@Flashman:
The current trend towards “Right-Wing” politics is largely a reaction to the Anti-racist cult. In fact it is not extremist but an attempt to restore a natural medium ground between the true extremes of conservative global capitalism and “liberal” internationalism, which has of course become anything but liberal.
Nationalism is the true basis of democracy and by deliberately eroding the nation state the left are creating chaos and anarchy and calling it “freedom”. They ignore the obvious parallels with the fall of the Roman Empire as if a thousand year dark age was a good thing.
That said, Mein Kampf is unreadable drivel.
But what is does reveal is that the aims of Nazism were always international, and are basically the same as the EU - create a highly centralised United States of Europe under German direction and expand into the east in order to create new markets and a source of cheap migrant labour.
During the late 1500s - early 1600s, the two strongest forces in English government were the monarch and the House of Peers. (The latter being a hereditary aristocracy.) But the death of King James and his replacement by Charles I led to a rise in importance in the House of Commons. Eventually that power struggle resulted in civil war, with the Puritans (House of Commons) ultimately defeating and beheading Charles I. His son, Charles II, was banished to France. The Puritans’ rule lasted several decades, after which Charles II assumed power. After Charles’ death, his son, James II, became king. In the Glorious Revolution (1688), Parliament decided to replace James II with William of Orange and Mary. This replacement involved only minor bloodshed, in contrast to the civil war which had taken place a half century earlier. The king had become significantly weaker than Parliament, and the House of Commons had become the single strongest branch of British government.
The American Revolution did not take place until many decades after the events I’ve just described. That revolution was in large part a response against abuses committed by the British government. The largely democratic British government. And it’s not as though those abuses were imposed by King George III against the wishes of a united Commons. On the contrary: all three branches of British government, including the House of Commons, played a role in embracing the policies the American colonists found so objectionable.
In history class it’s often claimed that the American revolutionaries were fighting for “democracy.” That claim is false, because the government we were rebelling against was largely democratic in nature. The replacement government, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, was intended to be only 1/3 democratic. (The House of Representatives.) “Checks and balances” meant balancing out that 1/3 democratic element against two other, non-democratic components. (The presidency and the Senate.) The president was to be chosen by the electoral college, not the people. And Senators were selected by state governments, not the people. The American colonies had been on the receiving end of democratic misbehavior (the British House of Commons), and did not want the American version of that misbehavior to form the sole basis of our government.
There are certain steps one must take if one wants a strong, prosperous nation. Other steps will achieve the opposite result: a nation that’s corrupt, poor, stagnant. The dying Roman Empire took the latter types of steps: steps which ultimately resulted in collapse, and the onset of the Dark Ages. As you hinted, democracies are perfectly capable of taking those same types of negative, destructive actions, and most modern major democratic regimes are doing exactly that.
On an unrelated note, I’ve read Mein Kampf. The writing and content were of much higher quality than I’d been led to expect. There were of course parts which which I strongly disagreed. My impression of the book’s author was someone who was highly intelligent, ethnocentric, opinionated, self-taught, and who’d gleaned some basic insights into human psychology. As an example of this last, Hitler wrote that people expect of a leader the same traits a woman expects of a man: strength, decisiveness, courage, etc.
