Adolph

--Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

Writing a paper on Mein Kampf turns out to be one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.  It's not the rhetoric of obscene racism or anti-Semitism that's bothersome--I'm around enough Singaporeans and self-deprecating Jews for that to both me.  Quite simply it is that nothing actually makes any sense.  It's a pastiche of almost-arguments that flounder in a contradictory morass.  Once realized in this light, it is difficult to decode from the text what the motivations or justifications for this doctrine of racism were.  It's so absurd that one frequently comes across a line like the one above, which caused me to burst out into hysterical laughter.  Of course in context that was terribly inappropriate, but I think the world would be much better off if people demanded a bit more rigor from others and took things a lot less seriously.

Notice that if you substitute dog breeds for the word "German", "Nordic-Germanic", etc. in the above sentence, the sentence becomes indistinguishable from a normal statement made by a somewhat zealous dog-breeder.  No one should be capable of taking such sentences seriously.