If You own a Signed Copy of Mein Kampf, You might be a Nazi

Let’s play the game, Are You a Nazi?

Here’s the first question: Do you collect Nazi memorabilia?

You do?

Then you are almost definitely a Nazi.

You are, at the least, Nazi adjacent. Maybe you’re a Nazi fanboy. That’s hardly better.

If you are a World War 2 obsessive who collects anything related to the war, it is then more forgivable to collect Nazi shit without being branded as a Nazi yourself. But you ought to have some Japanese military officers’ swords and an Italian soldier’s Beretta, and you damn well better have more Allies memorabilia. Allies shit should always outnumber Axis shit. If you claim to be a WWII buff, but only care about the Axis shit, there is something wrong with your brain and soul. Not only do you side with evil, murderous, fascist bullies, but losers.

A person who makes a point of collecting Nazi memorabilia is a living disease. Their brain and soul are diseased and they should be treated, to prevent them from infecting anyone else or any bit of the world. Perhaps treated with fire. Harlan Crow sounds like just such a personification of disease.

In all the controversy that’s come out about Clarence Thomas being a corrupt sack of shit, to no one’s particular shock, there have been regular offhand mentions of the fact that his bribing benefactor, Harlan Crow, collects Nazi shit. Among his many swastika embossed possessions is a copy of Mein Kampf signed by Adolf Hitler.

It is strange and suspect to own any copy of Mein Kampf. It is strange to read Mein Kampf for any reasons other than research or morbid curiosity, which will wane as you learn what a poor, boring, whiny, narcissistic, and stupid writer and person Hitler was. No reasonable person would ever pay for a signed copy of Mein Kampf. If I came across a free signed copy of Mein Kampf, I’d want to get rid of it as soon as possible. I’d like to think I’d burn the thing, but my fascination for weird shit might make me hesitate. My appreciation for money, one of my socialist failings, might make me look into selling it. Ideally, I’d sell it to someone who was going to burn it or deface it in the most disrespectful way possible. But I damn sure wouldn’t ever buy it.

Not everything in Crow’s collection is revolting or proof of Nazism or Nazi fanboyism. He has all sorts of cool and interesting things, works by Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, possessions owned by Dwight Eisnenhower, Paul Revere, sculptures carved by Donatello Gabrielli. All of those men (and he does seem to particularly, if not exclusively, collect the works of men, mostly white), whatever other faults they may have had, were not Nazis. We should recognize that and not paint the guy entirely with the Nazi brush. And I can’t fault him for having statues of Karl Marx or Che Guavera, weird as that and many of his other statues are, and I can’t imagine I’d ever want statues of any men standing around my garden. But the fact that he does collect Nazi shit is telling. Telling of a disease that should be treated with fire.

I’ve collected a lot of things in my life. I’ve collected comics, action figures, stuffed animals, trading cards, newspaper comic strips, VHS tapes and DVDs, video games, interesting rocks, pocket knives, books, magazines, toy cars and spaceships, ticket stubs from concerts and movies, beer bottles with cool labels, Gundam models, little animal statues of things like dogs, horses, and dragons, and probably plenty of other shit, most of which has since been given away, sold, thrown out, or just put away somewhere and forgotten about. The common unifying factor in everything I’ve collected, apart from branding me a lifelong nerd, is that they were all things I liked. People who collect Nazi shit do so because they like it and, possibly, because they are Nazis. Nazi shit never happened to fall into any of my collections by chance and I never collected Nazi shit, because I’m not a fucking Nazi. The same can’t be said of Harlan Crow.