Author: Marshall’s Meticulous Mind Melting Meta-Analytical Motifs (Fsem blog)

To start us off, the SCUM in the title is an acronym for “Society for cutting up men”. With such a cheery title, I’m sure it’s a surprise to everyone that this text was written by a woman. This text encompassed in one sentence is quite possibly the worst possible take on everything, done all at once. Most of it is spoken off the fly, the author has almost no knowledge about what they seem to be so passionate about, and things are said that are contradictory to common knowledge, common sense, and themselves.

The SCUM manifesto is a Feminist, Fascist, Anarchist, Communist manifesto. Yes. All of those things crammed into one unimaginably convoluted manifesto, alongside some typos. This is the sort of thing that strikes me as something written on a computer in a basement by someone who hates their father for trying to get them to try out for the cheer-leading squad, because I forgot to mention that there’s quite a few daddy issues sprinkled in there as well. It is written with a tooth-gnashingly bitter disposition toward men, I cannot imagine how long one has to go without physical intimacy to end up this delusion ridden. The beginning speaks of the feasibility of the eradication of men, as well as some personal opinions about the qualities of men (Which are contradicted not even a page later).

It goes into the elements of masculine society, and society as a whole. It then mentions an ideology that is unilaterally latched on to by edgy teenagers with computer access: Anarchism. Money is pointless, people should only have to work two to three hours a week at MOST, and while men are obsessed with work and working is a masculine trait, if women stopped working and started complaining and rioting and stealing, half of the workforce would disappear creating an unsustainable situation for men. You can see where these basic, common knowledge discrepancies start to arise.

While I could go into detail as to some of the asinine concepts mentioned in this text, I won’t. They’re the sort of thing you’d read in an eighth grader’s diary, the sort of thing that would get read in front of the class only to result in bellowing laughter. I believe a more important takeaway is a comparison to some similar works, taken much, much more seriously and to legitimate consequence. Most antisemitic literature follows the same formula that this one does. The only difference is, that instead of men, it’s Jews. All of your describable problems are their fault, so the only way that you can ever come to surpass these problems is by listening to me and doing incredibly drastic things in order to eliminate these problems. Whether this is a form of delusion (As it likely was in this case), or an advanced tactic of trickery and societal manipulation, varies depending on the case. These were incredibly similar veins of promises that Hitler offered to people during the Holocaust, except instead of wanting Germany for the Aryans, this person wants not to work, wants their dad to either talk to them more, or not at all, and other elements of standoffish adolescent life.

All in all, this is probably the most amusing text I have read for this class. To describe it as asinine would not do the extent that the author went to to include every possible denotation of profanity, as if to spite the person who for some reason took the time to read this. It cannot be taken seriously by someone who is not overwhelmed by emotional turmoil or circumstance at the very least, and seems like something written in mockery and jest, or by someone who hasn’t left their basement in thirty years and still shares sympathy with their seventeen year old self.

Ever since I was young I knew that comic books simply weren’t my thing. Where other children were looking for as many pictures as they could find with books, I found myself prone to books with fewer. If you handed me two chapter books, one with cover art, the other barren, I’d sooner inspect the spine of the plain novel than read the title of the former. The pictures I imagined were a waste of time, a picture spoke of a thousand words, so then, why not write those down instead? For a very long time I have not read any comic books or graphic novels, and after picking this one up I do not find myself itching to read more. This novel has convinced me that pictures do not speak a thousand words, and to me, most of the message of this book could easily be portrayed by many less pages of text while still holding their meaning. Only to two panels of two pages could I see truly where artwork would excel over the printed word, and even then the substance of which felt deliberate, though lost on me.

As I have read other graphic novels, so have I read stories by the prisoners of world war two, both fighting men and religious prisoners alike. I read these stories in middle school due to academic obligation, and upon reading this one, I can say confidently that I have learned nothing new of the atrocities of the war. What I knew at the age of twelve was not surpassed by this book. The discourse between the old father and artistic son feels like a plot device tacked on to sell the story of the old man. I feel as if it would have been more practical to make a comic about the old man’s life, and leave this “Context” out of it. On the note of things that seemed tacked on, the fact that every group is some type of animal makes little sense. Yes, there is the obvious entendre of cat chasing mouse, with the Nazis being the cats and the Jews being mice, buy it then begs the question as to why the Poles are pigs. Could the Nazi’s have seen the Poles as pigs? Pigs have no obvious relation in folk lore to cats, which in my eyes obscures that obvious connection by including pigs in the mix. The usage of the animal visages seems to be completely representative, as in the people are not legitimately anthropomorphized animals, but merely people represented by animal caricatures. This is proven in the scene where they are hiding in the cellar, and rats scatter over Anha’s fingers. They are compared to mice, which is the species that the Jews are being represented as. This complicates this representation, and is either deliberate and confusing, or an unnoticed and lazy coincidence.

