On Stephen Miller, Adolph Hitler and immigration
a best-seller in its time
Upon reading ‘Mein Kampf’, one of the shortest of Carlo Rovelli’s short essays in There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, I was immediately reminded of Stephen Miller, who apparently serves as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and Homeland Security Advisor in the current US administration. The fact that Miller is an Ashkenazi Jew just adds what one might call spice to the connection.
Let me explain. When Rovelli decided to read Mein Kampf (My Struggle) he expected a lot of breast-thumping about the ‘master race’ and the need to keep it ‘pure’, but to his surprise, he found the most prominent feature of the book was fear. To quote Rovelli:
For me this came as a revelation that allowed me to grasp something about the mindset of the political right that I had always struggled to understand. A main source of the emotions that give power to the right, and above all to the far right, is not the feeling of being strong. It is, on the contrary, the fear of being weak.
This fear is explicit in Mein Kampf; this feeling of inferiority, this sense of being surrounded by imminent danger. The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them. The reason for preferring combat to collaboration is that we fear the strength of others. The reason why we close ourselves into an identity, a group, a Volk, is to create a gang stronger than the other gangs in a relentlessly dog-eat-dog world. Hitler depicts a savage world in which the enemy is everywhere, danger is everywhere, and the only desperate hope of avoiding succumbing to it is to band together into a group and prevail.
This is an interesting and quite cogent diagnosis of Hitler’s malaise, and it’s also interesting that Hitler targeted Jews as the strongest of the ‘gangs’ he felt the need to deal with. Which brings me back to Miller. The story goes that one of his favourite books is Le Camp des Saints by Jean Raspail, which, according to AI (never lies), ‘is a fictional account that depicts the destruction of Western civilization through massive immigration from the Third World to France’.
This is particularly interesting as I remember reading some years ago about the Ashkenazi Jews being described, by such academic worthies as Steven Pinker, who is Jewish, as a group very much over-represented in IQ levels, intellectual achievements and the like, implying a kind of natural ‘mastery’, something in the genes perhaps. You can see where this might be going, one wouldn’t want such mastery to be diluted by interbreeding…
Miller is undoubtedly having his own struggle with immigrants and impurities. AI (never lies) again:
Stephen Miller, a key architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, is driven by a restrictive ideology focused on “100 per cent Americanism,” white nationalist talking points, and a desire to significantly reduce both legal and illegal immigration. His hardline views are rooted in a belief that high levels of immigration threaten the cultural, social, and linguistic cohesion of the United States.
I took this photo in Paris nearly 10 years ago. The inscription says: Arrested by the police of the Vichy government, complicit with the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944, and murdered at Auschwitz because they were born Jews. More than 500 of these children lived here in the 4th arrondisement. Among them, 101 little ones never had the chance to attend school. In passing, read their names, your memory is their only sepulchre.
References
Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2018
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-dark-ideology-behind-stephen
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