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In Mein Kampf I found abundant 'mental sunshine' which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness; brilliantly illuminating the heretofore obscure reasons for the world's madness. I was transfixed, hypnotized. I could not lay the book down without agonies of impatience to get back to it. I read it walking to the squadron, I took it into the air and read it, propped up on the chartboard, while I automatically gave the instructions to the other planes circling over the desert. I read it on the Coronado Ferry. I read it into the night and resumed the next morning. When I had finished, I started again and reread every word, underlining and marking especially magnificent passages. I studied it, thought about it and wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it. How could the world not only ignore such a book, but damn it and curse it and hate it, and pretend that it was a plan for 'conquering' the world, when it was the most obvious and rational plan for saving the world which has ever been written? Had nobody read it, I wondered, that people went around saying it was the work of a mad "rug-chewer"? How could sensible people get away with such monstrous intellectual fraud? Why was it so hated and cursed? I could see why the Jews would hate and curse it, but why my own people? I reread and studied it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began to understand. I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic worldview of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific, racial idealism, actually, a new 'religion' for our times. I saw that I was living in the age of a new worldview. Two thousand years ago there had been a similar rise of a new approach or worldview, called a 'religion'; a worldview which shook and changed the world forever. (en) |
