In Mein Kampf, Hitler ranted about the overwhelming power of the Jews, and their efforts to subjugate and oppress all others. In fact, the parallels between the writings of Adolf Hitler and those of feminist writers both past and present day should give us great pause.
History teaches us that there is a fast path to the sort of evil and horrific “final solution” that the Nazis unfolded upon the Jewish race. That is for those who believe in justice and righteousness to remain silent while there are those who publicly speak hatred and demonization of an entire group of people.
Today, the world faces a similar threat. An ideology that attempts to demonize based on group identity. A movement that seeks to portray a group as “toxic” for simple mannerisms or behaviors, but only if they’re a specific gender.
The only way to prevent a repeat of history is to recognize this modern threat and for all good people to stand firmly against it.
Hitler Had His Own Patriarchy Theory
You don’t have to look very far these days to find some feminist quoted on mainstream websites referring to “the patriarchy”.
What exactly is the patriarchy, according to these feminists? In the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning authored by three feminists, Holley Hassel, Amy Reddinger, and Jessica van Slooten, they defined patriarchy by quoting writer Allan Johnson:
“A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women….”
That last phrase is the critical one — “one of its key aspects the oppression of women”.
This is actually the most commonly repeated phrase if you explore Gender Studies text in nearly every college in the U.S. and across the Western world. The key element of Patriarchy Theory is that such a society is set up to maintain male privilege and the oppression of women.
Hitler used identical rhetoric by creating an ideological foe and then packaging up the Jews as spearheading the oppression of Germans under that ideology.
Feminists use the “patriarchy” boogeyman, while Hitler used the “Jewish freemasonry” boogeyman.
This ideology was described in The Holocaust, as published by the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center.
“Under Nazism, Freemasons were regarded as an ideological foe of the Third Reich as well as part of
the Jewish problem. The Nazis believed that Jews exploited the Freemasons’ international
connections to achieve world domination. In his political testament, Mein Kampf (1925), Nazi party
leader Adolf Hitler repeated the charge that the Jews used Freemasonry to achieve their political ends.”
The core reason Nazis were successful in pulling people into their anti-Jewish ideology was because they could point to very real suffering people experienced, and then connected that suffering to oppression by powerful Jews. Whether Jews actually enjoyed the privilege or power Hitler described didn’t matter.
Hitler used the word “oppression” 45 times throughout Mein Kampf, and each time referred to how Jews used their “cunning craftiness” to keep Germans oppressed and enslaved.
“Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means, but always and exclusively by the instincts of preservation of the species regardless whether these are found in the province of heroic virtue or of cunning craftiness; the one results in Aryan states based on work and culture, the other in Jewish colonies of parasites. As soon as economics as such beings to choke out these Instincts in a people or in a state, it becomes the seductive cause of subjugation and oppression.”
Hitler probably had an easier time convincing Germans that his fantasy “Jewish dominators” were real, because Germans only needed to look around at a crumbling economy and yet the apparent financial success of Jewish shop owners and other financially successful Jewish neighbors – and Hitler’s reasoning seemed to make sense to those Germans.
Hitler finally gets more specific about halfway through the text.
“…the shrewder Jew takes the oppressed people under his wing. Gradually he becomes the leader of the tradeunion movement, all the more easily as he is not interested in really eliminating social evils in an honest sense, but only in training an economic storm troop, blindly devoted to him, with which to destroy the national economic independence.”
According to Hitler, the Jews were knowingly or unknowingly part of a massive Jewish effort to subjugate and oppress German people.
The well-off Jewish families were real. Jewish shop-owners were real. But what Nazi ideology was able to do was to connect those observations with a vast Jewish conspiracy to subjugate Germany and oppress the German people. Once German propaganda “opened their eyes” to this, Germans could see it everywhere (or at least thought they did).
This is how hate-propaganda works.
Feminists’ Version of Mein Kampf
In the U.S., a similar hate-propaganda has been perpetrated upon students for generations. Many of those students are the bloggers, news journalists, psychologists, and politicians of today. They are the Nazi youth grown up — and they’re now spreading the same hate propaganda across the internet and the media.
When you examine Hitler’s writing and then compare it to famous feminist writings, the parallels are unnerving and disturbing.
Mary Becker, the author of an article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled Patriarchy and Inequality: Towards a Substantive Feminism, wrote:
“What drives Patriarchy as a system – what fuels competition, aggression, and oppression – is a dynamic relationship between control and fear. Patriarchy encourages men to seek security, status, and other rewards through control.”
She then paints Patriarchy and masculinity in almost exactly the same light as Hitler described how Jews drew in unsuspecting Germans in order to serve oppressive Jewish needs.
“…a social system that is male-identified, male-controlled, male-centered will inevitably view masculinity and masculine traits over femininity and feminine traits. In such a system, men (and women) will be encouraged to regard women as beings suited to fulfill male needs.”
In the same way Hitler described Germans as “blindly devoted” to Jews who were only interested in oppressing them, Becker paints a picture of women simply going along with men who’s sole purpose as a gender is to subjugate and oppress women.
These parallels are so scary because they both use cult-like indoctrination techniques to convince the audience that a social order is in place that causes the particular ills and problems they experience in life. This makes the theory more believable.
It doesn’t matter that many of Becker’s statements are completely incorrect upon closer examination.
Traditional society highly valued traditional male and female gender roles (masculinity and femininity) equally but in different ways – it gave power in specific social areas to each gender. Areas that the other gender was seen as weaker or not as capable.
In fact women were often viewed and placed on a pedestal (by male and female writers alike) as being more empathetic, more nurturing, being a more capable parent, and generally made of “sugar and spice”. Women could do no wrong — and even when they did, communities in general made excuses for them.
However, the true picture of history is as insignificant to feminist writers as it was to Hitler. The goal isn’t to paint an accurate picture of history. It’s to create an image of the subjugation of one side, with the sole intent to dominate and oppress the other side.
The outcome, unfortunately, is as it was in Germany — eventually an entire propaganda campaign targeting those “oppressors” with hateful caricatures and insults toward Jewish behaviors, and eventually calls for their removal from positions they once held, false accusations, imprisonment, and even death.
But This Could Never Happen Today, Right??
The hate movement that was launched through Patriarchy Theory, much like Hitler’s anti-Jewish conspiracy, expanded later to include an ongoing propaganda campaign.
The goal was to paint Jews as a group as dominating, power-hungry, and oppressive. This was done on several fronts, which included visual propaganda – usually portraying that “oppressive” class of people as rich, fat, and privileged.
The parallels between anti-Jewish propaganda and anti-male propaganda used by both past and modern feminists is striking.
In both cases the propaganda approach is to take very real issues the target group experiences, and draw a direct line between those experiences and the “entity” portrayed, then implant the conspiracy theory of the vast underlying “social” order operated and run by the Jews (or in the case of feminists – men).
While feminists today like to proclaim that the movement “doesn’t hate men”, it’s decades-long propaganda campaign shows otherwise.
Nazis also infiltrated the film industry, disseminating a constant stream of antisemitic films, as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes, “portrayed Jews as wandering cultural parasites, consumed by sex and money.”
Similarly feminist propaganda films have been streaming into theaters as far back as the 1960s, portraying men as wandering parasites, consumed by sex and money.
It isn’t very difficult today to see how these types of films have increased in modern days. Netflix is rife with pro-feminist, anti-male films where 90% of the male characters in the movies are sexist, bigoted, chauvinists, or adulturers. Directors make no attempts to build sympathy or empathy for such characters as they do in films where there might be a female villain.
Feminists Spread Hate Propaganda
As the hate-based propaganda continued to succeed, Nazi writers started printing cartoons and articles portraying characteristics of Jews in a negative light.
These articles were intended to target, as the US Holocaust Museum describes:
“…more subtle antisemetic language and viewpoints for educated, middle-class Germans offended by crude caricatures. University professors and religious leaders gave antisemitic themes respectability by incorporating them into their lectures and church sermons.”
We can see this today with feminist hate-based rhetoric, with anti-male words like “mainsplaining”, “manterrupting”, or “manspreading”, repeated nightly on the national news. Such hateful words are actually getting added to English dictionaries, like Merriam-Websters addition of “mansplaining” in 2018.
The goal of such propaganda is to normalize hatred of the target group. Not only hatred, but to create an environment where even violence against it is considered acceptable. An environment where people turn a blind eye because they’ve heard through so much propaganda that a person who’s part of that social group must somehow “deserve” it.
That the “oppressor” could never possibly be a victim.
This was very much what the entire Nazi anti-Jewish campaign was all about. It was to normalize violence against Jews. To make it socially acceptable to:
- Speak negatively publicly about them
- Write, publish, and distribute hateful phrases and words describing them
- Blame them as a group for current social ills
- Create laws that discriminate against them
- Conduct violence against them
The US Holocaust museum describes that normalizing of violence as follows:
“During periods preceding new measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews. In some cases the campaigns exploited the violence—both calculated and spontaneous—that ensued. The goal was to encourage passivity and acceptance of anti-Jewish laws and decrees as a vehicle to restore public order. Propaganda that demonized Jews also served to prepare the German population, in the context of national emergency, for harsher measures, such as mass deportations and, eventually, genocide.”
Leading up to “harsher measures”, it’s likely no one would have ever expected or understood where the normalization of hatred and violence toward Jews would lead. Early on, these were probably nothing more than anti-Jew jokes uttered between Germans having normal conversations. Finding comedy in referencing their deaths.
But little did they realize that their actions were influenced by years of careful indoctrination. Creating a belief system that as Germans, they were truly oppressed by a shadowy Jewish collective.
And as public discourse progresses in that direction, the empathy for those who are the targets continue to wane. They are the enemy. They are the privileged. They are the source of discrimination. They don’t deserve empathy or respect.
Yet the reality all along is that the Jews were the ones slowly having their liberties and rights removed. No one noticed, because no one cared. Society had learned to view them as the enemy. The perpetrator. Never the victim.
This blindness to reality went on so long that it reached the tragic end of the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others, and eventually their genocide.
But This Couldn’t Happen Today?
There are lots of ways to take away someone’s liberty and rights. Create an environment where they can be accused of a crime and be assumed guilty without due process (#metoo).
Create a family court system, where they can be incarcerated on the simple accusation of a crime, such as domestic violence – without any investigation into whether or not the claims are true.
Create laws that make even speech a crime, and then start pointing the finger at anyone you don’t like and would like to lock up.
Could it happen today?
Only if good people continue to stand by and allow the hateful propaganda to continue. Only if good people stand by and remain silent while an entire group of humans are demonized by hateful rhetoric and words.
Only if good people wait until their own husbands, fathers, or brothers are locked in handcuffs and put in jail or have their lives destroyed, without due process.
How Can I Stop It?
The best advice comes from Klaus Meyer in his Quartz article titled How to prevent a fascist takeover: Lessons from the Nazi party’s rise to power.
The weapon of choice by extremists is fueling hate. Meyer mentions “racially motivated”, but this could just as easily be replaced with “gender motivated”.
“For voters, be informed and engaged. And steer clear from political groups that are not committed to democratic processes or have racially motivated agendas.
For politicians, sharing power with extremists in your own party, or in other parties, is dangerous. Politicians of the center-left and center-right may see each other as historical opponents, but they should be allied in fighting extremists on either side.”
What this means is that when people in power like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make sexist comments about “white men”, or people like Donald Trump makes rude comments about a woman’s appearance, it’s up to all of us to call it out and stand up against that kind of hatred. It’s up to politicians on the center left and center right to shut them down and call them out for what their words are – hate.
Whey they create “art”, whether it’s in films or as statues, depicting female violence against men — speak out against it just as you would speak out against anything depicting violence against women.
When you tolerate hate, you are no better than the people who espouse that hate. And the longer you tolerate it, the more it continues to grow throughout a society like cancer.
Take the first step – be as angry as you would if there were a statue mounted portraying a man holding the lifeless head of a woman, regardless of the fictional background story used to justify the imagery of hate. Sign the petition to have the anti-male statue of Medusa in NYC removed.