I could not identify any clearly pronounced themes though out this novel, though there was one panel that stuck with me despite there being no reinforcing factors to it for the rest of the book. “It is easy to lay down and die, but to live, we must survive and struggle.”, said by the father to his first wife when hearing of news of their relatives’ passing. There has not yet to be a thinking man to grace this earth that has not come to the same conclusion that the only thing that will happen in life is misery. Death is a simply achieved inevitable rest, and when compared to life makes it seem excruciatingly burdensome. Death is the easiest thing someone can do, as it requires absolutely zero effort. There is no dedication, there is no struggle, and for your efforts there is reward eternal. Life, in stark contrast, is a struggle. Every beat of your heart and every breath of your lungs must be etched from the world around you, every step fueled with raw, indescribable drive for something that is inevitable unattainable, but irrefutably necessary. Whether the conveyance of these deeply philosophical themes was purposeful or simply something sparked by the boredom I felt flipping through the pages of this book is difficult for me to say, though in consideration of the rest of it, I lean more towards the latter.

The scholarly introduction to this controversial text starts out by explaining the context behind a translation, and I see it fit to do so as well.

To translate text in general is not particularly easy. To translate an entire novel to a different language, while still upholding the literary and cultural styling provided over a length such as is no trifling matter. While translating a German novel into English normally would be difficult, due to the emotional nature of the text, and some of the particulars of Hitler’s specific denomination of German writing, this is made much harder. This begs the question, if this is so difficult to do, why would someone, a professional translator, dedicate their time to creating a rendition of such a heinous text? The answer is strikingly simple: So that it doesn’t happen again.

History, especially the most gruesome parts, are worth studying in vivid detail for that reason. It is not enough to know that something happened, but why. It is for this reason that it is imperative to have access to the autobiography of one of the most notorious fascist leaders in recent history. This text goes into self described detail of his life, his motivations, and his political ideas from even a young age. It is important to have a thorough understanding of these things, in order to notice if something similar is happening in more modern times. Pessimistically, this is less to prevent it, and more to survive it. Being able to predict when a country is about to be overwhelmed by a regime helps significantly with survival.

It is also important to understand the way that this text was written, the styling used in its creation. This is not in praise of the man who wrote it, but done more in a fashion of calling him out. This was not by any means a brilliant literary masterpiece, especially in German standards. In fact, Germany was a literary and cultural powerhouse alongside its booming industry, which is what lead to the fact that Hitler was capable of producing such a work. Many lower class Germans were rather literate, and instead of simply reading things like magazines or short folk novels, they were reading books in their spare time. While this attributed to Hitler’s ability to produce such a piece, it did not do anything for the quality of it. While Hitler was literate, and particularly good at giving speeches, he was not a good writer. He struggled with German from a young age, and at best describes himself as an orator. Most of the text compensates heavily for this, and this is seen in translation. It is dull, droll, contradictory, mostly irrelevant, and jumps from one topic to the other on a whim. In one section he’s serious, and in another he’s angrily hurling epithets at the text, stringing along freakishly long sentences in an attempt to mimic literary prowess. It is standard in his dialect of German to include these painfully, pointlessly long sentences, though he takes this to an obvious extreme sometimes. The fact that he did not posses incredible literary prowess is important, since this was the book (Described as “The bible of Nazism” by the translator) that inspired the whole of the Nazi movement in Europe at the time. That doesn’t mean that this was a novel that was actually read by the supporters of it, in a similar suit to how the bible occupies the shelf of many Christians, going unread by them. They rely on it’s principal to motivate their faith, be it in political ideology, or religion. This adds to the importance of being willing to read such texts, it is likely that more scholars and students have read this book at this point than Nazi extremists did at the time.

Chapters 1-3 of Mein Kampf start out particularly strong. I imagine that this is due to the fact that the book is the size of a small jewelry box, and while I understand nationalism, I don’t think that there is anything in this world I love enough to sift through the entirety of a book THAT big. Comparatively, the Bible seems like a magazine.

