonic Magician:
The Life and Times of Count Cagliostro and his Egyptian
Rite_ by Philippa Faulks and Robert Cooper, Michael
Bailey's _Magic and Superstition in Europe_, and indeed
the abovementioned authors Marcel Mauss (_A General
Theory of Magic_) and Sir James Frazer (_The Golden
Bough). The last and most intersting book on magic I
own is _The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin
the Mage_ (first published in the 15th century). Abramelin
provides detailed instructions on how to cast various spells
of power by invoking specific demons and forcing them
to serve the magician.
Arindam Banerjee
Heh-heh!
Thanks a lot, Marko. If you are interested in something Indian and
relatively modern in this line, which many Indians regard positively, you
might check out what my wife is currently reading (and I, sorry to say, just
glancing through):
Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda ISBN 1-56589-108-2
To give you a whiff, I am quoting from pp350-351
"many quaint stories of Sadasiva, a lovable and fully-illumined master, are
still current among the South Indian villagers. Immersed one day in samadhi
on the bank of the Kaveri river, Sadasiva was seen to be carried away by a
sudden flood. Weeks later, he was found buried deep beneath a mound of
sand. As the villagers' shovels struck his body, the saint rose and walked
briskly away.
Sadasiva never spoke a word or wore a cloth. One morning the nude yogi
unceremoniously entered the tent of a Mohammedan chieftain. His ladies
screamed in alarm; the warrior dealt a savage sword thrust at Sadasiva,
whose arm was severed. The master departed unconcernedly. Overcome by
remorse, the Muhammedan picked up the arm from the floor and followed
Sadasiva. The yogi quietly inserted his arm into the bleeding stump. When
the warrior humbly asked for some spiritual instruction, Sadasiva wrote with
his finger on the sands:
"Do not do what you want, and then you may do what you like."
The Mohammedan was uplifted to an exalted state of mind, and understood the
saint's paradoxical advice to be a guide to soul freedom through mastery of
the ego.
The village children once expressed a desire in Sadasiva's presence to see
the Mathura religious festival, 150 miles away. The yogi indicated to the
little ones that they should touch his body. Lo! Instantly the whole group
was transported to Madura. The children wandered happily among the
thousands of pilgrims. In a few hours the yogi brought his small charges
home by his simple mode of transportation. The astonished parents heard the
vivid tales of the procession of images, and noted that several children
were carrying bags of Madura sweets.
An incredulous youth derided the saint and the story. The following morning
he approached Sadasiva.
"Master, " he said scornfully. Why don't you take me to the festival, even
as you did yesterday for the older children?"
Sadasiva complied; the boy immediately found himself among the distant city
throng. But alas! where was the saint when the youth wanted to leave? The
weary boy reached his home by the ancient and prosaic method of foot
locomotion"
***
Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee