(What follows is the third part of my series on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Parts one and two can be found here and here, respectively.)

Mein Kampf is quite possibly the scariest book I’ve ever read. It’s giving me nightmares.

In reading the book, it’s easy to see why it was dismissed upon publication in the mid-twenties: aside from the unintelligible self-aggrandizing, Hitler’s agenda was so radical that it’s absurd. But it’s this absurdity, coupled with historical perspective, that makes the author and his book so chilling. Hitler didn’t make up his policies as he went along; as Mein Kampf shows, in exhaustively muddled detail, everything about them was premeditated. It’s frightening, especially in our age, to imagine someone with Hitler’s arrogance and bigotry rising in politics, and the fact that it actually happened in a learned, cultured nation like Germany makes Mein Kampf more important: genocide and brutal dictatorship isn’t something reserved for poor nations. Indeed, as history shows, even the most horrifying state brutality can arise out of democracy.

Chapter III: Political Reflections Arising Out of My Sojourn in Vienna

Up to now, Mein Kampf has been tolerable, despite Hitler’s venomous racism, but chapter three really tested my endurance. In sixty pages of unbroken text, tangled prose, and condescending tones, Hitler essentially gives readers a mind-numbing lesson in history and political theory as he sees it. There’s just no pleasing him: he hates everyone—from “cowardly” politicians to stupid intellectuals and writers to Slavs, Jews (of course), communists, German pacifists, and the bourgeoisie—and everything—from Parliament to “Western” democracy (which he believes to be the forerunner of Marxism, which, in his eyes, is strictly a Jewish phenomenon) to the Pan-German movement to the press. I could go on, but suffice it to say that he hates anyone who doesn’t agree with his twisted idealism.

And it all comes down to nationalism: the only solution to fixing a broken political system is to unite Germany and Austria under a single epoch and to remind Germans that, despite the workings of sly Marxist—which is to say, Jewish—propaganda and political ineptitude, they’re intelligent people whom Fate as irrationally decided to place at the bottom of the barrel. All they need is someone with fully-realized ideals and an unshakable outlook to wake them from a long, national nightmare. If Fate has deemed that Jews, Slavs, and communists should be determining Germany’s place in the world, that’s because Germans, blinded by abstract concepts like “democracy,” “international socialism,” and “pacifism,” have refused to stand up for themselves and assert their own dominance.

Yet, out of the wreckage of his prose, one sees more of Hitler’s paranoia. To be sure, his paranoia was simmering in previous chapters, but now it’s palpable: this is a man who, under all the exhortations and bitter anger, is afraid that everyone is working against Germany, keeping her from gaining her rightful place on the international stage. And, given Hitler’s incessant self-congratulatory cleverness, one realizes that, though he seems to be warning Germans of the forces working against them, he’s also railing against those he believes are keeping him from achieving his goals.