when they ruled the West Bank, it became popular there when the Palestinian Authority took over. With every new Arabic edition it crops up on best-seller lists and bookstore displays across the Middle East. It loomed in menacing piles in the airport bookstore in Jordan. Israeli soldiers rooting through Arafat’s possessions abandoned in southern Lebanon in 1982 discovered many copies at all his base camps. Its rhetorical idiom of “pigs”… “jackals”… “bacteria”… “vampires”… “parasites”… “vermin”… and “vultures” recurs in the speeches of Osama bin Laden of al- Qaida, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, and thousands of imams throughout Islamic lands.
As familiar and consequential as this book is, it is strangely misunderstood. It has been reviewed thousands of times without any grasp of the central theme of its case against the Jews. Critics notice the references to Jews as “an inferior race… the incarnation of Satan and the symbol of evil.” Cited are Hitler’s references to the Jewish mastery of the press, manipulation of propaganda and public opinion, and the Jew’s devious “benevolence” and charity as “manure” applied as fertilizer for “future returns.” Critics comment upon Hitler’s celebration of the
To Hitler, however, Jews are anathema, not chiefly because of such exotic figments as their alleged racial inferiority or their demonic Satanism or their perennial Masonic intrigues, but because of a far more common and fashionable complaint still widely voiced at Harvard, Berkeley, and around the globe. Hitler’s case against the Jews focuses on their mastery of capitalism.
As von Mises observed, more than two-thirds of the leading entrepreneurs in Austria at the time were Jewish. The focus of Hitler’s racial theory in chapters ten and eleven of
In a theme later adopted by Osama bin Laden, Hitler asserts that the key to initial Jewish success was “his usurious rate of interest.” He cites the immemorial notion that Jews gain an economic foothold by mulcting others through their prowess as shysters and shylocks, ensnaring “ingenuous” Aryans in webs of debt. Blind to the nature of capitalism, Hitler condemns interest as illegitimate gain, the embezzled returns of dispensable middlemen. Then he makes an elaborate case that Jews parlay their insidious middleman strategy into a broader economic dominance, first in banking and finance and then in all commerce and industry. He implies that their resulting affluence and ostentation will ultimately bring them down. Projecting on others his own revulsion, Hitler contended: “The increasing impudence which the Jew began to manifest all round stirred up popular indignation, while his display of wealth gave rise to popular envy.”
Adumbrating Mearsheimer and Walt on Jewish lobbying prowess, Hitler spoke of the Jew as an “eternal profiteer,” mitigating popular hostility by paying “court to governments with servile flattery [and] used his money to ingratiate himself further…”
While sneering at Jewish lack of connection to the soil, Hitler wrote: “The cup of [Jewish] iniquity became full to the brim when he included landed property among his commercial wares and degraded the soil to the level of a market commodity. Since he himself never cultivated the soil but considered it as an object to be exploited, on which the peasant may still remain but only on condition that he submits to the most heartless exactions of his new master.” This theme now pervades facile journalist coverage of the Palestinian territories, where water for agriculture is allocated chiefly to Jewish farms that pay for it by profitable use of the irrigated land.
Referring to Zionism, Hitler wrote, “They have not the slightest intention of building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating,” which is Hitler’s characterization of Jewish enterprise.
Continuing his crude Marxist narrative, Hitler argues that as the Jews compiled wealth, “they bought up stock” in companies and had “predominance in the stock exchange.” They “thus pushed [their] influence into the circuit of national production, making this… an object of buying and selling on the stock exchange… thus ruining the basis on which personal proprietorship alone is possible… [and creating] that feeling of estrangement between employers and employees… which led at a later date to the political class struggle.”
This vision of a voracious and amoral capitalism that debauches moral codes, exploits the environment, and degrades the relations between workers and employers is a central theme of leftist economics today. Familiar, too, is the idea that stock and bond markets enable mostly Jewish middlemen and entrepreneurs, greenmailers and junk bond manipulators to seize companies from honest and stable management for financial exploitation. Change the wording by deleting the references to Jews and inserting the names of financiers, such as Michael Milken, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Henry Kravis, Gary Winnick, et al., or even such categories as “junk bond kings” and “private equity predators,” and present it all under the name of, say, Schicklgruber, and you will have an exemplary book for public consumption at American universities. Unfortunately for some of the above, these anti-capitalist prejudices, with their often inadvertently anti-Semitic undercurrents, also made their way from the American media into U.S. courts. Michael Milken, for example, was accused of being a Ponzi schemer and predator, but within two decades the companies he financed were worth more than a trillion dollars. He was forced to plead guilty to a series of trivial clerical offenses by the prosecutor’s threat to indict his totally innocent brother Lowell. The idea that behind every great fortune is a great crime joins anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism in the moralistic embrace that Hitler pioneered and epitomized.
Hitler’s complaint probes still more deeply, however. He charges Jews with violating the deepest mandates of the Darwinian law of nature. The heart of Hitler’s case against the Jews is that through their superiority over Aryans in capitalist finance and trade, they were cheating the law of survival of the fittest. They had found an individualist route to power without making the sacrifices necessary to achieve collective strength as warriors. They were circumventing the mandate of nature that requires all creatures to gang together and fight for their own survival.
This is Hitler’s concept of the key conflict in economies and societies. It is the division between Darwinian nature, governed by the survival of the physically fit and feral, and the effete and intellectual artifice of devious individualist entrepreneurs.
“Here we meet the insolent objection, which is Jewish in its inspiration and is typical of the modern pacifist. It says: ‘Man can control even Nature.’ There are millions who repeat by rote that piece of Jewish babble.
“Wherever [men] have reached a superior level of existence, it was not the result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature.”
This is the Hitler vision of the split between devious individuals (to him, Jewish) who gain power by prevailing in economic rivalry and groups that gain power by blood sacrifice in the perennial and always ultimately violent struggle for survival. It is the division between those who imagine that humans can manipulate nature and create new things under conditions of peace and those who believe that the greatest attainments come from solidarity and sacrifice in war.
As Hitler presents the law of nature in this way: “He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.”
As his devout jihadi followers do today, Hitler recognized that violence can trump economic exchange and progress. Against Jewish dominance in the stock market, he counterpoised his Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth movement, with its anti-Semitic lust for blood and its dominance in the streets. Just as the jihadis in their
At the same time, to justify his own plans for mass exterminations, he blamed the Jews in Russia for perpetrating the starvation and massacre of 30 million Ukrainians, Kulaks, shopkeepers, and other “class enemies.” (Reaching for the ultimate affront, he even charged: “The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland.”)
Hitler portrayed envy and resentment of Jewish achievement as a campaign of vengeance and social justice. True “social justice,” according to Hitler, “is a typical Aryan characteristic.” Individualist to the core, Jews merely
