Saturday, March 19, 2005
Mein Kampf a hot seller in Turkey
There are some evils, once unleashed, that cannot be eradicated from the world:
Not surprisingly, The Jerusalem Post is more willing to see a trend than the Daily Star:
Fifty thousand copies sold in less than three months is a huge sales figure for Turkey, equivalent to 250,000 copies in the United States. I could not find U.S. sales figures, but I found one source that said that American sales averaged 15,000 copies per year.
History does not progress in a straight line. Racist fascism has tremendous appeal to the world's dark hearts, and it will emerge in some quarters whenever there is social distress and conflict, as there is today in Turkey. No such platitude should let us forget, though, that Islam and Nazism have close historical ties that could re-emerge at any time.
The book was first published in Turkey in 1939, when Axis and Allied countries were competing for Turkey's soul as they tried to woo it away from the neutrality it would maintain until the very end of World War II.
But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the D&R bookstore chain.
"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925....
"This book, which does not contain a single ounce of humanity, unfortunately appears to be taken seriously in this country," political scientist Dogu Ergil complained in a recent newspaper interview.
He agreed that the unexpected popularity of "Mein Kampf" in this Muslim-majority country has its roots in a rise in anti-American sentiment sparked by the occupation of Iraq and anti-Semitism resulting from Israel's Palestinian policy.
"Nazism, buried in the dustbin of history in Europe, is beginning to re-emerge in Turkey," he warned.
Not surprisingly, The Jerusalem Post is more willing to see a trend than the Daily Star:
Filiba said the sales were part of a "worrying trend" with anti-Semitic publications - such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a 19th-century anti-Semitic tract - on sale even in bustling department stores.
Fifty thousand copies sold in less than three months is a huge sales figure for Turkey, equivalent to 250,000 copies in the United States. I could not find U.S. sales figures, but I found one source that said that American sales averaged 15,000 copies per year.
History does not progress in a straight line. Racist fascism has tremendous appeal to the world's dark hearts, and it will emerge in some quarters whenever there is social distress and conflict, as there is today in Turkey. No such platitude should let us forget, though, that Islam and Nazism have close historical ties that could re-emerge at any time.
1 Comments:
By 
geoffrobinson, at
Sat Mar 19, 08:27:00 AM:
I did some study of anti-semitism from my Christian perspective (results can be found at http://www.geoffrobinson.net). The best take-away, if you can permit me to use trendy management speak, would be the following: view anti-semitism as a spiritual disease. If it isn't viewed as a disease you have problems. It infects. It grows if left untreated. It sticks around.
And as a Chrsitian, I do not hesitate to say that it is demonic, in the most literal sense of the word.