The text starts out by annotating what most people already know about Hitler, that being, he is Austrian. This is both in the sense that he was born there, and strongly identifies himself with Austrian nationality. It does not take very long for him to get into the life of his father, which he considers an important backdrop to his childhood development. Something that may or may not come as a shock to you is that Hitler had daddy issues. There is no more dignified or proper of a way to put it other than that. He argued and disagreed extensively with his father over an issue that is also somewhat common knowledge. I believe it would be fair to assume that most people understand that Hitler wanted to become an artist, even from his youth. His father was a self made man, leaving home at a young age to score an apprenticeship, and put it to use. He eventually bought himself a farm, and while he lived a fulfilling life, his dream was always to be a civil serviceman. In a traditional fashion, his father pushed this dream upon his son, inadvertently causing world war two. Hitler didn’t want to be a civil serviceman, he wanted to be a painter, an artist. This is actually directly quoted within the text, with his father reacting in a way that seems as if it is straight out of a Disney film (Knowing Walt Disney, who knows.).

Obviously this disagreement led to Hitler becoming entombed in Austrian nationalism, because instead of pursuing creative arts on his own time, it only made logical sense to spend hours sifting through books on military strategy, in case he ever wanted to initiate a hostile military takeover of Poland. I would like to remind you that not only was he twelve when he started this particular interest in military strategy and soldiering, but that German was his weakest subject next to math, implying that he either simply did not exert himself in school at all, or much more likely, struggled intensely with it. Despite the latter assumption, he still deemed it integrally important to involve himself with this particular literature (And no other kind). It is noteworthy that his father was not particularly militant or nationalistic. After leaving the small village he was born in, upon returning he found that it seemed alien to him, and found more comfort in his accomplishments and goals than he did his home.

Hitler constantly claimed that his artistic abilities were profound, and that he was always the best in his class at drawing. In a twist of the fates, he actually decided to pursue formal academy to further his artistic abilities. While he wanted to be a painter, his ego-maniacal assumption that he was an amazing drawer was confirmed by someone who worked in the architectural department in the Vienna academic sect. Whether the fact that he was considered for this position instead of that of a painter due to the fact he was lacking in painting skills, or possessed exemplary drawing skills, we may never know.

Hitler lived in what could be considered a bohemian lifestyle. That was, he didn’t have a job. He was living off of his father’s estate (Who had died when he was 13), as well as a pension from the state for being an orphan once his mother died. This money dried up quickly, and it was at the point in which he had run out of it that he immediately began to detest and despise Marxist idealization and the Jews. There is almost no lead in to this, in the text (As described by him) it goes from him studying in Vienna with his inheritance money, running out of money, and then hating the Jews for two entire chapters.

I would really like to start off by saying that Bambi was an interesting read, intriguing in some way, but if I were to by any means, I would be stretching the truth. Having grown up in a woods, and having gone to grade school, I can say with confidence that I was not introduced to so much as a solitary new concept. I don’t believe that this novel tries to introduce any revolutionary concepts to the reader, but it is due to this fact that it becomes an incredibly dull read. We all know what deer are, we all know what a woods is like, and assuming we’ve graduated from grade school, we know about the circle of life.

About halfway through the novel, the key point and inevitable “Plot twist” becomes more than obvious, any attempt at build up feels almost misleadingly apparent, and becomes incredibly disappointing once the end is reached and it is revealed to be a serious attempt at bewilderment. The beginning of the novel starts out in a similar vein as to how it continues, by describing the rudimentary concepts and sounds of nature. Birds, squirrels, trees, and a few sounds and smells. Bambi is born, and has some seemingly meaningless conversations with the other animals. The first third of the book is about his relationship with his mother, and his newborn perspective of the world, learning the basics of being a deer and surviving. The turning point from the first to second third would be his first meeting with the prince of the forest, where Bambi learns some semblance of independence, even if it’s more to impress this prince than it is to survive.

The second third of the book is about the biological processes that envelop us all during our pubescent phase. He starts to notice his childhood friend, and eventually ends up sexually fraternizing with them. He spends a few months madly in love with them, before there is an incident with a large hunting party. Bambi’s mother is killed off almost nonchalantly during this event, and one of his friends is captured by the hunters.

Bambi starts to transition towards near total independence in the third third of the novel, learning the ways of the woods from the old prince. He strays away from his lover, and even the other animals of the woods after his friend, previously captured, domesticated, and then released back into the woods, is shot by a hunter. He is shown the body of a dead human, inexplicable shot in the head, before the old prince wanders off into the woods to die, and allow Bambi to unwittingly take his place, thus solidifying the theme of the circle of life.

Overall, I did not care for this book. It simply was not interesting in any facet, and it is easy to see why major changes were made in order to adapt it into a movie. It is not as in depth as a nature documentary, and does not breeze over these rudimentary elements to sell itself as story oriented. Though the character narrative is atypical, it is incredibly predictable and dull. All major consequence in the story lacks impact, and arguably doesn’t contribute meaningfully to Bambi’s character development. It seems as if this is done deliberately, in an attempt to push a broader theme, that being the circle of life and the nature of nature, which in my opinion is still done in a lackluster and unappealing fashion.