Reflections on George Orwell’s 1940 Review of ‘Mein Kampf’

I recently came across a review, written in 1940 by George Orwell, of ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler’s blueprint for a future Germany. With characteristic lucidity and incisiveness, Orwell makes the point that what Hitler was offering to the German people was something which hedonistic Westerners could neither understand nor believe in – the vision of an eternal struggle embracing danger, martyrdom and death, attended by “drums, flags and loyalty-parades”.

Hitler embodied the figure of a martyr with every fibre of his being, says Orwell, from his “pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs” to the image which he assiduously cultivated, of the self-sacrificing hero who would lead his people out of victimhood into battle against the forces of evil.

Fascism, Nazism and “Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism”, says Orwell, are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life which assumes that human beings desire nothing more than “ease, security and avoidance of pain”, in short, a comfortable life. It is a sobering antithesis to the democratic ideal.

The Orwell review impels me to reflect on today’s dictators and would-be dictators. The sense of grievance, however crudely stated, the promise to restore honor and greatness through fighting and bloodshed, and above all, the need to remain locked in eternal combat with groups deemed responsible for all the evils visited on the world (and here I cannot avoid thinking of the pervasive hatred towards the Jews) have as much emotional appeal in today’s conflict zones as they did 100 years ago, when Hitler penned his hateful and hate-filled ideas.

Essentially, Orwell tells us, there are two contrasting ways out of a state of hopelessness and misery. There is the authoritarian way, cunningly modeled by Hitler, which is to submit to a strong leader, to renounce one’s individuality and to join a nation of warriors whose only purpose is to carry on mindlessly killing an enemy identified as being to blame for one’s plight. The other way is to strive for a better world through cooperation and respect for one’s fellow human-beings.

Both solutions are dreams in the sense of being unrealizable but the former is carried forward by the thrill of bloodlust, the imagined restoration of honor and a release from self-reproach, while the latter is merely a concession to the ideal of universal friendship and the attainment of material comfort. To the enlightened spirit, the former is a nightmare, the latter a childish fantasy.

In their despair, says Orwell, the German people flung themselves at Hitler’s feet. He concludes that the promise of fulfillment in the future combined with the exultation of killing without restraint is more tempting than the dull solutions provided by tolerance and introspection. Apparently it is far better to kill or be killed, to destroy an enemy or become a martyr oneself than to accept life’s woes and work cooperatively towards constructive change.

It takes a few years of slaughter and starvation to correct that distortion, says Orwell cynically, but memory is short. In his own words, “ ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ end is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”